You Are Not ‘Behind’ (2016)
zackkanter.com
zackkanter.com
If you're lucky and work hard, you can be in the top 10%, 5% or even 1% of a few areas. But even then, you can beat yourself up about not being the best--because even if you sometimes are the best at something, sometimes you aren't. You can always make yourself miserable, if you choose to.
So what do you do? You have 3 choices:
1. sit there and complain about it
2. Deny the reality of your "behindness", which makes for weak men and women (and I didn't raise wimps)
3. Or, you can realize that there's a set of skills related to managing your internal state
The best way to do this is to focus on process-oriented goals, rather than results oriented goals. In other words, take pride in your work not in the output. You can lose every game, yet feel okay, if you set your goals to be play a bit better than last time--and do it.
Once you get there, you can admit others are better than you and be thankful for the opportunity to learn from them--since you're no longer competing.
This is what is meant by "losers focus on the winners, and winners focus on themselves".
It's simple, but not easy. It takes work to achieve this, just like it takes work to achieve any useful skill. And just like any other skill, you'll get this right sometimes and screw it up at others. Just try to do it better today than you did yesterday, yes, like it's any other skill.
Good luck, I'll always be rooting for you.
We can acknowledge that others have gone further, faster in an area and use that as motivation without falling into despair.
At the same time, life is about managing trade offs across many aspects. Often investing in one area means taking from another, and just because someone is further in one area, doesn’t mean their whole life is richer.
It's part of life and putting your head in the sand about is just weak. If you could have been farther--and worst case the only reason you aren't is because of mistakes you knew better than to make--face it, accept it, forgive yourself and use the experience to keep your head on straight going forward. It's all you can do anyway.
As for tactics, sometimes it might help if you imagine it was someone else who screwed up the way you did and consider how you'd treat/view them. (For those of us with really super-critical inner voices, this can help us get in touch with our compassion.) Like all these kinds of things, YMMV.
OP: “So turn your eyes forward and focus on what you can change: the future.”
You see it in multiplayer videogames for example. The further, faster players often end up skewing the whole competitive curve, to where ranking players are a lot better on the whole compared to when the game started, but worse off by the metrics. A silver player now is easily equal to a gold player at launch.
You can spend all this effort on a skill treadmill spending more and more effort to remain the same, only to fall off of it. High achievers are far too efficient and things tend to optimize way too much over time to try and play the competitive game.
I think you can also see this in things like children's sports; the people who turn little league into portfolio activities end up raising the cost for everyone, who then abandons the sport.
This is something I am wrestling with a lot in my life, and I think a lot of competitive burnout happens due to this. I can try to be my best self, but the deep end of the pool is so deep that it gets harder to not seek shallower and shallower water till I get out or drown.
Don’t try to be better at everything, get better at the things holding you back and then move on. You don’t need to be the worlds best cook to make lunch, but pick something and hitting the top 10%, 1%, 0.1% or even #1 becomes possible.
I have seen far to many overachievers who break down when they realized the vast majority of their time and effort has been wasted.
Some things like being able to clearly communicate in writing or even just walking are inherently useful. However, if the benchmark is being able to walk that’s pass fail, what does it matter if your in the 15th percentile or 90th percentile walker? Similarly not everything makes the cut. Judging a RPG wizard by their strength score misses the point.
When someone accepts that splitting their focus isn’t free. Then not learning French and not being on the top 10% of something was also useful. Judging yourself by external rankings in multiple categories is therefore foolish. Having a higher rank in something may be counter productive.
People who judge themselves by external metrics and think higher must be better can become overachievers, but getting depressed about their “failings” is just as problematic. I don’t mean this as a happy go lucky, showing up is worth a prize. I mean it in terms of the evolutionary pressure, body builders make poor marathon athletes.
The rank for strongest person goes in one direction, the rank for weakest person goes the other. To say your behind suggests a preferred and ranked ordering, that’s reasonably true of checkout lines at the grocery store. However it’s not so for total body weight as neither 50lbs nor 500lbs is the ideal adult body weight.
It literally says not to compete with others. If you still see everything as a competition, you're not taking the advice.
And if you're competing on an absurd metric that nobody else even thinks is a competition, like being the heaviest, then you probably have other issues that you need to work on.
Why was their time and effort wasted?
It's missing the fact that a lot of times 80% is good enough. You need to be okay with that and also stop when that is not the thing which you need/want to get to 99%+
My point is that everyone will have to deal with not being the best. For the vast majority of people being the best at anything is out of the question, regardless of effort or focus. Even if you are one of the lucky few who can be "the best", it'll only be for a moment in time. All of us age and our capacities fade. Then you're left dealing with the additional burden of having once kissed the sky and now being earthbound like the rest of us.
The whole point of the philosophy is finding something else to focus on other than the (true but depressing) objective rank-ordering of you among your peers. Leaderboards are useless to all but a chosen few.
However, everyone (even the ones that will place on the top of the leaderboards) can benefit from taking their focus off the leaderboard and putting it on their own process and effort (in some sense replacing the comparison to others with a comparison to their yester-selves).
Thank you for this. So simple, yet so profound when put into practice.
I believe you might just have changed my life.
Try to be the best version of yourself, not the best in the world. This constant need to compare yourself with your peers and neighbors and edited Instagram models is very unhealthy. It is the exact opposite of the road to happiness.
A certain amount of any job is going to be drudgery, that's why they have to pay you to do it. But if it is mostly drudgery then it's time to change jobs or careers.
There is an antique question put to Napoleon -- after you conquer the world, what will you do? Napoleon says: I'll sit back and drink a glass of wine.
Our time on Earth is limited. If you want to spend it "winning" go on right ahead. But you need to make sure you also know you're perfectly okay right where you are, too; lest you go insane, lest you spend your whole life in a tizzy about where you rank. Which unequivocally seems to me to be a life... wasted.
