> the "taste-skill discrepancy." Your taste (your ability to recognize quality) develops faster than your skill (your ability to produce it). This creates what Ira Glass famously called "the gap," but I think of it as the thing that separates creators from consumers.
This resonated quite strongly with me. It puts into words something that I've been feeling when working with AI. If you're new to something and using AI for it, it automatically boosts the floor of your taste, but not your skill. And you end up never slowing down to make mistakes and learn, because you can just do it without friction.
This is exactly why I’m wary of ever attempting a developer-focused startup ever again.
What’s not mentioned is the utter frustration when you can see your own output is not up to your own expectations, but you can’t execute on any plan to resolve that discrepancy.
“I know what developers want, so I can build it for them” is a death knell proportionate to your own standards…
The most profitable business I built was something I hacked together in two weeks during college holiday break, when I barely knew how to code. There was no source control (I was googling “what is GitHub” at the time), it was my first time writing Python, I stored passwords in plaintext… but within a year it was generating $20k a month in revenue. It did eventually collapse under its own weight from technical debt, bugs and support cost… and I wasn’t equipped to solve those problems.
But meanwhile, as the years went on and I actually learned about quality, I lost the ability to ship because I gained the ability to recognize when it wasn’t ready… it’s not quite “perfectionism,” but it’s borne of the same pathology, of letting perfect be the enemy of good.
Within every startup, there is a developer-focused startup that is trying to get out. I suppose that is because it is easier for people to think about problems that affect them directly.
Or maybe it's the only way in which companies these days give software developers agency.
2 issues here. Neither can be developed (perfected?) in isolation, but they certainly ramp up at different rates. They should probably feed back into each other somehow, whether adversarially or not
I'm confused. I often say of every genAI I've seen of all types that it is totally lacking in taste and only has skill. And it drastically raises your skill floor immediately, perhaps all the way up to your taste, closing the gap.
Maybe that actually is what you were saying? But I'm confused because you used the opposite words.
The gap will open itself back up again. If you can do anything in 10 seconds with a GenAI, it won't be long until 1,000,000 people have all done it and it's considered poor taste...
That’s an odd take for a massively successful person. In the realm of producing hip-hop, his taste and skill are at the top of the industry.
Sort of like saying Bill Belichick has a skill gap because he’s not a top NFL player. AFAIK he never played pro ball at all (and college wasn’t at a top D1 program). Bit, he’s undeniably one of the most successful coaches in the business.
You’re saying the same thing as GP. Let me attempt to clarify.
What GP is saying is not that Rick Rubin has no skill anywhere, but that he recognized he has 100/100 taste and instead of trying to become a hip hop artist, instead became a producer for other artists.
In the same way, you’ve described how Bill Belichick recognized his taste in what makes a player good is not enough to make him also a good player, so he positioned himself to take advantage of his 100/100 taste rather than whatever skill value he may have.
Detractors from AI often refuse to learn how to use it or argue that it doesn't do everything perfectly so you shouldn't use it.
Proponents say it's the process and learning that builds depth and you have to learn how to use it well before you can have a sensible opinion about it.
The same disconnect was in place for every major piece of technology, from mechanical weaving, to mechanical computing, to motorized carriages, to synthesized music. You can go back and read the articles written about these technologies and they're nearly identical to what the AI detractors have been saying.
One side always says you're giving away important skills and the new technology produces inferior work. They try to frame it in moral terms. But at heart the objections are about the fear of one's skills becoming economically obsolete.
> Detractors from AI often refuse to learn how to use it or argue that it doesn't do everything perfectly so you shouldn't use it.
But here is the problem - to effectively learn the tool, you must learn to use. Not learning how to effectively AI and then complaining that the results are bad is building a straw-men and then burning it.
But what I am giving away when using LLM is not skills, it's the ability to learn those skills. Because if the LLM instead of me is solving all easy and intermediate problems I cannot learn how to solve hard problems. The process of digging for an answer through documentation gives me a better understanding of how some technology works.
Those kinds of problems existed before - programming languages robed people of the necessity to learn assembly - high level languages of the necessity to learn low level languages - low code solutions of the necessity to learn how to code. Some of these solutions (like low level and high level programming languages) are robust enough that this trade-off makes sense - some are not (like low code).
I think it's too early to call weather AI agents go one way or the other. Putting eggs in both baskets means learning how to use AI tools and at the same time still maintaining the ability to work without them.
> But at heart the objections are about the fear of one's skills becoming economically obsolete.
I won't deny that there is some of this in my AI hesitancy
But honestly the bigger barrier for me is that I fear signing my name on subpar work that I would otherwise be embarrassed to claim as my own
If I don't type it into the editor myself, I'm not putting my name on it. It is not my code and I'm not claiming either credit nor responsibility for it
> If I don't type it into the editor myself, I'm not putting my name on it. It is not my code and I'm not claiming either credit nor responsibility for it
This of course isn't just a moral concern, it's a legal one. I want ownership of my code, I don't want to find out later the AI just copied another project and now I've violated a license by not giving attribution.
Very few open-source projects are in the public domain and even the most permissive license requires attribution.
I think you're very wise to preserve your commit handle as something other than a shift operator annotation, not everyone is.
I think I'm using it more than it sounds like you are, but I make very clear notations to myself and others about what's a big generated test suite that I froze in amber after it cleared a huge replay event, and what I've been over a fine tooth comb with personally. I type about the same amount of prose and code every day as ever, but I type a lot of code into the prompt now "like this, not like that" in a comment.
The percentage of hand-authored lines varies wildly from probably 20% of unit tests to still close to 100℅ on io_uring submission queue polling or whatever.
If it one shots a build file, eh, I put opus as the meta.authors and move on.
>> Proponents say it's the process and learning that builds depth and you have to learn how to use it well before you can have a sensible opinion about it.
That's like telling a chef they'll improve their cooking skills by adding a can of soup to everything.
> It's interesting seeing people argue about AI, because they're plainly not speaking about the same issue and simply talking past each other.
It's important to realize this is actually a general truth of humans arguing. Sometimes people do disagree about the facts on the ground and what is actually true versus what is bullshit, but a lot of the time what really happens is people completely agree on the facts and even most of the implications of the facts but completely disagree on how to frame them. Doesn't even have to be Internet arguments. A lot of hot-button political topics have always been like this, too.
It's easy to dismiss people's arguments as being irrelevant, but I think there's room to say that if you were to interrogate their worldview in detail you might find that they have coherent reasoning behind why it is relevant from their perspective, even if you disagree.
