Impatience: The Pitfall of Every Ambitious Person | Hacker News Reader

Impatience: The Pitfall of Every Ambitious Person

dariusforoux.com

241 pointsendisukaj34 comments

I'm a big fan of both Robert Greene's Mastery and Leonardo da Vinci, but I think using da Vinci as an example of patience is fairly misleading. After having read numerous biographies on the man, my conclusion is that it's remarkable that he managed to get as much done as he did. He was the ultimate dabbler, interested in and curious about virtually everything. His works took a long time to complete because he generally was distracted by some minor detail for years on end. If the ideal is productivity, then surely Michelangelo is a far better role model.

Of course, the real question here is whether productivity is what one should be ultimately aiming at. Doing very few things very well (alternatively, creating a small number of high-quality things) is a better ideal, to my mind.

'It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.' - Friedrich Nietzsche

> Of course, the real question here is whether productivity is what one should be ultimately aiming at.

This is a very good question also for the society as a whole. We are technically able to sustain the whole population with a fewer and fewer percentage of people working on holding up our living conditions (food, water, heat, housing, network communication, etc.).

On top of that we (as a society) create lots of bullshit work which we again try to perform as efficiently as possible. And as soon as productivity increases, we work hard to create more demand for more of the same nonsense, and if that doesn't work anymore, we invent a new type of bullshit.

Why are we doing that? (Well, I'm aware of the typical cynical answer: reducing violence and crime, but there must be a better way to achieve this.)

What if we concentrate on improving our living conditions, and on top of that, everyone who wants to work just picks their favourite problem and tries to find a solution for it, valuing quality over being the first, valuing long-term solutions over short-term minded crap?

> Why are we doing that?

What do you expect? The natural course for "the leisure majority class" would be a colorful ever-varying ever-shifting mixture of play, hobbyist endeavours, gamble, drugs, bohemian lives, sports, creative outputs of all kinds, a mild occasional flavour of anarchy. Actual human weathers instead of perpetual eternal grey September. Either "we, collectively", or our grown structures don't seem to prefer that.

Make-work and bureaucracy and petty in-fights and peer politics are the fallback behavioural patterns --- almost everywhere people aren't, mentally speaking, "fighting for a cause" (whether it's a small firm trying to survive or grow to 'more leisurely levels', or collectively-militarily, or post-war reconstruction, or faked-but-masterfully-orchestrated as Big Consulting somehow manages to ;)

How do we decide who gets to be part of the leisure class and who gets to be part of the working class? Assuming we decide that we cut the bullshit work and let everyone not working live on something like UBI.

The working class would be the new upper class so a lot of people would try to be part of it. Nice communist Utopia.

I think productivity is productivity, even if it's hard/impossible to measure. Quality is a productive output, just like quantity is.

There was some teaching expirements (don't hold me to its quality) with ceramics. Students either focused on quality or quantity. Iirc.. the quantity group produced better quality by the end. Quantity was just a good way of practicing productivity, which could then be used to produce quality.

>Doing very few things very well (alternatively, creating a small number of high-quality things) is a better ideal, to my mind.

I think you need both. Focused minds can construct incredible things in their discipline. Open minds can apply the ideas and tools from multiple disciplines in novel ways.

Any particular biographies on da Vinci you'd recommend? Particularly any that made him come across as a dabbler. I think I have a similar method of working on personal projects, and I'm curious to see how it worked in others.

I only read one but it was great: Leonardo by Daniel Arasse

Flights of the Mind is the best straight-up autobiography that I've read on him. The new Isaacson book is supposed to be great as well. It sounds silly, but How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci is also surprisingly pretty decent.

Also, check out this link: https://fivebooks.com/best-books/martin-kemp-leonardo-da-vin...

Anecdote from my own running training: when I get impatient, I get injured.

There is this idea that if you can just get this hard workout done even though you're not fully recovered, you will get closer to your goal. You hear the siren song to be patient, skip the workout or make it an easy day, but choose to push hard anyway. And so instead of missing one good training day, you have to spend 4 weeks or more off of running.

And so everyday I have to remind myself to be patient, be consistent, and be honest with myself.

The worst injury I've done to myself at training was when I wasn't patient and did deadlifts not long after a sprain. It's impossible to pinpoint the exact moment you're okay to train again, and it will feel okay before it is okay.

Came here to mention the discipline I've learned through endurance running as well. There is something beautiful knowing that it will take hours to finish and all you can do is wait

On the one hand - I agree you have to be patient in order to execute at the right times. On the other hand, that's only in terms of timing...

You can't be patient and wait for opportunities. You have to be consistently searching for them, and execute as you find them - staying as nimble as possible.

For instance, I am always 100% invested, but always in various types of assets. Some investments I can get my money out in 24 hours, others take weeks or months to divest. That enables me to execute quickly when I see opportunity, but only in a limited fashion.

I don't believe it's "impatience" that keeps me invested at that level. It's the fact that, being idol does nothing.

Hell, I'm even platform around identifying new opportunities. I didn't / don't want to be patient, so now I'm building something to enable faster decisions:

https://projectpiglet.com

Kind of reminds me of a similar parable from the story Time Enough for Love by Robert Heinlein, in it there was a man "too lazy to fail"[1]. The idea is summed up by a quote:

> Progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something.