If you fail to acknowledge the part of you that ranks yourself, it often leads to poorly masked jealousy. Like thinking everyone who makes more money than you is greedy, everyone who is smarter than you is pretentious. Better to notice that part of yourself. It doesn't have to rule you completely but it's there.
That overachiever neighbor with 3 kids he rarely sees, the trophy wife that wants another gucci handbag and the porsche he drives hastily to the next meeting? Does he have more money? Sure. Is he more happy? Hardly. If the happiness and relaxation metric are what counts then me bindge watching netflix a lazy saturday morning wins 10x over that guy rushing to the airport to make it to his business class flight to Paris.
Even if he is, it's not like happiness is a zero-sum game for humanity.
Several comments to this thread show that the poster is mixing up the will to power with a specific value system.
The will to power--and the skills to go with it--are a pure good in my mind. It's the stuff let makes babies get up and learn to walk. It's the curiosity that makes kids ask "why?" about everything in the world. It's the fire in humanity that let us put 7+ Billion on this little blue planet while generating amazing standards of living for so many of them.
That will to power can be aimed at whatever target you choose. If Porshe's and Gucci bags and trophy wifes, okay. It can just as easily be a good-paying job that puts a roof over your head and feeds your family, while leaving you plenty of time to be present in everyone's life. It can easily be starting a charity that feeds the homeless or shelters battered women.
The will to power--and the skills that go with it--are the ability to shape your world in to whatever you want. There's nothing in there that forces you to pick ugly shapes.
Also, if you "know you're perfectly okay right where you are" why would you want to change?
If you choose to strive for a fulfilling relationship, and you succeed in achieving that then yes, you've won.
I only use the analogy of life as a game because it resonates with me. There are other ways to phrase what I'm saying.
But I don't want to win. This is an important nuance.
Do you know what winning means? It means the game is over. It means there's no more challenge, no more adversary. It means boredom and purposelessness.
Rather than winning, what I want is to fight. Focusing on the outcome of the fight is missing the forest for the trees - the fun is in the conflict, in the struggle with your opponent(s), in the instinctive collaboration with your occassional teammate.
In the glory of the defeat, as well as victory. Unless you've got firsthand experience of this, you won't believe how wonderful it feels to get your ass handed to you by a truly superior player.
To put the gaming analogy aside, life will always have its ups and downs. Life will always take you somewhere unexpected. Fixating on outcomes will blind you to opportunities and invite needless suffering into your life.
A superior player can easily trap you in a corner and take your life down to half or more with a single combo string. It's like playing chess against someone entirely more skilled; everything you try to do gets responded to at a level far above you. There really isn't any "wonderful" about it; you could end up watching a video and getting the same result, for all you could do in the match.
There is no "glory" in this. A lot of the "play to improve" mindset is a result of needing to make a stupid level of effort to win games, with players going on long loss series due to low population and over-skilled players in the brackets they are in. This is why the fighting game genre struggles to get new players in the game at all-you have to work so much to get to where the fun is or to feel good about your efforts.
Overall, I agree with your point. This is the reason I don't play those games, or in those ultra-competitive brackets.
I don't think we're necessarily contradicting eachother. I choose to play fighting games for the fight, rather than the victory, and thus tailor my choices within that genre to suit me.
To offer a couple of 'parallel' examples to your own:
Player A is at a significantly higher level than player B, and 'stifles' player B through consistent reads and conditioning. Nothing player B tries works, everything player B does seems to play exactly into player As hands.
This is almost a restatement of your example, except it was a highly rewarding experience for me. In the language of cognitive psychology, it brought about a powerful flow state.
The two key differences: 1.) that the skill imbalance was not too great - just great enough - and 2.) that the nature of the game's design and the players' choices in tactics/playstyles ommitted the more obnoxious elements of combat.
My second parallel example is simply my first, reversed: I am player A, and my opponent is player B.
Everything plays out the same. Interesting, that.
Because implicit in player A's skill is that they are in control of the fight - they can, usually, make things fairly unpleasant and dirty for the opponent. It doesn't take much to push someone past the mental edge, to knock them off balance and keep them there; to destroy their flow state.
Why is player A so restrained? He didn't want to win, he wanted to fight.
Players motivations in games are often what makes the difference between a positive and a negative experience. So we nicely return to the beginning: if you're focused on winning, you're not going to have a good time and neither are the people playing with you.
In example 1, the player often DCs or rage quits, because there's no value in such a matchup. If they see the end of the match, they quickly leave to find one more balanced to their skill. You could have just stayed in training and worked on labbing combos for all the effort you went through.
And labbing is one of the big problems of that genre, where people feel they have to train hard just to have fun.
The second...yeah, no they usually demolish them and move on. A high skilled player also gets little value out of owning someone, and they often smurf in lower ranks for an ego boost. "Watch me stream bronze to grandmaster!"
A lot of this is more people trying to convince people to stick with something despite a lot of negative experiences. Fighting games are seriously at risk of being a dead genre, and a lot of the problems are not easily solvable.
It depends on the person. You're right that games that cater to the lowest common denominator and allow casual players occasional wins are way more popular. But for most multiplayer genres there are people that derive most of the satisfaction they get from gaming from playing competitive stuff with a super high skill cap.
I like Arena FPS games like Quake. Most people don't. Some like going for world first raid boss kills in MMOs, most MMO players just want to kill some of the bosses eventually or get some shiny loot without much effort.
I've made peace with the fact that most popular online games cater to casuals. I'm getting older so its hard to justify spending as much time as I used to anyways. I still love intense competition. I'm nowhere near the best in the world and I never could have been, but the pursuit of self improvement is still fun.
The problem is that the high end is absurdly high in skill. Like a casual may be bad, but he is not going to be as bad in relation to the average as a high skilled player will be good. There will always be someone who can beat the toughest content in a game using a guitar hero controller or something.
