You Don't Need a Mentor–Find a Nemesis Instead | Hacker News Reader

You Don't Need a Mentor–Find a Nemesis Instead

tedgioia.substack.com

196 pointsjger15111 comments

> Your nemesis is not your enemy. Or, put differently, your nemesis is more than just an enemy. Rather, the nemesis is an adversary is who is like your dark twin. Even as you battle with the nemesis, you share a kind of DNA. The gaze at your nemesis is like looking into a mirror, but one of those fun house mirrors at the carnival, where everything is both recognizable and distorted. In every way, this relationship is more powerful and volatile than a battle between enemies.

I have worked with people who fit this description, and I have certainly felt as if my desire to beat them, or at least not be beaten by them, has pushed me to do my best work.

But it's fundamentally an adversarial relationship, and it reminds me a bit of my kids' favorite movie, "Monsters, Inc." You can become so convinced that you need fear to excel that you fail to realize there's a better way.

The people who have TRULY led me to be my best have not been adversaries. They have been supportive mentors. They do everything that the nemeses do, in terms of bringing out the best work in me, but they do it through building up rather than tearing down.

And when I say they do everything the nemeses do, I really mean that. I can't think of any way that a nemesis has led me to grow that couldn't have been also achieved by a strong, encouraging mentor or manager.

> You can become so convinced that you need fear to excel that you fail to realize there's a better way.

But this is such an effective way of excelling. My fear of failure influences my output. Abstractly, perhaps we each need different kinds of stress that will push us in different ways. I embrace fear because it is exciting and uncomfortable and challenging. Without it I would be lethargic and lazy.

> I embrace fear because it is exciting and uncomfortable and challenging. Without it I would be lethargic and lazy.

I thought that for a while, but I found that really caring about the goal of what I was trying to achieve was enough to push me to do well. Not into the frenzied state that I had with a fear of failure, but a much more healthy (and surprisingly more effective) sustained push that lets me be clear headed enough to see where to put emphasis and focus. Now I'm more focused on winning versus not losing and that makes a big difference.

Interesting. Maybe I will change my ways in the future. Thanks for sharing

I think you're right, and I think what the author is actually trying to get at is what's known as a rival in anime (which is a bit more nuanced than the typical sense of rival) and roughly translates to friendly rivalry. Unlike the case for mentors, rivals need not have loads more experience. They can also be mutually beneficial in a largely positive sense and without antagonism, unlike the case for nemeses.

But you can't be friendly if foundation is strewn with fear and insecurity. It's also important to be able to recognize if rivalry is causing too much stress and revisit your goals and priorities. Sometimes it's fine to explore and go at your own pace.

I bet a nemesis is a lot easier to find than a really good mentor, though. Like, orders of magnitude.

It's not, because it's remarkably hard to find someone who is a "dark twin". People's life-trajectories are remarkably different, being chaotic processes, so it ends up being counter-productive to compare yourself to someone who seems similar to you. In general, your belief of how similar they are to you, or how aligned your goals are, is just that. A belief. One that is extremely difficult to prove, and might have terrible consequences (e.g. depression) if you're wrong.

Let me put it this way: even actual twins, who grow up in the same household, are usually not worth comparing between. Contrary to popular belief, twin-studies are not well-accepted as good science, in part because we are beginning to appreciate the complexity that is gene regulation. In particular: epigenetics.

(Humans don't have the largest genomes, but we do have genetic control systems that are far more sophisticated than those relatively simple organisms with larger genomes. More generally, mammals have sophisticated genetic control systems, compared to other organisms, but even within mammals, humans beat rats.)

I think you are taking the "dark twin" phrase too far. There were plenty of differences between Tesla and Edison, Musk and Bezos, mentioned as examples in the article. The concept of nemesis isn't built upon conscious beliefs, but "repressed attraction" as the article states. There's nothing fundamental about this concept that requires that you be similar in every way to the nemesis. A few similarities in the right areas can be enough to drive the repressed attraction.

This was one of the revelations for me from the “seven habits” book. Adversarial relationships can be a great motivator, but it remains an external one.

Depending on someone else to be the vehicle of your success is risky - they might not cooperate or do something different, or just disappear from your life, and now you’re empty.

