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Being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage
81–90 of 221 posts
Re: Being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage
#82Let's be honest, this is us taking a few terms from a few neuroscience and cognitive psychology papers and running with it.
There are two claims in this post: Initial goals get adjusted as we discover operating constraints, and it is easier to work with fewer variables to pay attention to.
I didn't like these sentences in this post:
- "I see this in wannabe ..."
- "Here's what happens to those brave enough to actually begin ..."
Here the author was brave enough to put themselves on a pedestal; like a true wannabe profound.
Re: Being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage
#83I thought I wasn’t going to enjoy the article from the title, but it turned out to be bang on the money with regards to creativity.
Re: Being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage
#84In the spirit of July 4, John Lewis Gaddis explores a similar theme in "On Grand Strategy". This is one of my favourite explorations, where he compares Abraham Lincoln and John Quincy Adams: > Compare Lincoln’s life with that of John Quincy Adams. Great expectations inspired, pursued, and haunted Adams, depriving him, at critical moments, of common sense. Overestimations by others—which he then magnified—placed objec…
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.
Can we invoke a version of 80-20 rule here, that 0.1% people will easily capture success of 80% while subsequent marginal capture takes increasingly more investment and luck?
Re: Being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage
#85To be strategic, you think hard enough how to get somewhere and carefully plan and eliminate unknowns until you reach a point when getting there is no longer interesting . Congratulations: you have successfully turned your cool idea into a chore. It’s just a lot of trivial typing and package management and it might not even be all that impressive when it is done. Your idea is not at all a path well-trodden, but it is…
RIP the project Ive spent 5 years on. Spent more time doing thinking than doing. Shifted goals higher and higher and never felt satisfied with what I had done. And now at the supposed end even my perfect goal seems completely uninteresting
Re: Being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage
#86I've definitely spent more time designing "the perfect system" than using it. There's a seductive comfort in planning that real execution just doesn't offer because actual work has feedback, friction, failure
Re: Being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage
#87To be strategic, you think hard enough how to get somewhere and carefully plan and eliminate unknowns until you reach a point when getting there is no longer interesting . Congratulations: you have successfully turned your cool idea into a chore. It’s just a lot of trivial typing and package management and it might not even be all that impressive when it is done. Your idea is not at all a path well-trodden, but it is…
Planning as a dopamine hit, turning creativity into project management, then raising the complexity bar just to feel engaged again. It's like chasing novelty within the sandbox instead of stepping outside it
Re: Being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage
#88I’m very good at one thing (thank goodness), but I do some other things that I’m not good at, to remind myself how nice it feels to just do something without the pressure of having to be good at it. I also think being a beginner at other things reminds me that failure is what learning feels like, which gives me some perspective when my “real” job feels difficult although I’m supposedly so good at it. When I look back…
There's something really valuable about stepping outside your comfort zone and letting yourself just be bad at something
Re: Being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage
#89There's the flip side to it too... I'm just waiting for an overly ambitious non-technical colleague in what should be a technical management role to overreach in terms of role and promotion.
Yeah, I've seen that dynamic play out. Sometimes it works out okay, but when it doesn't…
Re: Being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage
#90What 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.
Ambition isn't bad on its own, but when it becomes a substitute for action instead of fuel for it, that's where things go sideways