Competition sucks because of this. The high end often has insane talent and makes something their life; how on earth can average people even exist in an ecosystem like this?
It takes a particular personality to enjoy learning these punishing titles and from my personal experience it seems that the way people respond to this form of learning through loss is transferable to other domains outside of games.
I worry those kind of games will eventually mirror rl sports, where we have a professional class and a majority of watchers.
I think having an outcome in mind is important as your north star and/or driving force, but I agree about fixating on it.
This seems totally backwards. Winning is fun, but you don't choose a game because you like winning it, you choose it because you like playing it. All games can be won, but they all play differently.
You can't be Charlie Brown all the time. Ironically Peanuts is probably one of the original takes on this whole debate; Charlie Brown actually faces a lot of despair over losing. The animated special where he travels to the spelling bee is one of the most painful things I have watched because its so realistic; in the end there really was no answer given to him.
This isn't true for everybody. There are genres of games dedicated towards extremely challenging mastery where a single win will require hundreds or thousands of losses. Plenty of roguelikes and roguelites like Spelunky and Caves of Qud fall in this category.
And yes, you stop even those games; eventually you hit a plateau where you see enough and dont advance in skill enough to shelve the game for something much better.
Another case in point is Bruno Bettelheim - if you read his Wikipedia page, does he come off as a winner or a loser? He seemed very accomplished at one point in time. The article seems to indicate peoples' views of him changed after his death - that he was basically a fraud and an abuser, and did even more harm through the influence of his psychological theories.
Yes, indeed everyone wants to achieve their goals. That's vacuous and tautological, and no one was talking about that.
> Yes, indeed everyone wants to achieve their goals. That's vacuous and tautological, and no one was talking about that
My point is that choosing your goals is important. You might achieve your goals and then realize that you didn't even care about achieving them in the first place.
The "winning with respect to others" seems like a detail to me. It doesn't matter if it's winning with respect to others or yourself, as long as you understand what you're doing and are happy with it and the possible outcomes.
If someone wants to grind away to build a billion dollar company then so be it, as long as they understand what that means.
Sometimes, when the conditions are just right and my legs are in good shape and my mind is in the right place, I have one of those amazing ski runs that is just perfection. And it’s great.
But other times, I also have fun. And I don’t end up with a score telling me how I did on each turn or anything like that.
I log most of my trips on Strava, mostly as a way to stay in touch with friends around the world, but intentionally avoid the run-counting and speed-tracking gizmos, to help preserve this “did I enjoy myself or not?” metric.
Relatedly, I’ve intentionally slowed down when skiing on lift access. The ride down is more fun than the ride up, ans the lift is a fixed cost. So I get a better ratio of enjoyment by turning more, and thus sitting on the lift less.
I find the combination of talking about "winning" and "game" in a sense of "having relationships" completely forced and odd. Those two really dont mix well. In the context of personal relationship, association with game and winning is typically related to toxic relationships.
And for what it's worth, having a fulfilling relationship takes a bit of an effort too.
Thinking a desire to win is necessary to exert effort is intriguing.
For example Linus wanted to make an operating system, he didn't want to win (I would think), but ended up "winning". But if you want to be like Linus, you'll probably get lost.
edit: grammar, clarification
I think there must be some misunderstanding.
My point is that everyone will have to deal with not being the best. For the vast majority of people being the best at anything is out of the question, regardless of effort or focus. Even if you are one of the lucky few who can be "the best", it'll only be for a moment in time. All of us age and our capacities fade. Then you're left dealing with the additional burden of having once kissed the sky and now being earthbound like the rest of us.
The whole point of the philosophy is finding something else to focus on other than the (true but depressing) objective rank-ordering of you among your peers. Leaderboards are useless to all but a chosen few.
However, everyone (even the ones that will place on the top of the leaderboards) can benefit from taking their focus off the leaderboard and putting it on their own process and effort (in some sense replacing the comparison to others with a comparison to their yester-selves).
It's part of my value system, and I don't hide from it. I'm a second generation immigrant, and on my visits back to India, I've seen what real poverty looks like.
I don't mean any offense in this, but here it is as plainly as I can say: The idea that "success" isn't crucially important in life is just wrong. I see it as coming from a softness that I associate with participation trophies and the general wimpification of America.
I very much ascribe to G. Michael Hopf's philosophy of “Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”
The ability to succeed is essential. It's the ability set a goal and accomplish it. That ability is totally separate from the nature of the goal. That goal can be making a billion dollars or it can be building a neighborhood community group.
If I had to guess--and I don't know you well enough to do anything but guess--you're confusing America's value of extreme individualism and a proper focus on internal control and self-improvement in order to be able to succeed.
That's arguably worse than competing with other people, because with other people there is always the excuse of different contexts and conditions, while with yourself it's only you to blame if you don't come up on top.
Which, coincidentally, is what the original article is about. I suggest a reread and a bit of meditation about it.
Second, I think you're glossing over the part about process-oriented goals.
If one stays stuck on results-oriented goals, then your comment is pretty much on point. It doesn't matter who I'm competing with, I'll have bad days.
But with process-oriented goals, the focus switches how you do what you're doing, and that's something purely in your control.
To put it in exercise terms, you won't always be able to lift more than you did yesterday or run faster than you did 5 years ago--but you can always actually get off the coach and do it, you can always focus on your form, you can always push for that last rep or work hard into the last sprint.
It's really about an internal focus PLUS a process-oriented approach. Not just one or the other.
You realize, it's not working, following what others recommend for you.
So you follow your process.
You realize, your process is shit too, but you can at least amend it.
You iterate on this, until you reach the center, where you give up. You follow NO-PROCESS.
You retreat, from the world, into yourself.
Into yourself, from the world, you don't, follow, you lead, yourself.
You struggle to lead, others.
That fails.
So you continue. Not because virtue. Not because vice.
You need to be of service, to make money, to survive, you need others.