It can work, but I wouldn’t advise depending on it. Especially since there can be much better ways.

Introducing the ... Nementor. Part nemesis, all mentor. After they destroy you, they tell you how they did it. Or sometimes they go easy on you when they see you might get it.

Not to be confused with the Mentesis, who will teach you malevolently to get the better of you.

Spot on actually. I‘ve found that adversarial techniques are underrated in constructive relationships. The times where I was thrown a friendly challenge from peers were gold.

I once worked for a mentor of mine using elements of Provicative Therapy and thought zhat was weird… not doubting the effectivity anymore.

http://www.provocativetherapy.com/what-is-provocative-therap...

Internet trolls are the real therapists.

Isn't this basically Wells 1.0 from the Flash?

I’m a beginner in management. In 3 years, the only interns who excelled are those whom I told had barely passed the interview and were paid the least. The ones I respected for their initial talent didn’t fully understand their subject matter and, notably, couldn’t do post-deployment customer interviews to check, loop back and reflect on their work.

It deeply saddens me because it means saddistic managers obtain better results, and people perform better by being talked down. And that’s not a path I want to take and it’s hard to find the way to both congratulate people and get them to excel at their work (FYI we’re at 35h/week and we don’t do overtime here).

Or maybe you were just bad at judging their talent or capacity for working hard?

Some academic once told me that the best phd students tended to get Bs in their honours year, because they didn’t think memorising a textbook was a good use of their time.

Is your interview process perhaps over-indexing academic performance or some similarly time wasting achievement?

why would you tell anyone that they barely passed an interview and why pay an intern according to interview performance? I think the issue here is not the interns

After almost 2 decades in the industry, working at tens of companies in two continents, I can say without any hesitation that the best managers are never sadistic.

Within the context of a dysfunctional, fear-driven company, these sadistic techniques might squeeze better performance out of certain workers, but a force of creative, thoughtful, talented, self-motivated workers will work elsewhere. While I have worked in a few dysfunctional, fear-driven companies over the years, I did not see any of them grow or hold onto talent over time. The best companies I've worked at terminate abusive managers if they accidentally hire one. They take kindness and empathy very seriously.

Maybe your interview wrong and hire wrong people?

Seems that you hire people who are good at bullshitting during the interview, not the ones who are actually good at their job (what is not easy btw, many people are bad at bullshitting and bad at their jobs).

Obviously most interns are green, but it seems you get the ones who are good at the interview phase and expect them to read your mind somehow and acquire the skills that.. you dont teach them. Do they know that they are supposed to do the things you want? Are they told how?

Also it is pretty funny that after 3 years of management you didnt notice that what all those failed interns have in common is... you.

I believe that would just attract people that satisfy their narcissism with isolated gestures of patronage. The only exception I would see is to set high standards. People always get there if you let them. Many cannot even help themselves, it is like having to climb a mountain. A mentor that can leverage such ambitions and can provide assistance is probably priceless.

Also a bit like a good personal trainer? You hate them for suggesting burpies/suicide-planks/what-ever-you-hate-most, but you'll go to hell before you admit defeat and refuse to do them as you know you'll be better off in the long run.

I've worked with two trainers that work with professional athletes (NFL, etc) and neither took that approach.

Can you elaborate on their approach?

Not really. Because it's not clear I could see the entire of the athletes programming. Or even the tiny sliver of the coaches programming for the one athletes.

We would work out adjacent to each other in an empty gym twice a week and I could observe their workouts.

Sorry if that's shirking your question but wouldn't want to overstate and offer something incorrect.

I think a lot of these are discipline strategies and I'd wager that personal trainers to professional athletes perform as less of an external source of discipline and more of an external brain/workout strategist/source of encouragement, as professional athletes usually already have the discipline/motivation a little under control.

Whereas personal trainers (as opposed to professional trainers and more in line with the previous comment's thought of a single nemesis/mentor) would need to be that external source of discipline, as well.

Totally guessing here, no experience in the training world whatsoever, feel free to tell me I'm way off base.

sounds like the Sith model. Always two there are.

On that note, 'mentor' is almost an anagram of 'torment'

Cryptocurrency is my nemesis because it’s like a mirror universe where software destroys value instead of creating it, and smart engineers spend their best years pretending to believe in nonsense so they could retire early and try to forget it ever happened.

