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How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

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Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#71

Post by mrleinad »

throwaway9980 wrote: post #8

Reading that I can’t help but think most people in the modern knowledge work classes probably identify with a lot of it. Doesn’t everyone have these feelings? This all seems very normal to me, but I’m definitely the target audience. High IQ that was praised from a young age, hated school but did well with no effort, hated team work all my life, value deep thinking as the solution to almost any problem, successful in…

By the looks of your self description, seems you're my long lost (evil?) twin.

I didn't hate school though. I hated some people in it.

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#72

Post by le-mark »

_Schizotypy wrote: post #33
stopnamingnuts wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I concur. The tedium of maintaining somebody else’s crap code in an obsolete language is an invaluable learning experience for new devs. Also, it’s hilarious to listen to the whining.

Sometimes I feel like whining about someone else's crap code is enjoyable in itself.

Until you realize it's code you wrote. Happened to me when our children were little. There were large parts of a system I'd written, sleep deprived, that I had no recollection of writing. Version control said I did, but I didn't remember it.

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#73

Post by camelCaseOfBeer »

Seems like author of this article has mistaken smart people for people who think their smarter than everybody else. If a smart person can't focus on long term goals or cooperate with others, attaching their self worth to arbitrary skill assessments while lauding the world with these accomplishments, was that person really that smart to begin with? Nah.

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#75

Post by thisisit »

strikelaserclaw wrote: post #9

honest question, has anyone ever improved their lives by reading articles of this flavor ? (e.g 10 things successfully ceo's do, 10 ways to increase your chances of building a successful company)

It depends really. Personally, I find that explaining/reading doesn't work for me until I experience it. So, if you tell "sugar is bad", I don't get it. But then once I experience I will come back to you for advice.

So, most of the time I tend to save these article (pocket archive) and refer it back once the realization hits. And it most of the times it happens within a week.

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#76

Post by jcadam »

gnulinux wrote: post #61
projectramo wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

boredom is part of the human condition. It has nothing to do with being smart. Here are two tips: 1. get sleep 2. drink coffee

It's ironic that if you do 2 too much you can't do 1.

Though you can try to substitute #2 for #1. It works... sort of... for a little while.

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#77

Post by SubiculumCode »

I've a colleague who can barely put a sentence together much less conduct and understand a complex analysis, yet this person has twice the umber of QUALITY papers as me..HOW? This person is really good at getting other people to do the work. Once I realized this I disengaged from this person's schemes, but I found it frustrating.

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#79

Post by Epenthesis »

tom_ wrote: post #64
faceplanted wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you suggesting that if they were somehow truly smart they would know how not to sabotage their own success? Because that's some serious fallacious thinking right there.

Sounds like it, and I agree. How else should you judge this? And what should you call it when people are less successful than they could be, and can't see that the cause is their counterproductive habits and apparent lack of self-awareness? - because 'smart' isn't the first word that springs to my mind.

This is a bit of a silly semantic game.

There's "smart" in the sense of "general mental ability" (ie, skill in cognitive tasks), which is usually what the word is used colloquially to mean, and then there's "smart" in the sense of "making the optimal choices for long term happiness and success", which, being correlated with the first definition is often conflated.

Now, sometimes these definitions come apart, ie, people who are "smart" in the first sense fail to be "smart" in the second sense. That doesn't mean the first definition is inherently meaningless. In fact, g factor ("IQ"), the psychometric concept that maps most closely to that first definition is extremely well studied, and well established as coherent and measurable.

Why these two attributes come apart in some people is an interesting question, because they're usually so correlated, and that's what the article is in a sense about.

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#80

Post by nradov »

WalterSear wrote: post #60
bonniemuffin wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I definitely don't want my team to appreciate boring tasks! I want them to persist, endure, and then automate. The person who grinds through the boring stuff while thinking about how to automate it so they don't have to be bored anymore, is the person I want to hire.

The nature of the work doesn't allow that. Coding takes all your thought - even when it's boring and monotonous. The comparisons being made to washing dishes aren't realistic.

I've done some refactoring work that didn't take any more mental effort than dish washing.
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