61–70 of 249 posts
Don't really have much to add other that this is the best PG essay I've read in years, and it feels like a return to form.
I’m genuinely not sure if this is an intended as a compliment.
I love personality theory so I just wanted to dig into what that would mean using those terms.
Energy + Resilience would probably fit best under - Extraverted Sensing.
Imagination, good judgment and focus on goal - Introverted Intuition.
My takeaway: PG sees successful people as stubborn but teachable and open to feedback/discussion/pushback.
I couldn't fully grasp what he was trying to say and your summarization is both shorter and gets the point across better. Thanks
If you want to see "stubborn," look no further than their QA Division. In the US, there used to be a running joke, that if you had "Quality" in your job title, it meant your career was dead. At this company, it meant that you were headed for Executive Row. Many VPs and General Managers (a very powerful title, at this company), were former QA people.
And, boy, were they a pain to deal with. They would have 3,000-line Excel spreadsheets, and if even one of those lines was a red "X", the entire product line could get derailed. I had a project that we worked on, for 18 months, get nuked at the last minute, because they didn't like the Quality. I worked with an SV startup, that had a project canned, for pretty much exactly the same reason. The startup folks didn't seem to take the Quality seriously, which was basically a death sentence.
In that company, the kind of "stubborn" the QA people demonstrated, would be considered absolutely essential. I know that most folks around here, would not put up with it for a second.
They wouldn't be wrong. Making superb-Quality stuff is not a big moneymaker. You want lots of money, make lots of cheap, crappy things, and sell them at a small margin. The market is a lot bigger, and most people have much higher tolerance for crap than this company's customers.
As is the case with almost anything in life, "it depends." There's really no one-size-fits-all, "magic elixir." Every end may be reached by a different path.
This is a great article on the difference between an obstinate person and a persistent person, but I'm not sure the general public perceives them the same way that Paul does. What I've found is that many times, people like the perceived confidence that obstinacy can bring. For example, let's say that someone points out a flaw in a plan. Person A responds by saying "That's not a real problem. It doesn't matter." Perso…
The problem with that method of evaluation, is that it's not First Principles. Basically, pg's essay in this case just reduces down to, "Is that person steered by First Principles thinking?"
So obstinate people expect the desired outcome to depend on their expertise at some point(s) in the past. Is the difference between the two just humility?
Some obstinate people may not be stupid in the Forrest Gump sense. They may just be operating at their information processing capacity. Facing a hard choice, the first step is shedding the willingness to argue the foundations of the castle they built.
The psychological ramifications vary. Their predicament may even induce them to be unwilling to argue at all levels as a way to conceal it, leading to full incorrigible stubbornness.
I like his articles, but the artificial constructs sometimes drive me up the wall. After reading through a fairly rudimentary strawman about outcomes defining the difference between obstinacy and persistence, we reach the last paragraph that trades a poorly defined word (persistence) for five poorly defined words (imagination, focus, energy, judgement, resilience) persistence is also defined by flexibility in thinkin…
These are all properties of people, that ebb and flow and change from each problem they are working on. It is more productive to talk about contextualized behaviors over the properties of people.
I like his articles, but the artificial constructs sometimes drive me up the wall. After reading through a fairly rudimentary strawman about outcomes defining the difference between obstinacy and persistence, we reach the last paragraph that trades a poorly defined word (persistence) for five poorly defined words (imagination, focus, energy, judgement, resilience) persistence is also defined by flexibility in thinkin…
I too like these Just So Stories of the Startup Underground, but damn, they come off like Malcolm Gladwell forming a taxonomy of the kids that got it vs the kids that don't. These are all properties of people, that ebb and flow and change from each problem they are working on. It is more productive to talk about contextualized behaviors over the properties of people.
Yes, exactly. You put it better than I did. Shit's messy, non-linear, non-monotonic. No need to put a bow on it.
"The persistent are attached to the goal. The obstinate are attached to their ideas about how to reach it. Worse still, that means they'll tend to be attached to their first ideas..." So obstinate people expect the desired outcome to depend on their expertise at some point(s) in the past. Is the difference between the two just humility?