Though it hasn't really improved my ability to argue or even not argue (perhaps more important), I've definitely noticed this in myself when introspecting, and it definitely makes me think more about why I feel driven to argue, what good it is, and how to do it better.
>It's interesting seeing people argue about AI, because they're plainly not speaking about the same issue and simply talking past each other.
There's actually some ground truth facts about AI many people are not knowledgeable about.
Many people believe we understand in totality how LLMs work. The absolute truth of this is that we overall we do NOT understand how LLMs work AT all.
The mistaken belief that we understand LLMs is the driver behind most of the arguments. People think we understand LLMs and that we Understand that the output of LLMs is just stochastic parroting, when the truth is We Do Not understand Why or How an LLM produced a specific response for a specific prompt.
Whether the process of an LLM producing a response resembles anything close to sentience or consciousness, we actually do not know because we aren't even sure about the definitions of those words, Nor do we understand how an LLM works.
This erroneous belief is so pervasive amongst people that I'm positive I'll get extremely confident responses declaring me wrong.
These debates are not the result of people talking past each other. It's because a large segment of people on HN literally are Misinformed about LLMs.
I couldn't agree more, and not just on HN but the world at large.
For the general populace including many tech people who are not ML researchers, understanding how convolutional neural nets work is already tricky enough. For non tech people, I'd hazard a guess that LLM/ generative AI is complexity-indistinguishable from "The YouTube/Tiktok Algorithm".
And this lack of understanding, and in many cases lack of conscious acknowledgement of the lack of understanding has made many "debates" sound almost like theocratic arguments. Very little interest in grounding positions against facts, yet strongly held opinions.
Some are convinced we're going to get AGI in a couple years, others think it's just a glorified text generator that cannot produce new content. And worse there's seemingly little that changes their mind on it.
And there are self contradictory positions held too. Just as an example: I've heard people express AI produced stuff to not qualify as art (philosophically and in terms of output quality) but at the same express deep concern how tech companies will replace artists...
> we do NOT understand how LLMs work AT all.
> We Do Not understand Why or How an LLM produced a specific response for a
> specific prompt.
You mean the system is not deterministic? How the system works should be quite clear. I think the uncertainty is more about the premise if billions of tokens and their weights relative to each other is enough to reach intelligence. These debates are older than LLM's. In 'old' AI we were looking at (limited) autonomous agents that had the capability to participate in an environment and exchange knowledge about the world with each other. The next step for LLM's would be to update their own weights. That would be too costly in terms of money and time yet. What we do know is that for something to be seen as intelligent it cannot live in a jar. I consider the current crop as shared 8-bit computers, while each of us need one with terabytes of RAM.
This is not what Ira Glass meant by taste gap. What he rather means is that taste is important. It’s what gets you into the field and what makes you stick around. Happy to be corrected on this.
yes that was the gist of Ira Glass's quote, but he also added to it that it makes you feel frustrated when you have taste but are not creating things that live up to that taste, but that as a young artist you should push through that.
Here is a copy paste of the quote:
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
― Ira Glass
I don't know much about Ira Glass and I'm not going to be a 5 minute wikipedia expert about it, so maybe I'm missing out on very relevant philosophy (I hope someone links the must read thing), but those would be very intentionally inverted meanings of the taste/skill dichotomy.
LLMs are good at things with a lot of quantity in the training set, you can signal boost stuff, but its not perfect (and its non-obvious that you want rare/special/advanced stuff to be the sweet spot as a vendor, that's a small part of your TAM by construction).
This has all kinds of interesting tells, for example Claude is better at Bazel than Gemini is, which is kind of extreme given Google has infinite perfect Bazel and Anthropic has open source (really bad) Bazel, so you know Gemini hasn't gotten the google4 pipeline decontamination thing dialed in.
All else equal you expect a homogenizing effect where over time everything is like NextJS, Golang, and Docker.
There are outlier events, like how Claude got trained on nixpkgs in a serious way recently, but idk, maybe they want to get into defense or something.
Skill is very rarely the problem for computers, if you're considering it as district from taste (sometimes you call them both together just skill).
If anything it's the opposite, except maybe at the very low end: AI boosts implementation skill (at least by increasing speed), but not {research, coding, writing} taste. Hence slop of all sorts.
In 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 objectives beyond his reach: only self-demotion brought late-life satisfaction. No expectations lured Lincoln apart from those he set for himself: he started small, rose slowly, and only when ready reached for the top. His ambitions grew as his opportunities expanded, but he kept both within his circumstances. He sought to be underestimated.
The point -- being too ambitious can slow you down if you're not strategic.
Some people grow to both crave praise but also when they get it not really value it; they want people to be always surprised at cool stuff they can do but are not motivated to do boring uninteresting work. This may be accompanied by one or more of: perfectionism, narcissism, rejection anxiety, etc.
I suspect this might have to do with praise patterns in childhood.
> 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.
This seems far too deterministic and I think is contrary to what you're replying to.
It sounds more like a 99.999th percentile person[0] that constantly reaches too far too early, before being prepared, will not have a 99.999th percentile life. A 99th percentile person who, on the other hand, does not constantly fail due to over-reach, can easily end up accomplishing more. (And there are many other things that might hold them back too - they might get hit by a car while crossing the street.)
[0] in whatever measurement of "capability" you have in mind
Well the critical thing is that we can’t determine who is at what percentile until after the fact. So for example an early bloomer genius type, who is 99.999th percentile among everyone in the same birth year cohort, could suddenly crash back down towards the average.
There’s no practical way to determine that looking forwards in time.
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?
To 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 a path down which you’ve sent a high-resolution camera FPV drone so many times that you doubt you will see anything new in person.
What might happen then is that you try to keep it interesting by making it more impressive and raising the bar, by continuing to think and plan even harder. Why not write it in Rust? Why not make it infinitely extensible? More diagrams, hundreds more of open tabs…
It can absolutely lead to cool ideas with strategic and well-defined execution plans. Unfortunately, it is also difficult to break this loop and actually implement without an external force or another mind giving you some reframing.
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
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
> It’s just a lot of trivial typing and package management and it might not even be all that impressive when it is done.
> What might happen then is that you try to keep it interesting by making it more impressive
This feeling is something that immediately sets off an alarm in my head.
IRL every time I tried to impress someone, I said or did stupid things. These experiences are now part of cringe memories about myself.