You find relation, a straw.
Years pass.
Decades pass.
Are you here yet?
You have a, silent voice, only few can hear.
Every word counts, 10 and 20 times.
Only then it can matter, more than the noise pollution around.
Whispering.
You tend to people who seek the better, version of themselves, the unborn you can show them.
It's impossible.
So you do it today.
Every day.
For the rest of days.
Second, objective rank ordering does exist. You can deny it or dismiss it, but it's there:
- Who's fitter? - Who's prettier? - Who can run/swim/bike farther? - Who makes more money? - Who got in to a "better" school / got the better job / got promoted faster? - Who's got more friends?
Then, the biggest zinger of them of all: who has more status?
Humans may never know the entire leaderboard, but we're exceeding good at knowing our local neighborhood on these kinds of ordering systems.
You can say that these things "don't matter", but to a vast fraction of humanity, they do matter. And as social animals, I'd argue that humans are more or less programmed to care about these things. Maybe not everyone, but imo, social status is core driver of human behavior, just like hunger and sex. And status is all about rank ordering.
By ignoring the leaderboard you will have no clue if you are improving or not. The only way to know that for sure is to see how you compare to others. For instance I took up chess, and I can easily see if I improve when my ELO rises. If I didn't have ELO or leaderboards, I'd have no idea. I can never judge my improvement accurately if I can't compare it with others.
And I'd rather say I'm strong enough to be okay with not being the best, as opposed to having to pretend that others and leaderboards don't exist. It seems like this strategy to not compare oneself to others is just turning your head to an issue, because you can't handle it.
I'm not advocating ignoring the leaderboards (especially for things like chess where they're essential to determining skill).
But you don't focus on the leaderboard. It's not the center of your world--just one data point in a complex web of feedback.
To take the chess example, sitting there and saying "I'm 1063rd and I want to be better" is barely a start. You have to do a lot of evaluation of your internal strengths and weaknesses as a chess player: do you get bored/hyperaggressive? Do you get too cautious? Do you lose focus after X hours?
Then address those with a process in order to move up on the leaderboard. If you define "success" as executing that process, as opposed to winning the game, that's the ticket to both feeling good about yourself regardless of the result AND winning more games over time.
That's not exactly true in all cases though, is it?
Median and mean only diverge when there's a long-tail scalar that skews the mean away from the median. Since rank ordering gives every individual the same weighting with no scalars, "average" is accurate enough, if somewhat colloquial.
I'm not trying to be an ass, I just have always wanted to have a discussion on this. I commonly hear 50% of people are below average intelligence, for instance. But it seems like IQ is a somewhat discrete scale and quite a few people are within the error bars of being exactly average. If you can't tell, I've never taken statistics.
In most cases, with the amount of data you have, the rounding washes out any real impact of the effect, and you often have measurement error far larger than it anyway.
But yeah, if you're ranking 9 people on an easily knowable stat, then technical 4/9 are below median, 4/9 above, and 1 is exactly median.
With the IQ example you gave, it's just that people don't speak with that level of precision about most things--also, that level of precision is very rarely useful.
So, you're not wrong, but kind of sideways to the discussion at hand. It's actually a common problem in business, where really detail-oriented analysts miss the forest for the trees over stuff like this.
Regarding median vs mean vs average (as the 1st reply to your comment mentioned), median and mean are generally equal as long the values being measure are symmetrically dispersed around the "average". If you get a fat tail in one direction or the other, the mean will be skewed in the direction of that tail, and you need to be careful.
There is no high scoreboard at the end.
ALL advice MUST be tailored to the individual.
This entire discussion is moot for some fraction of the population whether due to internal traits or external circumstances.
So, if you are living option #4, good luck to you. If someone is not living option #4, there are likely internal drives they need to learn to control/manage, and just pointing out that other people are able to live option #4 isn't useful to them.
Eg., you have the potential of raising overly competitive children that will absolutely lose it when they realize there's no obvious ranking after they step out of the traditional path of school -> university -> corporate career.
Here's my answer to that, with some of it repeated from a comment posted to another comment above:
I 100% believe in "success" and the will to power--and I want my kids to succeed, full stop. I make no excuses. It's part of my value system, and I don't hide from it. I'm a second generation immigrant, and on my visits back to India, I've seen what real poverty looks like.
I don't mean any offense in this, but here it is as plainly as I can say: The idea that "success" isn't crucially important in life is just wrong. I see it as coming from a softness that I associate with participation trophies and the general wimpification of America.
I very much ascribe to G. Michael Hopf's philosophy of “Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”
The ability to succeed is essential. It's the ability set a goal and accomplish it. That ability is totally separate from the nature of the goal. That goal can be making a billion dollars or it can be building a neighborhood community group.
Given the above, I DON'T deem to know the right path for my children. They are their own people with their own passions, skills, and motivations. They're still young, but I hope that, if one day, one of them wants to drop out of college and pursue acting full time, I'll be supportive.
My goal is to give them the skills and emotional strength to go out there and be the best version of themselves, and in my opinion, knowing how to succeed--and how to see other are farther along than you and still keep going--it crucial.
At the same time, there's a reason I couched this conversation in terms of what I'd tell my kids. I'm not claiming any universal truth. This is me, my values, my biases. I think I'm right, but I'm just another schmoe doing the best I can. And fortunately, it's my right to screw up my kids in my own way :)
We are touching on some of the same ideas, which I think is great.
Part of the "wimpification of America" is in the same vein: "This does not make me successful, so I will not do it, someone else will handle it."
Part of creating strong people is creating robust people. The trouble is when success is the only goal, you will get it at any cost including your ethical framework. (Rereading this: when I say robust, I mean versatile.)