Somewhere in crypto, Mirror Me is stroking his pointy beard and wondering if the rumors about transporter accidents on HN are true.

I imagine that how I feel about crypto developers, good lawyers feel about ambulance chasers.

> I imagine that how I feel about crypto developers, good lawyers feel about ambulance chasers.

Former Corpo Bitcoin Developer and Consultant: We don't even think about you, or how you slave for a project you probably detest for money that barely covers rent in the Bay Area; all in order to one day have a chance to be able to escape the crime-ridden, woke-dystopia you've helped create and prop up in the last 20 years and maybe focus on what you probably care about much later on in life.

You're more of a cautionary tale rather than an actual entity, despite being so pervasive in tech--and often a big selling point. Which is why there has been a brain-drain in the banking and tech sector for nearly 7 years now into this ecosystem.

Maybe you should ask yourself why you weren't ever invited to join a project (despite deeming yourself one of the good devs) rather than pontificate about how you look down on others?

I think one of the most interesting concepts about crypto is:

"The Internet succeeded because it skewed capitalism - the first or richest project didn't necessarily win, the most user friendly project usually did."

Compare that to crypto: The largest project by far is the first, companies like crypto.com can just spend billions of dollars on marketing to become a leading exchange, and users still don't really reap tangible benefits from crypto (other than asset appreciation and edge use-cases).

It's like everyone looked to the early internet and ignored everything good about it other than the equity appreciation (probably b/c that is exactly what crypto is right now)

finance bros started getting deep into Silicon Valley (with gig economy stuff in particular) and this is the end result of that. Bunch of people who care way too much about money, with big mics and who have way too much respect in this industry relative to their own morals.

Hustle mindset got us here, dunno if it gets us out.

I think it does but it requires a different kind of hustle. If you have no capital you can still collaborate with other like-minded people and companies to extend your reach while you build out your business (this is how I am expanding). It's still hustle finding these people, supporting them, getting them up and running etc. but as the basis for something sustainable it has a lot of merits.

At least...it's working so far.

I think we are still in the 1998-1999 phase of crypto. In Internet terms, that was peak Pets.com and Kosmo. All of the money being made right now is from first-mover advantage and marketing. But value isn't really being created.

It is important to recognize that many of the ideas weren't necessarily bad at the time, they were just 100% optimized for moving fast and capturing eyeballs. Now Pets.com came back as Chewy.com and Kosmo came back as Instacart.

Most of the winners (assuming there are some) simply don't exist yet. There may be some Amazon/Googles in there - if so, they are getting some press but aren't necessarily winning the hardest right now but are building the hardest for tomorrow.

> It is important to recognize that many of the ideas weren't necessarily bad at the time, they were just 100% optimized for moving fast and capturing eyeballs. Now Pets.com came back as Chewy.com and Kosmo came back as Instacart.

What did CueCat come back as?

;-)

The difference of course being pets.com at least did something theoretically better than going to a pet store. Chewy was enabled by better logistics that just weren’t there in 1999.

For crypto, it’s not like there is a cool use case hampered by a lack of support infrastructure, there just is no cool use case (yet).

Like what’s version 2.0 of Solana look like? Is it a consumer transaction network? Is it a web3 thing? What’s the unlock that gets us there? Are we just applying the wrong metaphors to the wrong technology because we are hopeful that there will be “another Internet” that our generation can profit from?

> The largest project by far is the first, companies like crypto.com can just spend billions of dollars on marketing to become a leading exchange, and users still don't really reap tangible benefits from crypto

Crypto.com was founded in 2016, FTX in 2018, Coinbase in 2012, Gemini in 2014, Binance in 2017.

Sure. And FTX bought arena naming rights too.

My point being that no exchange is winning on “is a better exchange than competition,” they’re winning on name recognition.

The same could be said for targeted advertising.

I feel like at least both of these have redeemable qualities, though.

Blockchain is amazing (I love my signed git commits and the integrity that provides), but proof of work is contributing to the destruction of the planet.

A platform to unite people with needs to solutions for those needs is amazing, but less so when it goes to the highest bidder rather than the best or most individual-appropriate solution.