In software, the paradox is often that making something simple is difficult, but easily reproducible and unimpressive for most people. It is kind of like the engineers' version of when people say that their 4yo kid could do the same drawings as Picasso.
Just go through the last 90% and finish the thing. Like Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said, perfection is reached not when there's nothing else to add, but when there's nothing more to remove.
Then put the V1.0 tag on it and move it to maintenance mode. Then move to the next project, which very well might be about covering a different set of needs in the same area.
> Congratulations: you have successfully turned your cool idea into a chore.
The article gave me a vague, off-topic sense of unease but your comment crystallised the feeling for me.
I really wish less emphasis is placed on this kind of blue-sky, "strategic" thinking, and more placed on the "chores". Legwork, maintenance, step-by-step execution of a plan, issue tracking, perspective shifting etc. are all, in my opinion, critically important and much more deserving of praise and respect than so-called "strategic" thinking.
Which, IME, most people can't do anyway! After they've talked their big talk you suggest that there's a practical, on-ground problem and they look at you accusingly, like you're sabotaging their picture. And I'm like, no, my friend; reality is sabotaging your picture, it's just the two of us here and you're not losing any face by me pointing that out, and also if you were an actual strategic thinker you'd have taken my on-ground problem into account already...
This might come from childhood and problematic praise patterns. You can grow to both crave praise and surprise, but at the same time when you get it not really value it. You might be interested to do impressive work as play when you don’t know how it will pan out, but if you don’t feel like it is interesting enough then you are demotivated.
I think it is important to be able to strategise, especially if you can delegate parts of the work. If you cannot delegate, there needs to be a balance with capacity for grunt work. One way to address it perhaps is learning to get in the zone and enjoy ongoing work as a process. Unfortunately, sometimes it is hard to snap out of big picture view and get to it.
I'm just starting a software project and, again, it is ambitious and somewhat complex (multi-sig signoff solution).
I envy people that can identify a simple project and execute it successfully.
But the challenge of building something more complex is what's interesting for me. And I'm not sure I would have more success with a simpler project, I'd get bored rapidly.
For me it helps to reflect on my desire to finish, which is mostly just a fragment of my day job. On my side projects, I can go as deep into the rabbit hole as I want, and enjoy the journey. Of course it feels great to publish something eventually, but the zen garden effect of just bike shedding to your hearts content is really something you shouldn’t dismiss immediately.
I’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 at big things I’ve done, they’re all the result of just “doing the thing” for a long time and making thousands of course corrections. Never the result of executing the perfect crystalline plan.
I started my most ambitious project in February. A few years ago I wouldn't have even dreamed of ever starting let alone finishing it, but now I have a Claude Code Max Pro subscription and it goes forward in a steady pace. I expect the first version of it to be finished within the year. Even it's written mostly by AI, it's still a lot of work to get it to do the right thing, but I'm getting better at it.
The first two sections reminded me of an observation I've made about myself: the more I delay "doing the thing" and spend time "researching" or "developing taste", the more I turn into a critic instead of a creator.
> Your taste develops faster than your skill
> "the quality group could tell you why a photograph was excellent"
They are critics now. People with a huge taste-skill gap are basically critics — first towards themselves and gradually towards others. I don't want to generalize by saying "critics are just failed creators", but I've certainly found it true for myself. Trying to undo this change in me and this article kind of said all the words I wanted to hear. :)
It's both dense and beautifully written. Feels like every paragraph has something profound to say. This kind of "optimizing-for-screenshot-shares" writing usually gets overdone, but since this actually had substance, it was amazing to read.
For those who haven’t run across it, I like the man in the arena speech from Theodore Roosevelt to put things in perspective when I turn into a critic, or get harsh feedback from a critic.
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
If this sounds like you, I highly recommend reading "The Problem of the Puer Aeternus".
You can definitely skip a lot of the tedious bits where the author essential copy-pastes other books for analysis, but this is a very common pattern where people tend to hold themselves back because doing the unambitious, rather pedestrian next step forward requires one to face these preconceived notions about oneself, e.g. "I should've done this long ago", etc.
> At semester's end, all the best photos came from the quantity group.
The quantity group learned something that cannot be taught: that excellence emerges from intimacy with imperfection, that mastery is built through befriending failure, that the path to creating one perfect thing runs directly through creating many imperfect things.
This reminded me of Roger Federer, who has won 82% of all matches but only 54% of all points.
I really enjoyed this article and also believe that in many cases doing is superior to planning.
Just a word of caution: the author doesn’t account for cost. All examples given are relatively low-cost and high-frequency: drawing pictures, taking photos, writing blog posts.
The cost-benefit ratio of simply doing changes when costs increase.
Quitting your high-paid job to finally start the startup you’ve been dreaming of is high-cost and rather low-frequency.
I don’t want to discourage anyone from doing these things, but it’s obvious to me that the cost/frequency aspect shouldn’t be neglected.
This syndrome is called "eternal child" (puer aeternus) in psychology.
You were destined to great things. You were exceptional as a child, you learnt to associate your great potential with all the good in yourself, you built your identity around it. You were ahead of your peers in elementary school, whatever you applied towards - you exceled at.
So you value that potential as the ultimate good, and any decision which reduces it in favour of actually doing something - you fear and avoid with all your soul. Any decision whatsoever murders part of that infinite potential to deliver something subpar (at best - it's not even guaranteed you achieve anything).
Over time this fear takes over and stunts your progress. You could be great, you KNOW you have this talent, but somehow you very rarely tap into it. You fall behind people you consider "mediocre" and "beneath you". Because they seem to be able to do simple things like it's the simplest thing in the world, while you somehow can't "motivate" yourself to do the "simple boring things".
When circumstances are just right you are still capable of great work, but more and more the circumstances are wrong, and you procrastinate and fail. You don't understand why, you focus on the environment and the things you fail to achieve. You search for the right productivity hack or the exact right domain that will motivate you. But any domain has boring repeative parts. Any decision is a chance to do sth OK in exchange of infinite potential. It never seems like it's worth it, so you don't do it.
You start doubting yourself. Maybe you're just an ordinary lazy person? Being ordinary is the thing you fear the most. It's a complete negation of your identity. You can be exceptional genius with problems, you take that any time if the alternative is "just a normal guy".
There's no lesson. It's hard. Your brain will search for the silver bullet to skip the boring self-improvement work and feel good NOW. It'll likely detach your current self from your past self (I was bad, I discovered this, now I'm great, exceptional and heroic again). Then you'll again avoid the boring day-to-day work (becaue you feel exceptional again) and fail again.