Not caring about it is realizing that there are others who might sacrifice/min max in ways that are detrimental to their well being and that perhaps that is bad for you as an individual. The side effects of overpressure to perform are just as bad, you can see this in the indecision of people who don't make ANY decision because they are afraid to take responsibility for things. This is usually because anything that is not 110% is unacceptable, therefore, do not do anything you cannot 110%.
You can see this in newly formed adults who have never been told no absolutely losing it at their corporate job when things do not go their way. I have managed these people, and let me just say, wow.
You keep doubling down on how "success is crucially important" but, are maybe not seeing how this conflicts with strong people.
In either case, I hope your kids do well. You have a strong belief system which hopefully results in strong people.
> It takes work to achieve this, just like it takes work to achieve any useful skill.
This is the recipe to have the exact feeling of inadequacy discussed in the article. "Didn't achieve? So you didn't put in the work. Shame on you. You are behind."
> "losers focus on the winners, and winners focus on themselves".
Having to be a winner is the exact mentality descibed in the article.
And your kids not being raised wimps is a comment that just makes me sad.
Nobody said you had to be a winner though. But if you want to be a winner it is good to know what it takes.
It’s a fight against your heart or at a very least a fight for motivation.
Your parent is one of the few successful ones, whose niche paid off. You don't hear about the vast majority of researchers & scientists, all smiliarly talented and motivated, where at least in their lifetime, their research didn't payoff.
For the average person, the expected value of staying flexible and having decent breadth, is way higher than betting your entire life on some tiny niche.
THere's a third facet which I think better describes what you're talking about: being "purpose" oriented.
Results-oriented and process-oriented are usually fine at any given moment in time, but there's a danger that one can end up in a rabbit-hole of meaninglessness upon introspection and looking back at the big picture.
In other words, things like to-do lists, check-lists, and constant metric assessment have a dark flip side. You can only avoid that darkness by a clear-headed evaluation of your intention and your path. That's being "purpose" oriented.
There will always be someone on Youtube that is better than you will ever be at your favorite game, instrument, or craft. The three best ways of dealing with this that I have found are firstly to realize that your value as a person is not defined by your skill in a single specialized area, but by a combination of a plethora of unique traits, secondly to realize that being the 'best' or most notable at something is not equivalent to happiness nor a good life, and lastly to realize that even if you do wish to dedicate your life to specializing in a single skill, it's unlikely you have to privilige/genes/luck/etc to be the best human in the world at it. It also reminds me of a post I've seen on HN a few times that discusses being the best at a combination of things unique to you, rather than a single generic thing, which is generally impossible, which is very relevant here too.
It sounds like those headlines which try to shoehorn "the best in the world" followed by enough qualifier to make the statement true.
I think it's enough to recognize you can appreciate a skill at any level. Even when you completely suck at something you can still enjoy doing it.
I suck at singing, but still love it, and when I sing, I get a totally different kind of joy than I get from listening to someone else sing well.
I love it.
(When her singing debuted, music critics dismissed her voice as raspy and unpleasant.)
People don't also seem to care that average people sing songs, make movies, write books, etc. Why, when we have an endless amount of people making high quality goods well above what they could do?
We end up with what we have now, a producer and consumer culture. You can't make an economy that optimizes for the best and has all the birds in the forest sing, too.
In the USA, most people only do sport in high school, and after those that do are usually on some kind of professional track. There are a few exceptions, like golf, but it was nothing like when I was a kid. Singing, nah; again, things like Christmas caroling or teaching music in lower grades have declined massively.
The desire to honestly face your progress, judge it as wanting and then do something about it is necessary for improvement. The author is correct that wallowing doesn't help, but it's possible that the guilt that prevents you from excusing yourself will also keep you on track.
As is so often true, the ideal state is likely somewhere in the middle. A healthy recognition of ones goals and progress against those goals...without self judgement.
To your point, unpleasant does not automatically equal destructive. But unpleasant without perspective on why that unpleasant thing is also beneficial is going to lead to some negative outcomes. Generally, people understand why the speed limit exists, and there is enough info about healthy eating that most people get it.
I'd argue that something like feeling behind in ones life is not so clear cut. That feeling can be beneficial in the long run, depending on where it comes from. It can also be destructive, if perspective is lacking.
At the end of the day this is all rooted in our ego. We want enough ego that pushes us to get better, but at the same time be able to check that same ego when it gets in the way.
I've related many HN items to Jiu-Jitsu and here is another. First, there is always someone better than you. And in some ways it's worse because the person who kicks your ass might be younger, smaller, older or a different gender. It takes an ego to step on to the mat and find out. Then after getting your ass gets kicked it takes checking your ego to learn what happened and go again. Like a lot of life, it's the personal journey that matters.
My undergrad degree was in music. That career lasted 10 years and then I pivoted to marketing. With no relevant degree under my belt and no resources to go back to school, I felt perpetually behind. That feeling motivated me to read and self-study anything and everything I could get my hands on.
I believe I'm a better professional because of it and, combined with some good luck, allowed me to capitalize on opportunities that wouldn't have happened otherwise.
Gates didn't drop out of college because he smoked too much pot, or was too lazy. He was getting excellent grades and his teachers were very impressed. It was because he already had a business going, and wanted to concentrate on that.
Plus, as a business owner nobody was going to require him to have a degree, so it didn't really matter so long he had the skills he needed for his business.
Also, his parents were rich and supportive, and no doubt would have supported him if he had failed. He'd have no trouble getting back to Harvard had the business not worked out.
That's a very different kind of "dropout" than most.
I find usually people use "i'm behind" as an excuse not to even try because they can never be as good as so and so.
The high performers are usually the people who think it's never too late to learn something new, in my experience.
If you google "celebrity imposter syndrome" you'll see endless pages of articles of varying quality noting that many successful businessmen/leaders/artists have imposter syndrome, and they're evidently high performing.
I agree that high performers must feel that they are capable to make performing feel tractable - I think that's necessary. But also they have to be motivated to do so.