> Blockchain is amazing (I love my signed git commits and the integrity that provides), but proof of work is contributing to the destruction of the planet.

I can't believe this narrative still exists, 'Blockcahin not Bitcoin' was how it was phrased back then, now it applies to all PoW systems now that word has entered the lexicon by otherwise unknowledgeable people on distributed, immutable technology.

This isn't meant as a personal attack, but more as a rebuttal to a senseless and baseless argument: this is what irks so many of us that actually understand this technology and it's potential (money is really only its first application that allowed funding to occur in a project otherwise deemed 'valueless' since at it's core it's just a opensource software project): are you aware that Bitcoin (the Network and the most well known PoW system) is accelerating and expanding the use of renewable energy[0] and is greener than any of the woke FAANG/MANGA in terms of energy usage?

Or the fact that it's trying to mitigate and recapture energy loss in the oil and gas Industry [1]. To date, other than Google who partly invested in Ivanpah (which failed, but was worth attempting none the less), there hasn't been a single thing from SV that has done as much to incentivize the creation of renewables. Even Tesla's charging stations/network, as awesome as they are, are not prohibiting the use of fossil fuels. Lets compare relevant attributes here.

So, please, stop with the hyperbole: this was barely tolerable 4-6 years ago when it was touted as a reason to ignore or marginalize this tech and shoehorn alts that made no sense but were centralized and provided the banks and regulators to control them. But now... it's just sad and shows how pervasive narratives created by powerful entities (this was Blythe Master's work, btw) can last rather than taking the time to look into it yourself what it is that you are repeating.

0: https://squareup.com/us/en/press/bcei-white-paper

1: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/mining-bitcoin-clean-ene...

These two things are not mutually exclusive, are they?

The entire software developer career isn't exactly being competitive right now.

You can either be spending your best years being seen as a barely necessary expense in an incompetent bureaucratic place, or spending your best years wasting your life on lottery tickets at a tech startup, or you can be spending your best years destabilizing democracies while greasing the wheels of an ad targeting monster laughing smugly at everyone else especially the cryptocurrency developers, or spending your best years learning how to interview at said ad targeting monster.

While the cryptocurrency developers make more than all.

So, the relativity of "oh no I wish our best and brightest did something more productive with their time" becomes extremely apparent very quickly. Is it really that tempting to debate when you know the outcome of the debate?

But hey it's good to believe in something.

I won't attempt to justify adtech or startups (I work for/on neither, and couldn't care less about them), but: comparing them to cryptocurrency feels like setting a low bar.

The former have all kinds of socially negative incentives; the latter is designed to maximize negative social and environmental outcomes as part of one of two explicitly reactionary worldviews (conspiratorial fiat/economic doomerism for PoW and neofeudalism for PoS).

These are good points, there is a lot more going on than the consensus models, even if they are inseparable. Most cryptocurrency developers are not working on that, and are not working on mining. Some are, and some of those are working to improve these issues.

The only approach to the grandparent poster’s “nemesis” all leads to contributing to the cryptocurrency ecosystem, as you can only improve some parts of the stack, as opposed to hoping the stack disappears. And a high probability of making a lot of money in the process.

> Most cryptocurrency developers are not working on that, and are not working on mining. Some are, and some of those are working to improve these issues.

It would be interesting to see numbers backing this up, as well as the claim that cryptocurrency developers are making more than SWEs on average.

Anecdotally, my friends and acquaintances (numbering a ~dozen or so) at cryptocurrencies are split about evenly between PoW and PoS. Nobody I know is working on alternatives, and this is consistent with the economic incentives: the money is all in PoW, and the engineers go where the money is.

Its a stack. That part is done, so you dont work on that, you work on things at a higher part of the stack: wallets, standards, libraries, node communication software, applications, employee at a startup doing applications…Nothing to prove there, just a fundamental understanding. Maybe a tech recruiter can help you with numbers? This is like one of those studies where people are thinking “academics really spent time and resources to make a study on this topic?” when its true that someone in an obscure forum asked “source?” and there simply needed to be a source to point to eventually.