Everything you know is material for your brain to make excuses and rationalizations. So no lessons work.
What works is retraining the part of the brain that distorts the reality and directs all your thoughts towards these patterns.
It's a lot like debugging. There's a callback in your brain that is harmful. It triggers every time you have to sacrifice some future potential for uncertain reality. It is subconscious. Put a breakpoint in that callback. Try to notice every time it triggers. At first just notice it, notice what it urges you to do.
When you have it nailed down - try to change it. At that point you'll realize the urge and where it comes from. Then it's a matter to making the decision and committing to sth, no matter what. It doesn't only have to be big things, it can be small things unrelated to work. It's the same "code". If you do it every time - you'll retrain it eventually.
Physical exercise does wonders for this. The results you achieve are a 100% determined by the time and effort you put in. It's hard to start, as its asking for more self-improvement, but if you can get this one thing, the rest fall into place.
The word "ambition" comes with a variety of connotations.
>There are doers and there are talkers.
There are those who use their ambition to define a goal and then work tirelessly to achieve it. Think of the mountaineer who plans and trains for decades to eventually ascend Mt Everest.
Then there are those who share their ambition by talking about it. Seeking recognition, etc for "being ambitious". Staying with the mountaineer theme, those who refuse to climb a lesser mountain as not being important enough to expend their precious talents upon. It is these folks that if they somehow make enough money in some form, end up chartering a helicopter and sherpas to climb Mt Everest.
The word “ambition” is indeed vague, and this is unfortunate, as there is a rich vocabulary full of distinction we ought to be using. (You see the same thing when people use “passionate” as a virtue, such as in job postings when what they mean is “enthusiastic”. Taken literally, you certainly don’t want passionate employees!)
In the strict sense, ambition [0] is an inordinate love of honor.
Perseverance [1], OTOH, is the ability to endure suffering in pursuit of a good. Both effeminacy (refusal or inability to endure suffering to attain a good) and pertinacity (obstinate pursuit of something one should not) are opposed to perseverance.
It seems that ambition is therefore opposed to perseverance, since it can either be effeminate (the ineffectual daydreamer that makes big plans that he never realizes) or pertinacious (the person who bites off more than he can chew).
Prudence [3] involves the application of right reason to action, which itself presupposes right desire. An inordinate love of honor is therefore opposed to prudence, because it involves an inordinate desire. Furthermore, prudence presupposes humility [2], which involves knowing the actual limits of your strengths and qualities (it is not the denial of the strengths and qualities you actual have, which is opposed to humility and a common misconception!). Humility allows us to moderate our desires. In that sense, ambition as an inordinate desire for honors beyond one’s reach lacks humility.
If you consider any creative endeavor as a burden, I suggest you relook at why you're doing it. You have to love the process (not just the outcome), and in this case, that "gap" Ira Glass refers to usually acts like fuel on the fire.
The «taste-skill» thing is something you often see in music. Those with great taste, but limited ability, tend to pursue roles like promotion, agents, producing, etc.
Have to admit (I added to a snark comment about Substack and productivity blogs when this was posted), it addresses a problem that is plaguing myself.
Still not sure if it will help me overcome this, but the "quitting point" concept and the drawing example made it a good read for me.
Not 100% the same, but I've also heard there is a correlation between procrastrination and perfectionism, narcisissm (not only grandiosity, also vulnerabity and low self-esteem):
Recognizing delusions is probably the highest form of wisdom. It can help us avoid entire wasted lives.
That said, "Do-learn" sort of begs the question, and it's only a half-step. How do you know when you're polishing a turd? Who's to say this cycle is virtuous or vicious?
The second part is that after you drop your self-centered delusion of seeking perfection, you actually start to find and solve other people's problems.
It might not be pretty or fun, but that's what has value.
If you're interested in building companies, the key factor is not the technology or even the team, but the market -- the opportunity to help.
Then it's not really your ambition: it's a need that needs filling, and the question is whether you can find the people and means to do it, and you'll find both the people and the means are inspired not by your ambition, but by your vision for how to fill the need, in a kind of self-selected alignment and mutual support.
I'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
There'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.
Let'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 <people trying>..."
- "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.
I find it surprisingly difficult to lower my standards once I feel committed to an idea. I wish this article leaned a little more into ways to address that sort of dilemma.
Don't get me wrong, I agree fully with the article. I put it into practice plenty well in many areas of my life. I've made great progress with my diet, self-care, and physical fitness routines by keeping my goals SMART.
And yet, a few years ago, I got this idea in my head for a piece of software I wanted to create that is, if not too ambitious, then clearly asking all of me and then some. The opening paragraph of the article really resonated with me -- "The artwork that will finally make the invisible visible."
And so, I've chipped away at the idea here and there, but I find myself continually put off by "the gap" - even though I know it's to be expected and is totally human.
Part of me wishes I had never dared to dream so big and wishes I could let the idea go entirely. Another part of me is mad and ashamed for thinking like that about a personal dream.
Anyway, don't know where I'm going with all this. Just felt like remarking on the article since it struck close to home.
P.S. if you haven't seen the Ira Glass video, I'd take a look. It's pretty inspirational. Here's Part 3 which is what the article was referencing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2wLP0izeJE
Unconstrained curiosity is a superpower. Some of the greatest people in history have had immense curiosity. Think Newton, Darwin, Feynman. In fact pretty much any great scientist is great because of their wide curiosity. It's often the crossover between things that seem unrelated where the breakthroughs lie.
It's a joy to have "the pleasure of finding things out" and I pity anyone who lacks it.
To you maybe. People get satisfaction and purpose from different things. Unbounded curiosity can often drive tangible outcomes too. You might even have that curiosity to thank for methods and tools you use in your own persuits!
This resonates a lot with me. In fact it's a trait that has made me unhappy for as long as I can remember.
I'm seeing a therapist later this month because in a talk with my GP she saw strong enough hints of ADHD to send me there, and the kind of situations and some feelings talked about in the article came up a lot in the conversation.
I size up my oil paints against the old masters, not the old ladies in the atelier. I paint miniatures way better than average but hang around with Golden Demon winners so I always find myself wanting. Can play beautiful Renaissance pieces on my uke, but infuriatingly not at a professional performance level. Can win many sim races, but not against the top 0.1%, yet I size myself against their telemetry and laptimes. I dabble in Chess but being forever stuck around lowly 1300 ELO makes me feel dumb. My dead side projects cemetery has subdirectories approaching 3 figures. I go out and cycle with my brother but I huff and puff while he tops the Strava segments and wins the regional amateur championship again.