Low performers are often not aware, and would self-evaluate as high performers due to not being aware of their own knowledge gaps, and how far behind they are. There is an excellent graph to illustrate this: https://understandinginnovation.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/...
one is a social comparison, the other is an epistemological observation
I think "feeling behind" means different things for different people, depending on the experiences in their formative years they have associated with the thought of being behind. The ideal response to the feeling depends on what the feeling is.
A deep sense of the opportunity cost of time—which I how I think of the author's point—can be good and bad at the same time. If it fills you with renewed vigor to make the most of today, great. If it leaves you riddled with remorse and convinced that you have already lost the game and there's no point in trying, not so great.
It can be a delicate balancing act to fix the maladaptive parts of our brains without throwing off the adaptive parts too.
a lot of not so high performers also can decouple themselves from the busy world about, from it's projected images, and can search for their own truer, prime/primer/primest selves too. and sometimes they get way behind, and that dissonance is real, and we have to keep living with that distamce between our better selves and us, or we can adapt & be flexible and shift, or just triple down, try to push on, figure out new strategies or reform better fitting goals.
Thinking back there was a lot of utterly useless stuff taught in school, and then a lot of important stuff which wasn't. I would have gladly traded some subjects (geography, latin, IT) for some practical instruction on fitness and nutrition, managing finances and a bit of life coaching à la this post.
You could argue that this is stuff you should learn from family members, religious institutions, scouts, the soccer coach etc but it is in reality very patchy and inconsistent. I accept that some kids won't be very receptive. As always teaching is hard.
I also think that at some middle age 40 - 50 everyone should go back to school for 2 weeks for re-education mainly about health and nutrition (and en passant an experience outside their echo chamber), but that is unlikely to be popular even if time was commpensated. Worth running a randomised trial at least.
I did Latin because my dad didn't and regretted it immensely when he took up Pharmacy, since he felt he would have had an easier time learning latin names. It's both arguably wrong (it's not because you can translate Cicero that you can remember plant names) and very narrow. It however served me immensely in vocabulary parsing, both in French, my native language, and English, heavily influenced by it.
You mention interesting gaps, like nutrition or fitness, finance and general life knowledge, which I felt I lacked too. I had to suffer through a lot of these when emigrating to Asia but I survived. I suppose I'd be like my dad and force my kid now to learn how to setup life in a new country completely alone if it was a school subject :D But my kid could decide to become a local farmer and write on FarmerNews how useless it all was and how he wishes there were more classes about agricultural science.
The way I see it is that education is also a way to create well-rounded citizens able to take semi-coherent decisions at the voting booth (so Geography and History, Philosophy and Literature are useful here), a long and hard problem we've had for centuries. Beyond that, we have had a big debate in France since forever between school being "education" or "instruction": shouldn't parents be put on the hook for their children's survival rather than our taxes paying for everyone's ability to compete equally ? Do we educate children to the point we teach them to wipe their asses and eat properly, or do we "instruct" them solely on theoretical and moral subjects, leaving the base survival skill to the family ? School, many say in France, shouldn't shoulder all responsibilities in a person's "education".
In Asia, or let's say China since that's where I am, education is very mechanical and a pure transfer of practical knowledge in a narrow set of easy subject like Physics or Maths, or Chinese. There is no hint (or it's being discussed to remove them in some places) of opinion building, critical thinking, history-as-a-science or things like that. They would do fitness or eating classes if they realize it's becoming a problem, in a way that would probably serve kids. But, end of the day, they see humans as cattle and as every farmer, like their cattle so long as they do what they're designed to do. No way they read Cicero, ever :)
Sort of like teaching computers, from HTML and CSS to Github and all the related technologies. I think people don't realize how complex modern life has gotten in such a short time
1. time value of money (exponential interest)
2. the basics of double entry accounting
3. what stocks are and how they work
4. what bonds are an how they work
5. how loans work
6. how a business makes a profit
7. what "float" is
Arcana is not necessary, just the basic stuff. Ignorance, and even worse, misconceptions, form a large barrier to people wanting to move up in the world.
It's crazy that otherwise well informed adults are unable to distinguish "revenue" from "profit". Heck, I learned this when I was 10 and started buying and selling comics. I bragged to my dad how much I "made" from the sales. He laughed and punctured my balloon by pointing out how much I'd paid for the books.
I paid this forward years later when a friend was so pleased he'd "won" $250 with a lottery ticket. I asked him how much he'd spent on losing tickets, and his face fell. That was the end of lottery investing for him.
Using real money will pique their interest.
Probably the best episode of "The Apprentice" was the very first, where the teams had to each set up and run a lemonade stand for a day.
"I never let my schooling get in the way of my education." (Mark Twain)
"Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn." (Ben Franklin)
Most of these people seem to be concerned about some sort of pedagogy rather than school in general, though. They largely dislike the way that schools treat students as fungible cogs.
Formal education is more valuable the more that students are involved in the teaching process. Lockhart's Lament is a classic piece on that topic.
This. So many things was skipped and glanced over in school, because it won't be on final exam, so you don't have to know it. This constant focus on exams and numeric results is driving the education system into the ground.
As I entered my 30s, I managed to give up on the fake urgency while still retaining my overall drive. I can say that things are a lot better now (both in terms of success and mental health) than the days I spent hating myself for being an underachiever.
I’ve come up with a (somewhat dumb, but useful) mantra: The only difference between people who do things and people who don’t, is that people who do things, do things. It’s a ridiculous rephrase of the “1% inspiration, 99% perspiration” quote.
Also a reminder to myself and everyone else: it’s okay if you’re not working 80 hour weeks. It’s okay if you don’t make a company that is a billion dollar sale to a FANG. It’s okay if you take regular vacations. It’s okay to not have a side hustle. It’s okay to put your career second.
Do what’s fulfilling for you. Do what you find interesting, energizing, and fulfilling. And if you can only do that on the weekends and evenings, that’s okay.
