No-one knows what they are doing
successfulsoftware.net
No-one knows what they are doing
1–10 of 187 posts
Re: No-one knows what they are doing
#2I agree with the sentiment that adults are much better at projecting confidence than actually knowing what the heck they are doing or even making smart decisions.
The advice of just founding a company without a plan? Not so much....
Re: No-one knows what they are doing
#3Not true at all at things that need practice and that are recurrent.
From sports, to many other activities that have repetition, people know what they are generally trying to do. That doesn't mean that there is not a large degree of randomness, and some improvisation. Eg:
1. A penalty kicker knows what he/she is trying to do. Power over placement, what corner they want to shoot it, etc. They have practiced many times. Same with the goalie. The goalie will try to guess, left, right, center, etc...
They have practiced this many time as well. Both parties know what they are doing (at a professional level), yet there is always a degree of randomness, and improvisation.
2. A cop knows that in some corner it is much easier to catch people that are speeding, and they can give tickets easy.
3. A dentist has seen a root canal many times, and it is easy for him/her to just fill another one. All teeth are different, yet they are similar at the same time. Practice makes perfect. First time doing a root cannal, or an extraction must be tough/nerve racking. 10th time, a bit easier. 100th time, just another routine day.
Anyways... but these type of articles are really good feel good articles.
Re: No-one knows what they are doing
#4Blast from the past! I used PerfectTablePlan for our wedding, tweaked by the far superior ‘do what your better half tells you’ algorithm. We used the same approach later when naming our first child, I built a complicated machine learning system to learn what names and sounds we liked, then we settled on my wife’s first choice.
The thing I’ve learned in life (and especially in sports analytics where variance can dominate) is that “knowing what you’re doing” isn’t any number of instances where you got something right first time. It’s having a process (or even a process-creating-process!) that you’re willing to stand by even when individual results don’t work out. The question isn’t “would you do it all again, knowing what you know now?” it’s “would you learn the same way in the future?” I think being open about this with kids is pretty helpful.
Re: No-one knows what they are doing
#5I’m going to let you in on a little secret. I spent almost a decade in public sector digitalisation in Denmark, and those politicians who look like they don’t know what they are doing in the media, well, they absolutely know what they are doing. Not only that, but they get advice from a bureaucracy full of well educated, really smart people, who also know what they are doing and have known so for decades. One of the things that struck me going in was just how much people know exactly what they are doing, and, to my own discredit, just how engaged and well meaning those people are. What eventually led me to leave the public sector is that there is a very big difference between knowing what you’re doing and doing the “smart/right” thing, especially when you’re held accountable by an entire country, if not the world.
I’ve seen the same sort of thing in the private sector. Once you zoom out enough to understand decisions from the perspective they are being taken from, they very often make perfect sense. That doesn’t mean those very same decisions aren’t a load of bollocks from a lot of perspectives, but they are rarely just “fake it till you make it” sort of deals.
I think this author suffers from childhood delusion in that the author still thinks adults are supposed to have the answers for everything, which isn’t true. There is a lot to be said about figuring things out a long the way, but it’s not like people don’t know what they are doing, because we learn, we adapt and we very often plan ahead. I mean, the author even sort of contradicts the title or the article in the discussion on whether to do more SEO, YouTube, and/or, networking because that is already knowing a lot, just not everything.
A more accurate way to view the world would be that most people don’t know exactly how they are going to execute their long term plans, but almost every successful adult I have ever met did have both a plan and a genuinely good idea on how to execute it. From everything to their careers to raising their children, and I think it’s very easy to see when someone actually doesn’t know, because often they are either drowning, looking for help or both, or, alternatively never even beginning on the thing they want.
Re: No-one knows what they are doing
#6People know what they're doing the second and third time that they launch the same product.
Like when you see founders of large VC backed companies go off to launch the same thing.
Or why business practices calcify and people aren’t open to a new theoretically efficient process, they have already failed at so many other things that they don't want to risk again. Its not arbitrary why people become this way, there is a lot of crap out there.
Re: No-one knows what they are doing
#7I’m going to let you in on a little secret. I spent almost a decade in public sector digitalisation in Denmark, and those politicians who look like they don’t know what they are doing in the media, well, they absolutely know what they are doing. Not only that, but they get advice from a bureaucracy full of well educated, really smart people, who also know what they are doing and have known so for decades. One of the…
Here we run into the philosophical question of what it means to "know what you are doing".
On the one hand people may have the best of advice and make decisions that are extremely clever in a specific context. And on the other the world is fundamentally too chaotic - the most important factors are generally unknowns or unanticipated.
Re: No-one knows what they are doing
#8I’m going to let you in on a little secret. I spent almost a decade in public sector digitalisation in Denmark, and those politicians who look like they don’t know what they are doing in the media, well, they absolutely know what they are doing. Not only that, but they get advice from a bureaucracy full of well educated, really smart people, who also know what they are doing and have known so for decades. One of the…
Danmark vs Britain. From what I read occasionally in Dominic Cumming's blog, Boris isn't particularly good at using the bureaucracy.
Re: No-one knows what they are doing
#9I’m going to let you in on a little secret. I spent almost a decade in public sector digitalisation in Denmark, and those politicians who look like they don’t know what they are doing in the media, well, they absolutely know what they are doing. Not only that, but they get advice from a bureaucracy full of well educated, really smart people, who also know what they are doing and have known so for decades. One of the…
Danmark vs Britain. From what I read occasionally in Dominic Cumming's blog, Boris isn't particularly good at using the bureaucracy.
Absolutely true, the most realistic post about business that I've red in time
you are complaining about Boris, you have to see here in Spain to Pedro Sanchez, it's a completely mess
Re: No-one knows what they are doing
#10No post body was provided.