Crypto Tech recruiters will give you some insight into what people are making. People that opt for employment are getting like $150k-$250k and token grants that can easily be worth a million dollars or more, vest in 3-6 months as opposed to 1-4 years. People that opt for self employment negotiate much larger percentages of the tokens or sales of tokens, and so it can be a lot more. There are many duds, and that doesn’t matter unless a separate higher standard was levied exclusively to crypto (which is common, and silly). Its much more de-risked than equity in the rest of tech. It competes with FAANG and surpasses for almost everyone that bothers to show up. If you can code.

In any case, there are a few people looking for and developing consensus-level alternatives. But proof of work and proof of stake is very simple and so a developer wouldn't be working on that finished aspect. They would be working on an alternative, or not at the consensus layer.

I think you've misunderstood or are misinterpreting: I'm not claiming that the majority of people are working on the "proof" aspect of PoW or PoS. Those are, indeed, mostly settled.

The anecdotal claim is that all of the components up the "stack" are focused primarily on chains/substrates/ecosystems/whatever-you-want-to-call-thems that ultimately boil down to just PoS or PoW. Nobody is laboring under the delusion that their NIH cryptocurrency wallet is worth anything in any other context.

Okay, its a stack. Everything at a higher layer is dependent on the lower consensus layer. Not sure what answer you want or are willing to accept if you don’t want to separate those things.

Many frontend only developers just plug in a library so that their client side users communicate to the nearest node and then make 6-7 figures or more. Thats so far abstracted away from consensus layer that I dont know what to say.

Edit: I guess the most important thing to say is that the frontend developer’s code would still work even if the consensus model was swapped to something else, or was an actual centralized database. I mean, they do test on localhost.

The two claims here ("it's an abstracted stack" and "DeFi engineers are collecting 6-7 figures") are fundamentally at odds: the latter can only be true if the economic (un?)reality of hype around PoW and PoS tokens can sufficiently goad investors/grifters/whoever into dumping money onto ideas that they would scoff at in a conventional setting.

The same goes for someone caring about TCP vs UDP, or perhaps a more fundamentally competing standard back then which doesnt exist now. If the software developer is not working on that, they're not working on it. The backbone layer functioning still has to provide confidence to investors so the developer can sell their app.

Why is cryptocurrency software development different, to you, then the rest of tech?

> Why is cryptocurrency software development different, to you, then the rest of tech?

In the rest of the software industry, there is at least a plausible resemblance to traditional economic incentives: you build software that people pay for (or otherwise extracts value from them, like adtech). The "value" of the product, company, &c. is some function of the company's financial health, public speculation, and the expected size of the market.

It's difficult to say the same for DeFi: nearly all of the products seem to be in the "Uber for Dogs" category, except that the "Uber" is an extremely slow distributed ledger with no discernible benefits. The value appears to be solely in speculation, divorced from underlying technical value.

And here's the thing: the market can speculate all it wants. But the underlying economic reality is that cryptocurrencies aren't meaningfully competing with traditional alternatives, and the market is built on that: we see ridiculous valuations for "$SERVICE but on $COIN" not because `$SERVICE` is worth that much, but because speculators are riding the speculative wave of `$COIN` and using `$SERVICE` to pump that speculation.

The Uber for Dogs team is extracting value, all of their users pay to use it. That team is also not working on consensus models, they work on their app, no different than how an iphone app developer is not working on tcp improvements.

So an unfalsifiable and impossible separate higher standard levied exclusively at crypto when it applies to teams and products in the rest of the tech industry.

It doesn't matter that you don't like the applications? This isnt different enough from the non crypto world to support what you’re writing.

> Token grants worth a million dollars or more, vest in 3-6 months as opposed to 1-4 years […] Its much more de-risked than equity in the rest of tech

Getting paid in unregistered securities that I have to dump on some shady foreign exchange isn’t my definition of “derisked”.

People accepting this kind of payment for their services are hoping to cash out before the bubble pops and develop selective amnesia about their role in scamming retail investors with these boiler room tokens.

1. All private startup equity is unregistered.

2. Money talks.

> All private startup equity is unregistered.

Yes it is, and I’m not trying to profit by illegally selling it to retail investors.

I’m not a lawyer, but it seems like a dangerous assumption that the SEC won’t care that you sold a million dollars’ worth of tokens that represent equity in your employer and were granted to you on that basis.