Ambition is just trying to accomplish things. In my opinion, it's impatience that pushes us to solve problems, else we'd all settle for the way things are. The trick, is learning to solve them in a way that mitigates risk. Which is really what the author is trying to get at. Arrogance (or over confidence) might be a better description of the pitfall, than impatience.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Enough_for_Love#"The_Tale...

It's funny that he would take the famously lazy and impatient Leonardo as a role model here.

Unless he thinks The Last Supper is supposed to be like that.

Laziness, impatience, and hubris enough to dabble in lots of fields. Leonardo was truly a great hacker.

"If your work is not hard, you’re not doing great work." - that sums up German mentality :D

I like that quote, but to be honest, being a German myself something I hate about other Germans is that they always are very limited in their head and scared of disruptive innovation. Germans are good at incremental but not at disruptive innovation.

This is true almost everywhere. What's truly astonishing is that there actually exists a place on earth with cultural norms that encourage disruption rather than try to suppress it. I don't think people really appreciate how historically rare that is.

There's a tendency to avoid the "boring" problems this way though. I find that a bit in myself and others when it comes to software dev. A lot of problems in software are of the boring kind. Establish convention and reinventing the wheel rather than applying machine learning and coming up with brilliant algorithms.

By avoiding or skipping over the boring problems i think you tend to miss a lot of the bottlenecks for actually making something valuable.

But boring problems -are- hard problems. I find very little is 'hard' in the sense of being difficult but ultimately overcomeable. Most things are either impossible (but can be fun to think about), or rather simple but requiring a lot of time (learning a new thing), or easy and quick (which we do and don't think about), or easy but long, and thus boring. And it's these latter that are, to me, 'hardest', because they're the ones I, and basically every one of my colleagues, least want to do. But as you say, they also can be some of the most valuable.

You mention machine learning and brilliant algorithms? Did you clean your data? Did you refine the parameters to the algorithm? Did you try different algorithms and compare? Machine learning is -boring-. Like, the things it enables are exciting, once it's working it's exciting, but the process is boring as hell. And I find that aspect every bit as 'hard' as understanding the underlying math.

I think it's a bit more nuanced - it's a question of reward. If you know there is hard+boring problem that needs to be done, the reward pops up immediately - the problem doesn't look great on CV, so it's a net negative for your future employeability comparing to (shallow) "fun" problems; is completion of such a hard task going to be accompanied by significant equity or bonus and can you trust manager/CEO promises about it (99% you can't), or at best you can hope for a pat on the back and not being kicked out of the company once the "boring" part is finished and is making money for the owners that don't want to share anything with you? These things happen way too often in our business...

But people enjoy different things, surely some might find a task you deem as boring to be enjoyable?

> Look at it this way. You’ve spent enough time getting where you are — don’t screw it up by wanting to go too fast. Spend more time on your work. Take pride in it. That’s the only way we can do truly great work.

My favorite quote.

Why is the story about investing in 2009-2011 in this post?

Unless they invested right in 2011, and your benchmark for "impatience" is investing in late 2007, their accidental market timing probably lost them money.

Plopping everything they made into some popular ETF when they made it probably would've been better.

The only actionable advice I saw in here was journaling. Pure platitudes otherwise, and as talon pointed out the examples aren't great.

I think the author was contrasting being a “fair-weather,” unknowledgeable investor (in the stock market, or by analogy in prorjects) who buys in when things are going up and pulls out when they go down, versus being a committed, knowledgeable investor who waits for a specific opportunity.

The analogy makes sense but is much easier to see in hindsight. Plenty of people during the Depression bought stock after they believed the market bottomed out only to witness their wealth go to nothing because the market continued shrinking after short periods of growth. It’s almost impossible to know whether a crash has turned around when it’s happening.

Dollar cost averaging, diversifying assets, and keeping liquid on hand is easier than trying to predict the market.

Most who bought stocks after the 1929 crash and held made very good money during the depression. The average dividend yield of the S&P index during the 1930s was about 7.8% per year.

Impatience, greed and fear can be confusing bedfellows when investing.

Lol. Anyone on an hourly rate should use this line to their fee-payer.

Rough heuristic is that in most projects, delay + downside-uncertainty = go-nowhere failure/death. You need to chip away at one or the other with your loop of actions to get anything done. Otherwise it is just luck.

Ambition is the enemy of consistency.

Be consistent.

consistently mediocre? what are you trying to say?

Better to be consistently good and progressing in life than an ambitious failure who tried to fly too close to the sun and failed and never amounted to anything.

As someone young, and highly ambitious, I've taken to seeking like-minded peers by asking people where they'd like to be in 10 years.

It has the air of being a quite typical interview-y type question, though I think it's useful to see, given youthful optimism and the astounding future promise of our field (software + computing), just how many shy away from declaring great personal hope and aspiration, seeing no place for themselves in the future's next great achievements or assuming they will 'just happen' around them.

It's a shot in the arm to actually hear someone young candidly express grand aspirations whilst soberly embracing the year and years of toil those aspirations demand. It galvanises me, and no matter how much work I've taken on recently, makes me feel far less tired.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com