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This is such an unhealthy way to view the world, so full of cynicism and an easy path to self-loathing.

> Not achieving "success" (failing) is rarely free: it leaves emotional and physical scars.. Repeat it a couple of times and you're either dead or on your way there.

This is where the mindset change matters so importantly. If you view every point of lack of success as failure, of course it will defeat you- but if you instead view it as a learning experience, and you try your best to understand why the failure came, you can build something out of it.

This is a common strategy to gaining skill in- well, anything- but especially in games. Often the difference between someone with innate talent and someone with experience, is that the person with innate talent can keep up in terms of general mechanics- they can think ahead, guess their enemy out, and go faster, just stressing their enemy out.

But they'll still be beaten incredibly quickly by someone with experience, because they don't recognize the patterns that lead to loss. In fact, one can climb the ladder of skill to the highest echelons of Chess, Formula 1, or Starcraft off of simply exploiting other people's lack of knowledge in a specific pattern.

> In fact, the rule is this: No matter how hard you try, you might still lose. Sorry about that.

For sure. But then again, to always lose no matter what, is about as likely as being Bill Gates. And none of us- truly, none of us- know what the future holds for us. Some of this decade's most successful people didn't see it until their late 40s.

Life is a lot more interesting than "settle for average". We haven't even begun to figure it out, that's why you can even still have such crazy outliers as Gates.

> This is a common strategy to gaining skill in- well, anything- but especially in games.

Great analogy, because in games this seems obvious. Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes (predominantly) from bad judgement.

> But then again, to always lose no matter what, is about as likely as being Bill Gates.

This sounds very inspiring, but assessing whether that's really true is also difficult. You are assuming that skewness and kurtosis in the marginal distribution of success (with respect to innate ability, effort, and all other factors except "luck") are minimal.

> But then again, to always lose no matter what, is about as likely as being Bill Gates

I'd like for you to be right, but there are a lot of poor and oppressed people out there. There are a lot of children that die young. There's only one Bill Gates.

And how many heroes does the world revere for rising up and doing something about similar situations, even if it was in the past? There are a lot of people dealt very shitty cards. What this is trying to say is that, even in the most horrible of situations, people have found a way. You can too.

> No matter how hard you try, you might still lose.

This is true and inspires tremendous fear. It prevents many would-be successes. I suspect far more than enough to offset the would-be failures. We could recapture this lost value with a universal basic income. We're just too busy chasing down all the "lazy" people while simultaneously declaring their uselessness. It would be funny if it weren't so sad. Why are they useless anyway?

>We could recapture this lost value with a universal basic income

In absolute agreement. UBI may unlock extreme growth of efficiency by enabling risk taking without risk of total defeat.

"Bill Gates: No. I think after the first three or four years, it's pretty cast in concrete whether you're a good programmer or not. After a few more years, you may know more about managing large projects and personalities, but after three or four years, it's clear what you're going to be. There's no one at Microsoft who was just kind of mediocre for a couple of years, and then just out of the blue started optimizing everything in sight. I can talk to somebody about a program that he's written and know right away whether he's really a good programmer." http://blog.codinghorror.com/how-to-become-a-better-programm....

fixed link: http://blog.codinghorror.com/how-to-become-a-better-programm...

This is in the context of programmers-who-have-already-been-hired-at-microsoft. And possibly speaks to a lack of training/mentoring. Edit: and something Gates said 20 years ago.

Learning new things makes you a better programmer, always. My first four years, I was a copy/paste programmer. Then I turned 11 and learned algebra. Huge leap forward. Another huge leap forward with trigonometry and calculus. Again when I had access to a library with books that weren't older than me. Another when I finally met other programmers, studied FP and learned half a dozen real languages. Another with statistics, differential equations and linear algebra. And so forth.

The ascent only ever stops if you are employed at a company that has a culture of overwork and no mentoring. But if Gates believed people can't grow, then (true to the headline) he probably made it a self-fulfilling prophesy.

I think Bill Gates is not saying people can't improve their programming chops, but instead that innate talent cannot be taught or learned.

From a different perspective - all pro-level athletes got to where they are today with a lot of training. But only a tiny fraction of the global population, if put through the same training regimen, could achieve that pro status.

That's what you call a fixed mindset :) .

Some people can never be good singers, because they're tone deaf. Or mute. Blind people, with perhaps a few exceptional, uh, exceptions, can never be good basketball players. People with exceptionally low can never be programmers.

On the other side are the virtuoso's. People who not just through training, but innate ability are at the top of their field.

The rest of us are somewhere in between.

It strikes me as downright ridiculous that there's an infinite ascent to becoming a better programmer, considering that it's trivial to think of examples of people who cannot even master the basics.

I think anecdata in this case doesn't quite cut it.

That said, I very much applaud the sentiment of your message, as I think a lot of people err on the side of thinking that they are innately incapable while diligent practice and learning might get them quite far.