So too many days I just sit and do nothing, or just look for something else to enjoy for a few months until I become an unhappy promising beginner at yet another thing, adding to the overall problem.
To have such capacity and drive, as well as critical self-reflection is a rare thing. I would first suggest some appreciation for the interesting and curious state of being that you seem to have developed. Nicely done!
My own route out of this trap was to explore theories of mind and, more profoundly, practices of no-mind. Doing nothing is much harder to achieve than doing something and can create a space for insight that the analytical mind cannot access. From this place, which is free of comparison and judgement, incredibly beautiful things can emerge.
If you would like to get to the root of it, I would suggest Taoist teachings and reading a few things by Krishnamurti. To understand the fundamental limitations of the mind can tell you something about who you through negation. For me, this has brought a deep sense of peace as well as an ability to use my mind in a more satisfying way.
I don't want to psychoanalyze but it seems your sense of dissatisfaction is a little different from what the author is describing? Your dissatisfaction is from not accomplishing the possibly implausible goal of being the very best at something without being a professional competitor, while the author is describing a case of not even getting started on creative projects out of a fear of them not living up to a made up standard in your mind.
They're both arguably unreasonable standards but one is for the end-product (i.e. a novel/album/software project) as opposed to reaching some apparent level of general skill at your hobby. The latter is full of traps because for subjective hobbies like arts, how does one even evaluate that?
I tend to find if it isn't ambitious enough, than it is just low hanging fruit for competitors... Chances are someone already published something similar.
The market usually doesn't want advanced technology, but rather the comfortable nostalgic dysfunctional totems they always purchased in the past. =)
>Creation is not birth; it is murder. The murder of the impossible in service of the possible.
What a stupid quote. You know why it's stupid. Because murder is creation. It is the creation of death while destroying life.
Just use the word the way it's meant to be used. Don't come up with quotes that sound clever and trick the mind into thinking a statement is profound when really it's just more word trickery.
I thought the phrase was a whimsical/poetic way of saying something that rings true to me: that all the possibilities in your mind get narrowed down to a single imperfect one when actually materializing/putting them into practice -- in a way getting "destroyed" and replaced with an imperfect but existing version -- and that we sometimes get anxious about this.
It's not the only way of looking at it, but it is one way, and it's not wrong.
I hate the title but actually a pretty decent article.
> We are still the only species cursed with visions of what could be. But perhaps that's humanity's most beautiful accident. To be haunted by possibilities we cannot yet reach, to be driven by dreams that exceed our current grasp. The curse and the gift are the same thing: we see further than we can walk, dream bigger than we can build, imagine more than we can create.
> And so we make imperfect things in service of perfect visions. We write rough drafts toward masterpieces we may never achieve. We build prototypes of futures we can barely envision. We close the gap between imagination and reality one flawed attempt at a time.
+1 - this resonated with me. For 25 years I have been an aspiring songwriter and it’s a constant battle against perfectionism and learned/imagined standards. I believe the right path is to just write a large volume of songs at a high rate no matter how bad they are, but that is an amazingly hard thing to let yourself do
This resonated quite strongly with me. It puts into words something that I've been feeling when working with AI. If you're new to something and using AI for it, it automatically boosts the floor of your taste, but not your skill. And you end up never slowing down to make mistakes and learn, because you can just do it without friction.
What’s not mentioned is the utter frustration when you can see your own output is not up to your own expectations, but you can’t execute on any plan to resolve that discrepancy.
“I know what developers want, so I can build it for them” is a death knell proportionate to your own standards…
The most profitable business I built was something I hacked together in two weeks during college holiday break, when I barely knew how to code. There was no source control (I was googling “what is GitHub” at the time), it was my first time writing Python, I stored passwords in plaintext… but within a year it was generating $20k a month in revenue. It did eventually collapse under its own weight from technical debt, bugs and support cost… and I wasn’t equipped to solve those problems.
But meanwhile, as the years went on and I actually learned about quality, I lost the ability to ship because I gained the ability to recognize when it wasn’t ready… it’s not quite “perfectionism,” but it’s borne of the same pathology, of letting perfect be the enemy of good.
Or maybe it's the only way in which companies these days give software developers agency.
My attempt to improve the cliche:
2 issues here. Neither can be developed (perfected?) in isolation, but they certainly ramp up at different rates. They should probably feed back into each other somehow, whether adversarially or notMore grown-up way to do it is to consume your mates' stuff?
(Trying to go from where TFA left off)
Maybe that actually is what you were saying? But I'm confused because you used the opposite words.
He can't really play an instrument, but he knows exactly what works and what doesn't and can articulate it.
Sort of like saying Bill Belichick has a skill gap because he’s not a top NFL player. AFAIK he never played pro ball at all (and college wasn’t at a top D1 program). Bit, he’s undeniably one of the most successful coaches in the business.
What GP is saying is not that Rick Rubin has no skill anywhere, but that he recognized he has 100/100 taste and instead of trying to become a hip hop artist, instead became a producer for other artists.
In the same way, you’ve described how Bill Belichick recognized his taste in what makes a player good is not enough to make him also a good player, so he positioned himself to take advantage of his 100/100 taste rather than whatever skill value he may have.
Detractors say it's the process and learning that builds depth.
Proponents say it doesn't matter because the tool exists and will always exist.
It's interesting seeing people argue about AI, because they're plainly not speaking about the same issue and simply talking past each other.
Detractors from AI often refuse to learn how to use it or argue that it doesn't do everything perfectly so you shouldn't use it.
Proponents say it's the process and learning that builds depth and you have to learn how to use it well before you can have a sensible opinion about it.
The same disconnect was in place for every major piece of technology, from mechanical weaving, to mechanical computing, to motorized carriages, to synthesized music. You can go back and read the articles written about these technologies and they're nearly identical to what the AI detractors have been saying.
One side always says you're giving away important skills and the new technology produces inferior work. They try to frame it in moral terms. But at heart the objections are about the fear of one's skills becoming economically obsolete.
But here is the problem - to effectively learn the tool, you must learn to use. Not learning how to effectively AI and then complaining that the results are bad is building a straw-men and then burning it.