This also happens to me. In other comment I read it may be related to social media too: now we have many more connections and those who are successful are even more known that they were in the past, and we're not just watching one single person with that "gift" but just one after the other, so it may seem that they all are better/do more amazing things than we do.
The thing is that we see the popular ones, which are the very tip of the iceberg, but there are many many others "behind" them...
I guess we may also have to reduce our exposure to those sources...
Same applies to real-life, too. Many of my students (I teach mostly 18-21 year olds) suffer a kind of existential panic. Exactly as the OP says, why can they binge-watch the whole of GoT but cannot bring themselves to start an assignment? They, like everyone, myself included, are excellent procrastinators and accomplished at lying to themselves. My advice to them is similar to OP's advice - do better than you did before, by your own measure, no more, no less.
META takes all the fun out of any game, but it's especially bad in MtG in my view.
Self competition is one of the key parts to maintaining a healthy mindset when improving on anything versus overly relying on external comparison.
The author also briefly touched on another topic I think is incredibly important for improving and moving forward with "I'll say it for you: you're forgiven".
I consider myself rather Type A and one of the hardest things is forgiving myself for anything really. I carry things that happened N years ago with me that likely no one besides myself noticed or things they did but forgave me for a long time ago. Forgiving myself is even harder than not focusing on external comparison and I'm getting better with it as times goes on and sometimes it fuels me but at other times it really is a lot of weight that can slow you down when you don't want it to.
So I'm still working on forgiving myself on things that I really should be able to and knowing the difference for things I maybe should carry with me for a bit. As I've lived I've realized I am without a doubt my own harshest critic and the critic is a right bastard who's not always in the realm of reality.
There is no need to compare yourself to the 26 year old billionaire, just like it was never relevant for the 26 year old billionaire to compare themselves to the general population. If your goal looks the same as their outcome, then benchmark yourself and be disappointed if its not working out. If not, then don’t.
You have to do the things you make habits of to get to your goals anyway.
Like Sisyphus, if he had set his mind on getting the boulder to the top of the mountain, he would objectively have lived a failed life. If he focuses instead on the act of each push, then it doesn’t matter if the stone rolls down the hill, his concern is the action, not the outcome.
Goals are a desired result.
Habits are deeply ingrained practices that are formed with repetition, and may or may not help you achieve that desired result. Some habits might actually hinder progress.
The only way to know which habits to cultivate (or rely on) is to have a desired result in mind.
Setting goals is important, because it helps clarify what you should spend time on, including the cultivation of habits that will help you achieve the goal. I could invest a lot of myself into the formation of a new (good) habit, but it may not help me achieve my goal.
And goals can also be reached without the formation of habit.
Here are some of his blog posts on it:
https://www.scottadamssays.com/2013/11/18/goals-vs-systems/
https://www.scottadamssays.com/2014/01/21/goals-are-for-lose...
Personally, I don't really think of it as goals and habits being mutually exclusive. Specifically, I wholeheartedly agree with your comment, "The only way to know which habits to cultivate (or rely on) is to have a desired result in mind."
The method (your habits vs op's) are not what's important. The result should be deep meaningful work for each individual.
There's a good amount of solace in the realization (or self-deception) that most others are probably as clueless as you are.
The idea is to remove people-relative measures, and cultivate deep, meaningful work for its own sake [1]. Some ways of doing that are better than others. For some, the platitude works. For others, not.
[1] happiness hypothesis -- jonathan haidt.
You do you, Set your own goals, and work to make today your best day.
That's your boss's job.
Great description of how we notice our stressful emotional responses in our bodies.
I agree with the article, and also know how hard it can be to "just stop" thinking those thoughts or having that physical response.
I'm launching a service to support software engineers in resolving exactly this kind of response!
Check out www.tinyurl.com/happyhackers if you want to learn more!
I recently worked with someone who described "paralyzing jealousy" when reading about companies that raised a ton of money -- pretty much the same thing described in the article. We resolved it in one session so that response no longer comes up for them. No more slow panic in the chest :)
If you're healthy, in good company, have laughter and love, and a dose of adventure, with minimal stress, you've got the perfect life. Everything you do beyond that should be for pleasure, you can find challenge pleasurable, but failure shouldn't be painful if you had thrived to achieve more out of fun. Try to be conscious as to why you're doing what you do, why do you try so hard and why are you so hard on yourself?
You are not 'behind' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15155202 - Sept 2017 (209 comments)
https://web.archive.org/web/20190401041033/http://rahulbijla...
I think this is just as false as the thing he's denouncing.
It's entirely possible to not be where you should be.
These have significant research supporting _at least one_ as a meaningful long-term change agent in depressed or unhappy individuals. You may enjoy the Happiness Hypothesis for a wealth of other research-supported insights into a fulfilling life.
Is it just me or has the "tell people to GO TO A SHRINK" plastered all over the internet become kind of obnoxious?
E.g. consider this instance here:
We're on a website where the intelligence required to understand 90% of the content is certainly enough to also be aware of the fact that psychiatrists etc. exist.
So why is there a need to constantly tell people to go to them if you know that they're probably smart enough to figure that out on their own?
It feels kind of patronizing to me.
Sorry if that wasn't your intention!
It took someone saying 'this is bad, you should go to a doctor' for me to actually make that appointment and go through with it.
That has helped a lot. I wish I had done it 8 years ago.
Normalizing all those options is what's important.
It's okay to be behind and feel bad about it as long as it provokes action. Execution and a bias to action are everything. You can feel like sh*t, loath yourself, you can cry, you can be in pain as long as you leverage those things to get into a flow state and keep on doing.
You are not okay, but you can work on becoming acceptable.
But I have a knack for software development and during college managed to outdo anyone else I've went to school with. I mean in the grand scheme of things I'm still middling at best, I won't get into a FAANG because one I don't want to relocate, and two I don't have the leetcode skills or go-getter extrovert personality required, but I know I am better at what I do than the vast masses of mediocre developers that only sorta get by.
