Thank you for sharing, it's a fantastic article. When you feel like giving up, that's when the real work begins.
Being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage
201–210 of 221 posts
Re: Being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage
#202It's funny, I was aspiring to be a game developer when I was a child and developed some games on Game Maker when I was like 12, and those were the best games I made.
Then, I attended to University but never found my skill enough to develop a game worthy of my tastes.
Re: Being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
It almost seems like a tautology. e.g. By definition the 99.9th percentile person cannot live a 99.999th percentile life, if they did they would in fact be that amazing.
Significant part of what separates 99.9th (or even 90th) from 99.999th percentile is ego management. In particular IQ is not associated with better life outcomes after you have "enough", and that "enough" isn't Mensa level.
How could that possibly be true?
The former might be a literal genius (in the genuine unironic sense) in one field, say software engineering of astrophysics or banking or diplomacy.
The latter would be a literal genius in all four fields simultaneously.
Re: Being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's no meaningful taste-skill gap in programming because programming doesn't involve tacit skills. If you know what you're supposed to do, it is trivial to type that into a keyboard. The taste-skill gap emerges when you intellectually recognize what a quality creation would be, but are physically unable to produce that creation, and judge the creations you are physically capable of producing as low quality The of…
That's absolutely not the case. I can look at code and realize that it's garbage because the architecture sucks, performance degradation is out of the window, and there's lots of special casing and unhandled edge cases. That's the taste part. But I can also absolutely be underqualified and be unable to figure out how to improve the architecture, fix performance issues, or simplify special/edge case handling.
Then your taste hasn't developed. You don't know what good code for the problem even looks like. It's not that your code doesn't resemble what you wanted to make, you don't know what you want to make at all.
Re: Being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's no meaningful taste-skill gap in programming because programming doesn't involve tacit skills. If you know what you're supposed to do, it is trivial to type that into a keyboard. The taste-skill gap emerges when you intellectually recognize what a quality creation would be, but are physically unable to produce that creation, and judge the creations you are physically capable of producing as low quality The of…
> There's no meaningful taste-skill gap in programming because programming doesn't involve tacit skills. If you know what you're supposed to do, it is trivial to type that into a keyboard. Strongly disagree here. The taste-skill gap still applies even when there's no mechanical skill involved. A lot of amateur music production is entirely "in the box" and the taste-skill gap very much exists, even though it's trivial…
If you know what sound you want to hear, but don't know the compressor settings to make that sound, that is a taste-skill gap.
If you don't know what sound you want to hear at all, that's undeveloped taste.
If you know what code you want to type, but don't know how to use a keyboard, that would be a taste-skill gap.
If you don't know what code you want to type at all, that's undeveloped taste.
Re: Being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage
#206> At semester's end, all the best photos came from the quantity group. The quantity group learned something that cannot be taught: that excellence emerges from intimacy with imperfection, that mastery is built through befriending failure, that the path to creating one perfect thing runs directly through creating many imperfect things. This reminded me of Roger Federer, who has won 82% of all matches but only 54% of a…
That's a really important point, and I completely agree.
This perspective reminds me of an excellent book I recently read, How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors That Determine the Fate of Every Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration and Everything In Between by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner.
This book focuses on extremely high-cost "megaprojects" and emphasizes the critical importance of thorough "planning" before execution. This stands in stark contrast to the low-risk creative activities discussed in the article, which makes the point about cost even more compelling.
However, rather than being a complete counter-argument, I see a significant overlap. The book advocates *for low-risk, low-cost experimentation and creative exploration during the planning phase* through methods like miniature prototyping and CAD simulations. In this sense, both the article and the book highlight the value of iterative approaches, whether it's through frequent, small-scale actions or through meticulous, low-cost trials before committing to high-cost endeavors.
Re: Being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
I said often not always
All the same. There's a mixture of no-true-scotsman in the argument that (paraphrasing) "often they did not learn to use the tool well", and then this part is a strawman argument: "They try to frame it in moral terms. But at heart the objections are about the fear of one's skills becoming economically obsolete."
I remember when I first learned the names of logical fallacies too, but you aren't using either of them correctly
Re: Being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage
#208>Creation is not birth; it is murder. The murder of the impossible in service of the possible. What a stupid quote. You know why it's stupid. Because murder is creation. It is the creation of death while destroying life. Just use the word the way it's meant to be used. Don't come up with quotes that sound clever and trick the mind into thinking a statement is profound when really it's just more word trickery.
> Just use the word the way it's meant to be used.
Ha ha, you are funny:-)
This is the whole point of a (natural) language – the meaning of words is inevitably floating.
Do not nail down a meaning of a word, it’s impossible. Instead, try to imagine there is no word;-)
Re: Being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage
#209What is "too ambitious"? Are there dreamers who overthink and never get anything done? Absolutely! Are there also people who do what other people regularly say is impossible? Also an absolute yes. Ambition has nothing to do with it. There are doers and there are talkers.
It's too ambitious if it's harming the doing.
Re: Being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've heard that one way to pace is to... only consume your own stuff (aka dogfooding :) More grown-up way to do it is to consume your mates' stuff? (Trying to go from where TFA left off)
I think you must consume (I hate that word, but let's go with it) elsewhere. Someone said (maybe Stephen King in "On Writing"?) in order to be a writer you must be voracious reader, and there's no escaping this. It rings true to me. Of course the problem of taste growing much faster than skill remains, but I don't think the answer is to "consume" (yuck) less. I actually don't know if there's an answer.
Something important is “consuming” critically.
You can be a passive consumer and never improve your taste or skill. However when you consume with the intent of asking how and then attempting to answer that question ( for skill ) and why ( for taste ) you get a much different experience.
Read code, looking for patterns. Look at design looking for patterns.
Then play, try to implement what you saw, implement to opposite and see how if feels, see what happens to the code.
This is a lot of work, but helps you improve.