But what I am giving away when using LLM is not skills, it's the ability to learn those skills. Because if the LLM instead of me is solving all easy and intermediate problems I cannot learn how to solve hard problems. The process of digging for an answer through documentation gives me a better understanding of how some technology works.
Those kinds of problems existed before - programming languages robed people of the necessity to learn assembly - high level languages of the necessity to learn low level languages - low code solutions of the necessity to learn how to code. Some of these solutions (like low level and high level programming languages) are robust enough that this trade-off makes sense - some are not (like low code).
I think it's too early to call weather AI agents go one way or the other. Putting eggs in both baskets means learning how to use AI tools and at the same time still maintaining the ability to work without them.
I won't deny that there is some of this in my AI hesitancy
But honestly the bigger barrier for me is that I fear signing my name on subpar work that I would otherwise be embarrassed to claim as my own
If I don't type it into the editor myself, I'm not putting my name on it. It is not my code and I'm not claiming either credit nor responsibility for it
This of course isn't just a moral concern, it's a legal one. I want ownership of my code, I don't want to find out later the AI just copied another project and now I've violated a license by not giving attribution.
Very few open-source projects are in the public domain and even the most permissive license requires attribution.
I think I'm using it more than it sounds like you are, but I make very clear notations to myself and others about what's a big generated test suite that I froze in amber after it cleared a huge replay event, and what I've been over a fine tooth comb with personally. I type about the same amount of prose and code every day as ever, but I type a lot of code into the prompt now "like this, not like that" in a comment.
The percentage of hand-authored lines varies wildly from probably 20% of unit tests to still close to 100℅ on io_uring submission queue polling or whatever.
If it one shots a build file, eh, I put opus as the meta.authors and move on.
That's like telling a chef they'll improve their cooking skills by adding a can of soup to everything.
Unless I can become a millionaire just with those skills, they are in a limbo between economically adequate and economically obsolete.
It's important to realize this is actually a general truth of humans arguing. Sometimes people do disagree about the facts on the ground and what is actually true versus what is bullshit, but a lot of the time what really happens is people completely agree on the facts and even most of the implications of the facts but completely disagree on how to frame them. Doesn't even have to be Internet arguments. A lot of hot-button political topics have always been like this, too.
It's easy to dismiss people's arguments as being irrelevant, but I think there's room to say that if you were to interrogate their worldview in detail you might find that they have coherent reasoning behind why it is relevant from their perspective, even if you disagree.
Though it hasn't really improved my ability to argue or even not argue (perhaps more important), I've definitely noticed this in myself when introspecting, and it definitely makes me think more about why I feel driven to argue, what good it is, and how to do it better.
There's actually some ground truth facts about AI many people are not knowledgeable about.
Many people believe we understand in totality how LLMs work. The absolute truth of this is that we overall we do NOT understand how LLMs work AT all.
The mistaken belief that we understand LLMs is the driver behind most of the arguments. People think we understand LLMs and that we Understand that the output of LLMs is just stochastic parroting, when the truth is We Do Not understand Why or How an LLM produced a specific response for a specific prompt.
Whether the process of an LLM producing a response resembles anything close to sentience or consciousness, we actually do not know because we aren't even sure about the definitions of those words, Nor do we understand how an LLM works.
This erroneous belief is so pervasive amongst people that I'm positive I'll get extremely confident responses declaring me wrong.
These debates are not the result of people talking past each other. It's because a large segment of people on HN literally are Misinformed about LLMs.
For the general populace including many tech people who are not ML researchers, understanding how convolutional neural nets work is already tricky enough. For non tech people, I'd hazard a guess that LLM/ generative AI is complexity-indistinguishable from "The YouTube/Tiktok Algorithm".
And this lack of understanding, and in many cases lack of conscious acknowledgement of the lack of understanding has made many "debates" sound almost like theocratic arguments. Very little interest in grounding positions against facts, yet strongly held opinions.
Some are convinced we're going to get AGI in a couple years, others think it's just a glorified text generator that cannot produce new content. And worse there's seemingly little that changes their mind on it.
And there are self contradictory positions held too. Just as an example: I've heard people express AI produced stuff to not qualify as art (philosophically and in terms of output quality) but at the same express deep concern how tech companies will replace artists...
Here is a copy paste of the quote:
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.” ― Ira Glass
LLMs are good at things with a lot of quantity in the training set, you can signal boost stuff, but its not perfect (and its non-obvious that you want rare/special/advanced stuff to be the sweet spot as a vendor, that's a small part of your TAM by construction).
This has all kinds of interesting tells, for example Claude is better at Bazel than Gemini is, which is kind of extreme given Google has infinite perfect Bazel and Anthropic has open source (really bad) Bazel, so you know Gemini hasn't gotten the google4 pipeline decontamination thing dialed in.
All else equal you expect a homogenizing effect where over time everything is like NextJS, Golang, and Docker.
There are outlier events, like how Claude got trained on nixpkgs in a serious way recently, but idk, maybe they want to get into defense or something.
Skill is very rarely the problem for computers, if you're considering it as district from taste (sometimes you call them both together just skill).
> 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 objectives beyond his reach: only self-demotion brought late-life satisfaction. No expectations lured Lincoln apart from those he set for himself: he started small, rose slowly, and only when ready reached for the top. His ambitions grew as his opportunities expanded, but he kept both within his circumstances. He sought to be underestimated.
The point -- being too ambitious can slow you down if you're not strategic.
I suspect this might have to do with praise patterns in childhood.
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.
In particular IQ is not associated with better life outcomes after you have "enough", and that "enough" isn't Mensa level.
This seems far too deterministic and I think is contrary to what you're replying to.
It sounds more like a 99.999th percentile person[0] that constantly reaches too far too early, before being prepared, will not have a 99.999th percentile life. A 99th percentile person who, on the other hand, does not constantly fail due to over-reach, can easily end up accomplishing more. (And there are many other things that might hold them back too - they might get hit by a car while crossing the street.)
[0] in whatever measurement of "capability" you have in mind
There’s no practical way to determine that looking forwards in time.
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 a path down which you’ve sent a high-resolution camera FPV drone so many times that you doubt you will see anything new in person.
What might happen then is that you try to keep it interesting by making it more impressive and raising the bar, by continuing to think and plan even harder. Why not write it in Rust? Why not make it infinitely extensible? More diagrams, hundreds more of open tabs…
It can absolutely lead to cool ideas with strategic and well-defined execution plans. Unfortunately, it is also difficult to break this loop and actually implement without an external force or another mind giving you some reframing.
