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The Right Kind of Stubborn

paulgraham.com

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Re: The Right Kind of Stubborn

#91

Post by breck »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #55
breck wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but most people who write/publish _a lot_ are not fools.

Still disagree. The most prolific writers are journalists, and most of their stuff is absolute garbage. On top of that, most of the most successful people on the planet write little or nothing. They are too busy doing.

> The most prolific writers are journalists

You state this as fact without providing a dataset to back it. I think this is not true at all.

> most of the most successful people on the planet write little or nothing

It depends on how you define "success".

I would consider people like Linus and Dwayne Richard Hipp and TBL to be among the most successful people on the planet, and they write quite a lot.

Do you call people who capture then give away a billion dollars the most successful? I don't. To me the most successful are the ones who create billions in wealth and capture just a tiny fraction--enough to support their family and friends and live a good life.

Re: The Right Kind of Stubborn

#92

Post by thimkerbell »

sitkack wrote: post #68
ableSprocket11 wrote: post #57

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.

Good to make a conceptual distinction though.

Re: The Right Kind of Stubborn

#93

Post by dvt »

sitkack wrote: post #72
dvt wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would probably kill it on Instagram ads honestly. Price point is a tad high, but it's like the perfect "not sure what to get someone" gift.

Price point is high? Based on what? I'd say the price is too low for the expected volume.

> Based on what?

Based on it being a semi-impulse buy, since I don't see many people explicitly searching for "framed programmable e-ink calendar."

Re: The Right Kind of Stubborn

#94

Post by com2kid »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #64

I used to work for a corporation that was legendary for their Quality (note the capital "Q" -I got used to denoting it that way). They have been making precision optical gear for over a hundred years, and fetch many thousands, for their consumer (really, professional) kit. Thousands of successful people have built their entire careers around this company's gear. If you want to see "stubborn," look no further than the…

When I first joined Microsoft as an SDET back in 2006, the culture was such (at least in my org) that any SDET could halt shipping.

A bit less than a year out of college I found a pretty significant bug in the compiler (I forget the bug! I do remember the one major bug I let slip out into a release though) well after everything had been signed off on. I brought it up in the team meeting and the principle dev asked me directly "Do you think we should cancel the release to fix this bug?" I wasn't sure of myself and he told me that "it's your call", and I said that yeah, we should fix the bug.

For anyone under 35 who is confused by this, was before releases were rolling and shipped online. When Microsoft released a major version back then, it had a (IIRC) ~10 year support contract attached to it (and if you found a bug and were on a good enough of a support contract, the dev team would develop a custom patch for you to fix a bug in a 9 year 6 month old release!), and a lot of gears were set in motion to make a release happen.

This was the norm at Microsoft for a long time. I was originally attracted to the SDET role because they were the last defender of the customer experience, they were the engineers who held the line on quality. The entire industry is worse off for the SDET role having been eliminated across all major software companies.

Re: The Right Kind of Stubborn

#95

Post by kaibee »

pilingual wrote: post #85
arp242 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an old anecdote where I think Pascal, but I'm not sure, argued the existence or non-existence of God in front of the king with another philosopher. Maybe-Pascal exclaimed loudly and with great confidence "A plus C equal B squared! Therefore God exists! COUNTER!" The other philosopher didn't know much about mathematics, had no idea to reply, got flustered, and "lost" the argument.[1] And honestly, I'm not sure…

Why are NFTs dumb? How can I buy a digital asset sold by an artist?

Talk to one and get something commissioned, then sign a contract about what copyrights you're acquiring from them. NFTs provide none of those.

Re: The Right Kind of Stubborn

#96

Post by burningChrome »

wkcheng wrote: post #44

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…

Just in case someone is wondering:

Obstinate - Stubbornly adhering to an opinion, purpose, or course in spite of reason, arguments, or persuasion.

Re: The Right Kind of Stubborn

#97

Post by supercanuck »

Article is trying to discern a cause and effect.

The fact is people are involved and success and failure can be determined by any number of reasons beyond the control of the obstinate.

You can control the effort but not the outcome. Judgement will come regardless.

Re: The Right Kind of Stubborn

#98

Post by thimkerbell »

arp242 wrote: post #49

I suspect that obstinance this is rooted in strong black/white thinking. I don't really know how this works for these people and can't experience it myself because I have just one brain. While I am flawed in many ways, I am not flawed in that particular way. I don't really understand how this works. I find that inability to understand qualified language is a decent marker. Note I said "I suspect that often", and not…

Probably unable. Though stress can make people temporarily that way.

Re: The Right Kind of Stubborn

#99

Post by jimbobthrowawy »

konschubert wrote: post #48
rvbissell wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's cool. The news front-page screenshot & calendar use-cases appeal to me. (Although, it seems like I could just do the news FP thing myself, with "Any image URL", rather than your $3/mo service.) Is it touch interactive? Like, can I tap on a cell in the calendar to see "... and 2 more" details? Can I easily create my own replacement frame? Can I hang it on the wall in a manner where I can rotate between portrait…

You can probably create your own frame if you are careful when you open it up. It has no touch. If you change its orientation on the wall, you have to change the orientation in the phone app. There is no sdk but there is an api one can use for connecting third party apps.

Are you using something like an ESP32 to run the thing? I ask because a lot of them have a surprising amount of random sensors tacked on, like accelerometers. (capacitive, and hall-effect sensors too) Auto-orientation is probably a thing you'd need to design for though.

Re: The Right Kind of Stubborn

#100

Post by thimkerbell »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #37

TLDR: You need "energy, imagination, resilience, good judgement, and focus on a goal" to go places. Funnily enough, every very successful person seems to arrive at the conclusion that "focus" is a differentiator.

And focus requires that you assume that others will pick up the slack, to deal with all the stuff you're not focusing on.
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