Why smart hardworking people don't become successful (2018)
medium.com
medium.com
Not all who wander are lost.
This post is terrible advice, it's like a sermon from the Church of the Silicon Bubble. Smart but not successful? You don't reach out enough. You don't sacrifice enough. You're too distracted. You don't take enough risks. You don't believe in yourself. You can't commit. It's all in your head!
I'm not really sure that quote means what most think it does. The source seems to be:
“All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
The implication is not that wandering aimlessly is OK but kind of the opposite: that one who looks like a wanderer has a grand purpose and destined greatness within him that is merely temporarily hidden.
Anyway, going back to the main point, a different quote comes to mind: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” ― George Bernard Shaw
That wasn't the point of the GP.
> I'm not really sure that quote means what most think it does
Wandering is exploring a domain. Knowing a domain is part of forming a strategy or merely the goal in itself.
But survivorship bias means we assume all successful people hold a unique skill and wisdom that, if we only did the same, we'd find similar success.
I don't think anyone likes to admit that very few things in life are actually within our control, which makes it desirable to ascribe success to hard work, or intelligence, or whatever.
I started a consultancy that failed, was part of a small team with a moderately successful product, and now am part of a small team with a much more successful product.
All of that happened while former colleagues were working on much more successful products making a lot more money than I was.
In none of those cases was the outcome related to hard work, skill, or desire.
Sometimes you have the right people together in the right place at the right time. Sometimes you don't.
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None of which is to say that luck is the _only_ factor. Part of taking advantage of the luck is doing the best work you can, and honing your skills to the best of your ability, so that if the opportunity pops up you can grab it.
But just because you haven't had the success you've wanted doesn't mean there's anything wrong with you at all.
Getting anything else requires opportunity. Even discovering where your talents lie takes resources.
And there's also genetic luck, not necessarily biological but also wealth and environment. Without that many talents are unknown or undeveloped. This kind of luck cannot be made.
Nobody can actually find people with undeveloped talents. You'd have to force them to try a wide variety of occupations, preferably early so that they can develop it.
The people we value are not just any talented, they're developed talents that have been noticed, and beyond that lucky geniuses.
A smart person might be good at school and individual contribuitorship, and so believe that they should naturally be good at political games as well. But truly, politics takes a whole other set of smarts and the things that make you an excellent IC do not much overlap with things that make you good at the political game: charisma, selling, risk-taking, deep emotional intelligence, extroversion, strategic intuition, sociopathy, commanding presence.
Many smart engineers can't even see see that the game is being played or they realize it long after the match has been won. They are not the players, but the pieces on the board.
And I don't think it's accurate either to say that only fools love power. The need for power and status is deeply rooted in our evolution and psyche. To go back to Aristotle, man is the political animal.
Many smart, principled people aren’t able to sufficiently lie to themselves or feel comfortable using ambiguous terms and/or outright lying, and that hampers their ability to covertly send and receive signals to others, so others who are successful at politics would do well to stay away from them. You have to compromise in order to get things done, but it doesn’t behoove you to lay out all of your cards for everyone to see.
For example, how do you react to inherently unfair situations, someone taking advantage of someone else? If you start picking on people good politicians will quickly “plausibility deniability” you out of the equation.
It’s much easier to accept (with a bit of anger) that you made a mistake in your program that bring defaced due to your “judgement being clouded by anger”.
You may be smart enough to even understand what you have to do, but it will take practice to do it well even if you understand it conceptually.
From what I have observed charisma is by far the number one factor for success. It's more significant than hard work, intelligence/IQ, appearance, or the quality of one's ideas. You can put charisma behind an obviously stupid idea and get quite a bit of traction. It does often fail eventually but the charismatic founder often profits nonetheless and moves on to something else.
Charisma is so powerful that I find it disturbing. I've watched people who really ought to know better become transfixed at the presence of a charismatic person even if the stuff coming out of their mouth is nonsense. I think it works so well because it bypasses the rational mind and speaks directly to the brain stem and says "I am big alpha, follow me and I will get you food and safety" or similar. It speaks to the most ancient parts of the brain.
I don't mean to sound totally negative. Like any power it can be used for both good and evil. It's just that I've mostly observed it being used for evil in today's world.
According to my 10 years old me, I'm the most successful person in the world, because I wanted to learn to play the bagpipe (in my original country it was pretty impossible), now I'm moving to Scotland and learning to play the bagpipe.
Please don't buy this bullshit, that success is measured in job titles and whatever you can do at work. (Dont get me wrong, my job is important part of my life, I have a nice and IT fulfilling job, which buys my family food, a roof over our head because Scotland is pretty rainy.)
As long as I have enough to live comfortably, stash some away and not worry I'm good, I don't need more. As such, I don't really get involved in most of the things that this post is about nor do I particularly care to do so either.
Work is what I do in order to sustain myself, it's not my life. The minute I walk out the door at work I've forgotten all about it and never think about it until morning. I realise this is me being pretty lucky but I'd probably even change career completely if I couldn't do this anymore working in tech. I think a lot of people struggle to find that balance, sadly.
If I was single and had no dependents, I would need very little to make myself feel comfortable. But with dependents, I feel as if I need to however much I can to ensure their security. That means the living in the best neighborhood I can afford, cultivating a network that can be useful to them in the future, having sufficient income for legal/health matters, and passive income if I become incapacitated.
And this feeling is compounded by the fact that the numbers indicate that if the kids don't get funneled into the "right" tracks, then they will fall further and further behind in society as the wealth/income gap grows and it becomes that much less likely for them to be able to catch up.
``Thus is happened he became neither musician nor poet - - if we use this latter term in its every-day acceptation. Or it might have been that he neglected to become either, merely in pursuance of his idea that, while a high order of genius is necessarily ambitious, the highest is above that which is termed ambition? And may it not thus happen that many far greater than Milton have contentedly remained `mute and inglorious'? I believe that the world has never seen -- and that, unless through some series of accidents goading the noblest order of mind into distasteful execution, the world will never see -- that full extent of triumphant execution, in the richer domains of art, of which the human nature is absolutely capable.''
-- Edgar Allan Poe (``The Domain of Arnheim'')
It was likely the single most valuable skill I (eventually) learned, as a "smart hardworking people" by nature.
Its called charisma and some people are just born with it. But you can also work on it.
You have to take risks and be uncomfortable to grow. But you also have to accept that your choices have opportunity costs and it takes time to make them come to fruition.