This feeling is something that immediately sets off an alarm in my head.
IRL every time I tried to impress someone, I said or did stupid things. These experiences are now part of cringe memories about myself.
In software, the paradox is often that making something simple is difficult, but easily reproducible and unimpressive for most people. It is kind of like the engineers' version of when people say that their 4yo kid could do the same drawings as Picasso.
Just go through the last 90% and finish the thing. Like Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said, perfection is reached not when there's nothing else to add, but when there's nothing more to remove.
Then put the V1.0 tag on it and move it to maintenance mode. Then move to the next project, which very well might be about covering a different set of needs in the same area.
The article gave me a vague, off-topic sense of unease but your comment crystallised the feeling for me.
I really wish less emphasis is placed on this kind of blue-sky, "strategic" thinking, and more placed on the "chores". Legwork, maintenance, step-by-step execution of a plan, issue tracking, perspective shifting etc. are all, in my opinion, critically important and much more deserving of praise and respect than so-called "strategic" thinking.
Which, IME, most people can't do anyway! After they've talked their big talk you suggest that there's a practical, on-ground problem and they look at you accusingly, like you're sabotaging their picture. And I'm like, no, my friend; reality is sabotaging your picture, it's just the two of us here and you're not losing any face by me pointing that out, and also if you were an actual strategic thinker you'd have taken my on-ground problem into account already...
I think it is important to be able to strategise, especially if you can delegate parts of the work. If you cannot delegate, there needs to be a balance with capacity for grunt work. One way to address it perhaps is learning to get in the zone and enjoy ongoing work as a process. Unfortunately, sometimes it is hard to snap out of big picture view and get to 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 at big things I’ve done, they’re all the result of just “doing the thing” for a long time and making thousands of course corrections. Never the result of executing the perfect crystalline plan.
> Your taste develops faster than your skill
> "the quality group could tell you why a photograph was excellent"
They are critics now. People with a huge taste-skill gap are basically critics — first towards themselves and gradually towards others. I don't want to generalize by saying "critics are just failed creators", but I've certainly found it true for myself. Trying to undo this change in me and this article kind of said all the words I wanted to hear. :)
It's both dense and beautifully written. Feels like every paragraph has something profound to say. This kind of "optimizing-for-screenshot-shares" writing usually gets overdone, but since this actually had substance, it was amazing to read.
(See how I turned into a critic?)
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
You can definitely skip a lot of the tedious bits where the author essential copy-pastes other books for analysis, but this is a very common pattern where people tend to hold themselves back because doing the unambitious, rather pedestrian next step forward requires one to face these preconceived notions about oneself, e.g. "I should've done this long ago", etc.
The quantity group learned something that cannot be taught: that excellence emerges from intimacy with imperfection, that mastery is built through befriending failure, that the path to creating one perfect thing runs directly through creating many imperfect things.
This reminded me of Roger Federer, who has won 82% of all matches but only 54% of all points.
I really enjoyed this article and also believe that in many cases doing is superior to planning.
Just a word of caution: the author doesn’t account for cost. All examples given are relatively low-cost and high-frequency: drawing pictures, taking photos, writing blog posts.
The cost-benefit ratio of simply doing changes when costs increase.
Quitting your high-paid job to finally start the startup you’ve been dreaming of is high-cost and rather low-frequency.
I don’t want to discourage anyone from doing these things, but it’s obvious to me that the cost/frequency aspect shouldn’t be neglected.
You were destined to great things. You were exceptional as a child, you learnt to associate your great potential with all the good in yourself, you built your identity around it. You were ahead of your peers in elementary school, whatever you applied towards - you exceled at.
So you value that potential as the ultimate good, and any decision which reduces it in favour of actually doing something - you fear and avoid with all your soul. Any decision whatsoever murders part of that infinite potential to deliver something subpar (at best - it's not even guaranteed you achieve anything).
Over time this fear takes over and stunts your progress. You could be great, you KNOW you have this talent, but somehow you very rarely tap into it. You fall behind people you consider "mediocre" and "beneath you". Because they seem to be able to do simple things like it's the simplest thing in the world, while you somehow can't "motivate" yourself to do the "simple boring things".
When circumstances are just right you are still capable of great work, but more and more the circumstances are wrong, and you procrastinate and fail. You don't understand why, you focus on the environment and the things you fail to achieve. You search for the right productivity hack or the exact right domain that will motivate you. But any domain has boring repeative parts. Any decision is a chance to do sth OK in exchange of infinite potential. It never seems like it's worth it, so you don't do it.
You start doubting yourself. Maybe you're just an ordinary lazy person? Being ordinary is the thing you fear the most. It's a complete negation of your identity. You can be exceptional genius with problems, you take that any time if the alternative is "just a normal guy".
So, what is the lesson here?
Gotta let go of pride and risk it for the biscuit (ship something)?
Everything you know is material for your brain to make excuses and rationalizations. So no lessons work.
What works is retraining the part of the brain that distorts the reality and directs all your thoughts towards these patterns.
It's a lot like debugging. There's a callback in your brain that is harmful. It triggers every time you have to sacrifice some future potential for uncertain reality. It is subconscious. Put a breakpoint in that callback. Try to notice every time it triggers. At first just notice it, notice what it urges you to do.
When you have it nailed down - try to change it. At that point you'll realize the urge and where it comes from. Then it's a matter to making the decision and committing to sth, no matter what. It doesn't only have to be big things, it can be small things unrelated to work. It's the same "code". If you do it every time - you'll retrain it eventually.
At least that's the theory, I'm not there yet.
Damn I love this advice phrased like this.
Best: good job studying for that exam.
Meh: good job passing that exam.
Worst: you so smart, everything comes easy to you.
Nice, I‘ clever!
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.
>There are doers and there are talkers.
There are those who use their ambition to define a goal and then work tirelessly to achieve it. Think of the mountaineer who plans and trains for decades to eventually ascend Mt Everest.
Then there are those who share their ambition by talking about it. Seeking recognition, etc for "being ambitious". Staying with the mountaineer theme, those who refuse to climb a lesser mountain as not being important enough to expend their precious talents upon. It is these folks that if they somehow make enough money in some form, end up chartering a helicopter and sherpas to climb Mt Everest.
In the strict sense, ambition [0] is an inordinate love of honor.