Selling tokens from employment is much more like selling a bunch of SUPREME merchandise you were granted at one price which retail will pay a premium for. Tokens just make that a practical thing to offer to employee given the high market liquidity, compared to consumer products. The technology allows for overlapping feature of equity securities, but they dont have to be implemented.

Sometimes the SEC sees overlapping securities laws involved, and then they do care, but its really just a problem for consumer protection agencies like the FTC, who doesn't care to regulate transactions. So securities purview is not inherent to the format of asset being exchanged, so there are some things to avoid and then you’re good to go.

Onchain automated market making (AMM) systems have changed that for the last two years.

Its derisked because the shady foreign exchanges are removed from the equation, and the gamble for exit liquidity is removed from the idea of exchanges balking at SEC actions.

We are at the point now where liquidity doesn't disappear even if the SEC pokes at the project. Due to the nature of AMMs, liquidity can be automatically provided and locked on-chain and even burned - ensuring its availability permanently at some prices, so nobody could even compel an entity to take down liquidity, I’ve never seen a system like that before. This is an example of antifragility, and antifragility has value. This kind of systems increases its capability to thrive as a result of stressors, shocks, volatility, noise, mistakes, faults, attacks, or failures. Its an example of what people have been trying to say for a whole decade now.

Derisked doesnt mean absolved of risk. It means some of the risk is removed.

So, it also means it doesnt matter! Employees have no liability, only money, they don't even put up capital. Its the same circumstance as hopeful employees being convinced they're “changing the world” at tech startups and publicly traded tech companies, except more favorable for employees.

There are a lot of people working on PoW and PoS still. See NIPoPoWs (https://nipopows.com/) or the competing PoS models that do things differently (Ouroboros, Tendermint, Lachesis)

I definitely find that part of the stack interesting

I really find that todays trendy “muh energy use” detractors will wind up contributing to alternate consensus models for distributed ledgers

Which means its still more beneficial to have prior experience in this sector than simply hoping it goes away

> You can either be spending your best years being seen as a barely necessary expense in an incompetent bureaucratic place, or spending your best years wasting your life on lottery tickets at a tech startup, or you can be spending your best years destabilizing democracies while greasing the wheels of an ad targeting monster laughing smugly at everyone else especially the cryptocurrency developers, or spending your best years learning how to interview at said ad targeting monster.

There are other options. For example, I've spent the best years of my life on startups building things that are doing good in the world and trying to get them to scale. I haven't had any home runs, but I've helped get a faster acting anti-psychosis drug approved for people with severe schizophrenia, gotten a COVID vaccine approved faster, and now build tools for social workers that have gotten hundreds of people out of homelessness and helped people get out of housing that was making them sick. Despite not yet having a winning startup lottery ticket, that I've made a small positive difference in the world is enough for me, especially because I earn more than enough to have a comfortable life.

There are a lot of people at every category passionate about what they do.

I’m glad you are finding something fulfilling.

Most crypto developers have causes that have nothing to do with intentionally believing nonsense for a limited time, or greed, or the environmental concerns over using a fraction of the energy that other industries do.

> So, the relativity of "oh no I wish our best and brightest did something more productive with their time" becomes extremely apparent very quickly. Is it really that tempting to debate when you know the outcome of the debate?

I'd argue that the fact that we got to the point where the options are what you described might be an indicative that they (we) were never the best and brightest in the first place.

I’ll take that

Its more that other people say that about a very few select industries and trades, I've heard this many many times levied at the finance industry and the last two decades thats been specifically software engineers (the “quants”) at finance firms, software eating all

Having recently moved to New York City, that part of the article hit home for me. NYC is so loaded with talented, successful people—living sometimes literally on top of one another—that it really makes you push yourself. For example, I attended a jazz show one night that included performers on "classical" instruments. After the show, I was chatting with the violinist (discussing whether, and how, improvisation was taught to "classical" performance majors). After a nice chat, I Googled her at home and discovered she has a PhD, two Grammys, she's been on the Tonight Show several times, she plays with Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road ensemble, and toured with Stevie Wonder. And she was far from the featured performer; she was just a "hired gun" for that evening's gig. I doubled down on my musical pursuits immediately.