Anyway, I'm 35 now, pretty comfortable all things considered. Might make a jump and go back to consultancy or go self-employed, might get lucky and grow into more of a managerial role (although full on management is not my ambition, that takes personal skills and at best I can fake / approximate those, lol).
You are always late for something. But you are always early for something else. Times, all things being equal, always breeds opportunities and risks.
He replied "I'm not very good at mountain biking, but I've been riding all day."
"Are you having a good time?" asked my coworker.
"Oh, I'm having a blast."
"Well, it sounds to me like you're pretty good at mountain biking then."
Life and the activities it consists of are a lot like mountain biking in that regard.
I completely agree, but this is easier said than done. How do you stop an automatic process that gets triggered multiple times a day? I know it's no longer relevant that I said that I said that thing to that person 10 years ago, but my brain sure seems to think it is.
TLDR: Worked hard to be ahead, got sick, stayed behind trying to catch up until I stopped trying.
That being said some people are driven by dissatisfaction and need it to stay motivated.
I've got over being behind when I realised how successful people get where they are:
It's, as a certain narrator would put it, a confluence of skill and purpose.
And also just the right environment to nurture these.
Ironic huh?
It's not possible to earn money any other way. There are unethical schemes and there are illegal schemes; nothing else yields any profit.
Many unethical schemes aren't even profitable anymore, that's why many people are doing things that are downright illegal now; their entire career is centered around not getting caught.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Wrote an opera for an emperor
Albert Einstein: Published a paper that introduced the equation E = mc2
Orson Welles: Directed and starred in one of the greatest films in cinema history
Me: Ate some toast
Am I missing something?
every day on hn there are countless articles that are of the self-help variety from various entrepreneurs and startup celebrities and whatever. why is this kind of content so popular on a place that prides itself on rigorous rational inquiry (or whatever it is that's on the masthead)? basically i see people nodding along with the most superficial "wisdom" and i don't understand
1) why people are fine with being pandered to
2) why people don't seek out counsel from trained professionals (i.e. therapists) or at least the truly wise (the steinbecks of the world).
in reality i know the answer to these questions (that people here are no different from joe rogan/gwyneth paltrow fans they just have a different flavor) but i just wish hn would drop the pretense about "curious discourse" or whatever.
I've watched about 10 of the shows and he doesn't sell anything or offer anything except asking questions and guiding the conversation with the guest. For example the 2 kevin heart interviews, joe rogan sold nothing.
as of april 14 there have been 1,634 episodes of JRE. do you think maybe your sample isn't representative?
How is this not true? All good things I have are because I busted my ass and when I was lucky enough to have opportunities I had the tools to capitalize on those opportunities.
If you’re lazy and just coasting you cannot be ready when opportunity knocks.
2) Price tag
Also, who are you to decide what is "truly" wise ahahaha
Do you have any specific critique for this post?
I can see how it might be annoying if all of the content was of this type, but these posts don’t seem to take up too much space.
Many wish to learn from their mistakes - many argue that learning from mistakes is key to not repeating them. All of this contributes to the stress and anxiety felt from looking back. I could write an article that takes an entirely contrary opinion about looking back and learning from your mistakes. The conclusions are self-help nonsense, but it's well-written self-help nonsense with a techy / entrepreneur vibe. If it makes you feel better, I'm happy for you.
But it's just astrology with a different coat of paint.
You reject all attempt at explaining the world so you don't get stuck in awe on the beach looking at the sky, and start instead the long work of cultivating fields, building monuments, joining armies, things like that. Islam was a tool to unite then conquer, Judaism possibly an emancipation/union initiative for slave, and Christianity a very soft society transformer in Rome. They all served group-building exercise.
Self-help instead does a bit the opposite, it focuses on you as an individual, is very transactional (you pay to read advice), and has very little to show for (or it's very hard to measure), unlike say Christianity arriving in a slave colony.
> every day on hn there are countless articles that are of the self-help variety from various entrepreneurs and startup celebrities and whatever. why is this kind of content so popular on a place that prides itself on rigorous rational inquiry (or whatever it is that's on the masthead)? basically i see people nodding along with the most superficial "wisdom" and i don't understand
It’s funny you say this because I was going to comment that this is the comment I see everyday on HN whenever anyone gives business advice.
The HN comment section of every article written by an entrepreneur (especially a successful one) that gives basic advice is filled with comments about how they are tired of business people selling them a dream. You almost always can find a comment on survivorship bias, luck, privilege, etc.
> 1) why people are fine with being pandered to
Have you ever considered that people actually find these articles useful ? HN has been extremely valuable for me. I’ve learned so much about the startup world and it’s awesome to here from people who have built successfully companies themselves.
so then there's a consistent group of people on hn that are sick of business guru advice. what's your point?
>Have you ever considered that people actually find these articles useful
https://www.amazon.com/Chicken-Soup-Entrepreneurs-Soul-Inspi...
and yet do we really believe "Chicken Soup for the Entrepreneur's Soul" is substantive content?
If someone is proud that he is ahead, would you ask him: ahead compared to what? Some alternate-reality version of yourself binge watching netflix?
> It may be worth looking at your history in order to learn more about yourself, but that learning stops when review turns to regret.
Regret is inseparable from learning about yourself, learning from your mistakes.
> And besides, the further behind you start, the more glorious your comeback will be. There’s a reason why we celebrate ‘rags to riches’ stories. A ‘riches to riches’ story would be so boring.
But that has nothing to do with how fast the story is. Rags to riches in 20 years is more impressive then rags to riches in 30 years. If it has a lot of ups and downs, the latter story might be more interesting, but if it took longer because of time wasted binge watching netflix ...
Proud to achieve or something maybe but ahead feels like it would never come up