Perseverance [1], OTOH, is the ability to endure suffering in pursuit of a good. Both effeminacy (refusal or inability to endure suffering to attain a good) and pertinacity (obstinate pursuit of something one should not) are opposed to perseverance.
It seems that ambition is therefore opposed to perseverance, since it can either be effeminate (the ineffectual daydreamer that makes big plans that he never realizes) or pertinacious (the person who bites off more than he can chew).
Prudence [3] involves the application of right reason to action, which itself presupposes right desire. An inordinate love of honor is therefore opposed to prudence, because it involves an inordinate desire. Furthermore, prudence presupposes humility [2], which involves knowing the actual limits of your strengths and qualities (it is not the denial of the strengths and qualities you actual have, which is opposed to humility and a common misconception!). Humility allows us to moderate our desires. In that sense, ambition as an inordinate desire for honors beyond one’s reach lacks humility.
[0] https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01381d.htm
[1] https://www.newadvent.org/summa/3138.htm#article2
[2] https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07543b.htm
[3] https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12517b.htm
“I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.”
― Bill Gates
"Jeepers - they're on to me!"
Still not sure if it will help me overcome this, but the "quitting point" concept and the drawing example made it a good read for me.
Not 100% the same, but I've also heard there is a correlation between procrastrination and perfectionism, narcisissm (not only grandiosity, also vulnerabity and low self-esteem):
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11353843/#sec3-ijer...
Relevant proverbs are plenty... "There is no failure except in no longer trying" etc
That said, "Do-learn" sort of begs the question, and it's only a half-step. How do you know when you're polishing a turd? Who's to say this cycle is virtuous or vicious?
The second part is that after you drop your self-centered delusion of seeking perfection, you actually start to find and solve other people's problems.
It might not be pretty or fun, but that's what has value.
If you're interested in building companies, the key factor is not the technology or even the team, but the market -- the opportunity to help.
Then it's not really your ambition: it's a need that needs filling, and the question is whether you can find the people and means to do it, and you'll find both the people and the means are inspired not by your ambition, but by your vision for how to fill the need, in a kind of self-selected alignment and mutual support.
The word that kept coming to my mind as I read this was convergence.
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 <people trying>..."
- "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.
Don't get me wrong, I agree fully with the article. I put it into practice plenty well in many areas of my life. I've made great progress with my diet, self-care, and physical fitness routines by keeping my goals SMART.
And yet, a few years ago, I got this idea in my head for a piece of software I wanted to create that is, if not too ambitious, then clearly asking all of me and then some. The opening paragraph of the article really resonated with me -- "The artwork that will finally make the invisible visible."
And so, I've chipped away at the idea here and there, but I find myself continually put off by "the gap" - even though I know it's to be expected and is totally human.
Part of me wishes I had never dared to dream so big and wishes I could let the idea go entirely. Another part of me is mad and ashamed for thinking like that about a personal dream.
Anyway, don't know where I'm going with all this. Just felt like remarking on the article since it struck close to home.
P.S. if you haven't seen the Ira Glass video, I'd take a look. It's pretty inspirational. Here's Part 3 which is what the article was referencing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2wLP0izeJE
Unconstrained curiosity is a vice, not virtue.
Unconstrained curiosity is a superpower. Some of the greatest people in history have had immense curiosity. Think Newton, Darwin, Feynman. In fact pretty much any great scientist is great because of their wide curiosity. It's often the crossover between things that seem unrelated where the breakthroughs lie.
It's a joy to have "the pleasure of finding things out" and I pity anyone who lacks it.
We already know that too much of anything is bad and that virtue is in the middle.
Please stop writing articles like this.
I'm seeing a therapist later this month because in a talk with my GP she saw strong enough hints of ADHD to send me there, and the kind of situations and some feelings talked about in the article came up a lot in the conversation.
I size up my oil paints against the old masters, not the old ladies in the atelier. I paint miniatures way better than average but hang around with Golden Demon winners so I always find myself wanting. Can play beautiful Renaissance pieces on my uke, but infuriatingly not at a professional performance level. Can win many sim races, but not against the top 0.1%, yet I size myself against their telemetry and laptimes. I dabble in Chess but being forever stuck around lowly 1300 ELO makes me feel dumb. My dead side projects cemetery has subdirectories approaching 3 figures. I go out and cycle with my brother but I huff and puff while he tops the Strava segments and wins the regional amateur championship again.
So too many days I just sit and do nothing, or just look for something else to enjoy for a few months until I become an unhappy promising beginner at yet another thing, adding to the overall problem.
My own route out of this trap was to explore theories of mind and, more profoundly, practices of no-mind. Doing nothing is much harder to achieve than doing something and can create a space for insight that the analytical mind cannot access. From this place, which is free of comparison and judgement, incredibly beautiful things can emerge.
If you would like to get to the root of it, I would suggest Taoist teachings and reading a few things by Krishnamurti. To understand the fundamental limitations of the mind can tell you something about who you through negation. For me, this has brought a deep sense of peace as well as an ability to use my mind in a more satisfying way.
Just my two cents :)
They're both arguably unreasonable standards but one is for the end-product (i.e. a novel/album/software project) as opposed to reaching some apparent level of general skill at your hobby. The latter is full of traps because for subjective hobbies like arts, how does one even evaluate that?
The market usually doesn't want advanced technology, but rather the comfortable nostalgic dysfunctional totems they always purchased in the past. =)
"The Man In The White Suit" ( 1951)
https://archive.org/details/TheManInTheWhiteSuit1951_201810
What a stupid quote. You know why it's stupid. Because murder is creation. It is the creation of death while destroying life.
Just use the word the way it's meant to be used. Don't come up with quotes that sound clever and trick the mind into thinking a statement is profound when really it's just more word trickery.
It's not the only way of looking at it, but it is one way, and it's not wrong.
> We are still the only species cursed with visions of what could be. But perhaps that's humanity's most beautiful accident. To be haunted by possibilities we cannot yet reach, to be driven by dreams that exceed our current grasp. The curse and the gift are the same thing: we see further than we can walk, dream bigger than we can build, imagine more than we can create.
> And so we make imperfect things in service of perfect visions. We write rough drafts toward masterpieces we may never achieve. We build prototypes of futures we can barely envision. We close the gap between imagination and reality one flawed attempt at a time.
But how does it reward anything if you're not engaging with anything outside of direct article links or newsletters you subscribe to?
IMO your comment is not constructive unless you think the linked article is "viral vague behavior that only draws clicks"