I am honestly curious how you don't instinctively see it as a "dog chasing car" kind of competition.

I think it has to be evenly matched to be a rivalry, although I admit that I'm assuming you're an average hacker news user and not someone who has, say one Grammy and a few (not yet several) tonight show appearances.

I don't find people who are way better than me very inspiring because when the difference is that big, it's probably up to what proteins our bodies are folding moreso than anything conscious we're choosing to do.

What I'd like to see, honestly, is someone really successful that was about as dull as I am. Now that would be inspiring.

Interesting point. I guess I don't tend to look at the world that way, for a couple of reasons. First off, hard work often trumps innate talent. Secondly, life is a mosaic of niches, and I don't have to compete in her niche to be challenged and inspired by her.

And I'm probably not the average HN reader, as I am (also) a professional musician with years of training.

Lastly, I bet you're not really dull.

I think each person should learn what motivates them best, and the pros and cons of different motivational strategies.

Pre-burnout, dark motivation strategies such as stress and having a chip on my shoulder motivated me.

Now post-burnout, I still get stressed out easily, and a darker motivation strategy would probably lead me to collapsing from stress again. Gratitude, pride, self-compassion, and lovingkindness meditation motivate me better, without negative side effects. cf. Emotional Success — David DeSteno

I needed to read this. I grew up on dark motivation and physically cringed at the idea of being motivated by happiness and positivity (I was quite an edgy teenager as I'm sure you can guess!)

Now in my late 20's, the pandemic plus all the years of accumulated negative energy seem to have broken the camel's back. I burned out hard over the last two years and I've had trouble picking up the pieces. But the motivational techniques you mentioned ring quite differently now than when I was younger and I think that's the path I'll want to pursue from here on out. Appreciate the thoughts.

Very similar life story and timeline here.

Going from being a very motivated worker to burnt out can be psychologically challenging, and people around you often don’t seem to understand that your burn out can last for longer than a few weeks.

Some other books helping me in my journey are Upward Spiral by Alex Korb and Feeling Great by David Burns

I'm quite interested in this exchange, because I've noticed that a lot of very successful people saying they had strong dark motivations early in their career, but are now very glad to have much healthier sources of motivation. The pattern is so consistent I can't think of many high achievers that I know for a fact weren't driven by dark motivations in some early stages of life.

I've developed the theory that explicit preponderance of dark motivations might have knock-on effects in shadow integration that are hard to get elsewhere - any thoughts from those who recognise this pattern?

Problem is, sometimes you don't have a say on what motivates you because life happens.

Ask any struggling freshly divorced parent who's trying to provide for their kids and suck up all the toxicity from her workplace because paying the rent matters more than loving what you do.

Hard pass for me. I’m happy being an individual and supporting others.

Trying to one up people is ego/anger driven behavior and while maybe a person works faster in that mode, isn’t better in the long run.

Think about it. Can you count on your nemesis for a work reference?

I prefer the word “rival” because you can even be good friends with a rival, while the connotations of “nemesis” don’t quite work for that.

It’s also just a more accurately descriptive word. Nemesis was the Greek god who punished hubris. A Nemesis is somebody who delivers (a usually unavoidable or inevitable) retribution to you. An archetypal nemesis is somebody you have wronged, and somebody who successfully manages to enact a retribution. I get that it’s come to mean basically any serious rival, but that’s dumb imo, and the original definition of the word is better.

For some reason, which is not quite clear to me, the author explicitly brings up the term rival and rejects it without any clear explanation.

> It has to do with what sportswriters and fans call rivalries. But I view it as something different—I refer to this same phenomenon as the Concept of the Nemesis.

Then he goes on to use the term rivalry a bunch.

He seems to be trying to name a more specific concept than "rivalry", an especially intense one with that mirror aspect.

I could say that these substack blowhard types are my nemesis, but that would be giving their pontificating too much significance.

I've read a few of Ted Gioia's books about jazz and 20th C music, and they're uniformly excellent - very well-researched and very well written. I think The Jazz Standards: A Guide to the Repertoire was my favourite - fascinating investigations into the stories behind 250+ jazz standards. Music: A Subversive History is also a great read. Also The History of Jazz etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Gioia

That's a good point, and I'd be happy to read his works on jazz. People can be great in their niche, and rambling when riffing on another topic.