But that doesn't change the, in my opinion, completely sensible observation that some people are just not cut out to be great programmers. Programming is difficult!

"There's no one at Microsoft who was just kind of mediocre for a couple of years, and then just out of the blue started optimizing everything in sight."

That's a fixed mindset if there ever was one. He's saying its extremely improbable for someone to go from mediocre to super skilled.

This mentality is what causes tech companies to all adopt the myopic "We only hire 'A' players" hiring policy. I totally disagree with this. With the right coaching, feedback, and practice, B players can definitely become A players. I've seen it happen over and over throughout my career. Gates is usually right about this kind of stuff but I can't agree with this one.

It also completely ignores that programmers may appear to be mediocre because of environmental factors beyond their control. Casting this to the general case, people do not have absolute control over the conditions in which they need to succeed, and may fail despite taking every optimal action for their situation.

> Gates is usually right about this kind of stuff but I can't agree with this one.

Context: He said this in 1986.

What super interesting about this is that it could be that you'll spot the people with a growth mindset over a few years, while those with a fixed mindset will be the ones not growing. So what Gates may have been doing all along is weeding out the fixed mindset people.

That can't be true, unless you also want to claim people are born with ability to program or not.

What you are saying is that people can't learn period. Which is not true. 3-4 years is not enough time to master anything, but 10 years might be:

http://norvig.com/21-days.html

Dude it's not my opinion :P.

Lord, the grandiosity here is breathtaking.

You've set it up as: I achieve SUCCESS and am a winner, or I fail again and again and again at everything I do and I'm a failed startup founder and on my way to death.

I understand that voice, I really do, and it's the voice of perfectionism coming through grandiosity. It's an incredible barrier to success, because your choices are, "I'm going to write THE BEST math paper!! ! !" or "I'm a failure." This keeps you from writing the ones in between that might be crappy and might not be (ask me how I know).

It's much more functional to break tasks down into concrete items without a value judgement. I'm going to learn three chords on the guitar. I am going to accomplish the following tasks with the goal of increasing conversions x%. I will see how these efforts work and adjust accordingly.

These habits don't guarantee success, but they give you the perspective to react proportionately.

Kill the voice of grandiosity & perfectionism, which is disguised as "reasonable thinking" because you & I are so smart and really can do some things faster & more easily than others.

> I can agree with the distinction of 'fixed' versus 'growth' mindsets (although... .. how do you measure that?), but that success is guaranteed if you believe and try... Not necessarily.

where does Dr. Dweck make that implication anywhere? in fact, her research is more about how the growth mindset gets more exposure to failure, while the fixed mindset tends to avoid failure in the first place, which is just a different type of failure. so in that sense, her work is all about failure, not about "success being guaranteed if you believe and try".

You might just lose indeed. But there are so many interesting things you can lose at, you'd be crazy not to take that chance. I've "lost" at skydiving, stage improv, novel writing, screen writing, foreign language acquisition, and so many other things. There's a whole lot of fun to be had embarrassing yourself and setting yourself up to get yourself killed.

*

On the flip side of that, fixed mindsets in the context of a "semi-boring job" can lead to a LOT of psychological trauma. I won't go into the details but I will say this. Given the choice, you're better off jumping out of the airplane. Trust me on this.

What does "losing at skydiving" look like?

Losing in that context is this. You concede with the skydiving instructor and drop zone safety officer that you aren't cut out for the sport. You walk away from it with body physically in tact and take up something else. At least that's what losing is in skydiving if you're smart about it.

Reading your post...lots of misconceptions about Dr. Dweck's work. You might want to finish that book.

This comment is both black and white, negative, and reductive.

How do you measure a growth mindset? Well, we could look at Dweck's research with school children, where kids exposed to the concept that the brain is a muscle score markedly better than the control groups. [1]

Your views on failure suggest you have either forgotten childhood, or have a warped perspective on it: all kids do is fail, over and over, until they get the hang of things. We scrape our knees, our towers of blocks fall down, we can't get the puzzle pieces into the holes and constantly misidentify letters and numbers. To say that you repeat failure a couple of times and 'you're either dead or on your way there' is bleak and also wrong.

What Dweck's research shows is that children who are praised for their efforts fare better than those who are praised on being innately smart. You seem fixated on success being a zero-sum game. Like, whether a startup succeeds or fails. Dweck isn't guaranteeing that with positive thinking, you can achieve anything. It's not so black and white. The idea is that with the proper mindset, people can achieve a whole lot more than society might otherwise make them believe – and for so many people (children especially), that can be a life-changing realization.

1: http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/oct0...

> No, success is not guaranteed even if you try many many times times, even if you train a lot and believe a lot. In fact, the rule is this: No matter how hard you try, you might still lose. Sorry about that.

I agree. As soon as you stop trying, you've lost.