In the case of the musicians being more productive, I would have guessed that it's because their creativity fed off of each other, with sharing of ideas and helping each other out of slumps, rather than any urge to outcompete their nemesis.

There's lots of stories of competitive rivalries within bands, and between bands (especially between rap artists in modern age), and between composers/artists. I think there may be something to this desire to one up someone in a creative field when you consider yourselves better than them producing great works.

Is it like the other person attempts show you it's possible to push the boundaries, so it unlocks your creativity a bit more ?

This reminds me of self-play AI: one of the concepts behind the huge advances in AI performance in games like go and chess. You start with 2 agents that are initially braindead, then record game(s) and then set the agent which lost to train on the game history db, then see if that agent performs better. The cool thing about self-play is that it converges on optimal play w.r.g. to the game history db.

I've been pushed to grow by various nemesis in the past. I don't enjoy it. It is often a painful process because of they are truly a nemesis, it isn't just friendly competition. You have to watch your back and not assume the best in someone. I hate that, it is against who I am and what I stand for.

That out of the way, some of the biggest personal and professional growth I've undergone with my communication skills, playing politics (a necessary evil at times), and even organization and documentation can be traced back to being burned hard and at times by a given nemesis.

I'm better at my job and a better person as a result of trying to be the opposite of them and leading by example. If you're going to have a nemesis, at least try to get some value out of it.

I guess what they mean by nemesis is someone who is basically your peer, but sincerely trying to be much better than you. It works when they aren’t just your rival out to crush you, but someone much more “honourable” who wants to beat you the right way, maybe even share what they learn along the way. Rather than a nemesis, this is commonly known as a “great friend” and isn’t that much easier relationship to find than a mentor. In fact depending on the culture and industry, a mentor who isn’t all knowing but much more experienced and wiser than yourself is a more common occurrence.

I feel that people just bikeshed too much about these things when really all you need to do is be helpful where you can and don’t be an asshole.

Jonathan Coulton has a really appealing song that gets at this.

song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unjGuvJIePs

lyrics: https://wiki.jonathancoulton.com/Nemeses/Lyrics

Here is the chorus:

    Could it be that you need me
    To keep you out, to run you faster
    Promise me you'll let me be
    The one, the worst of all your enemies
    Pretending you're a friend to me
    Say that we'll be nemeses

Ah, the pokemon approach.

Thanks for the TLDR, I wasn't going to read that whole novel.

Relationship design patterns for effective communication.

Maybe the author could read Bertrand Russell's thoughts on motivation. Rivalry is a good, but not the best, motivator...

In a way Lennon/McCartney were a ambivalent nemesis pair. They would respond to each other's hits.

In recent years JDilla also fed off Pete Rock's sampling ideas, creating new strange rhythms when trying to understand his predecessor.

The there's the Allan Holdsworthses, whose nemesis seems the universe.

> In a way Lennon/McCartney were a ambivalent nemesis pair. They would respond to each other's hits.

Also, the Beatles and Beach Boys. One article about that is here: https://mathewstreet.co.uk/the-beatles-vs-beach-boys/. A pull quote:

> Brian Wilson was quoted as saying: “Rubber Soul blew my mind. I liked the way it all went together, the way it was all one thing. It was a challenge to me to do something similar. That made me want to make Pet Sounds, I didn’t want to do the same kind of music, but on the same level.”

Then

> However, it was Paul McCartney who was possibly the biggest fan of ‘Pet Sounds’. He was even quoted as saying: “It was Pet Sounds that blew me out of the water. I played it to John so much that it would be difficult for him to escape the influence.”

And further:

> At the time, Brian Wilson was working on the The Beach Boys’ Smile album and was struggling to complete it. One day, whilst driving in his car under the influence of drugs, the newly released ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ was played on the radio. His passenger at the time, Michael Vosse, recounts “he just shook his head and said ‘They did it already – what I wanted to do with Smile. Maybe it’s too late.’”

The author never defines "nemesis". "Nemesis" was a goddess that punished hubris (extreme pride and arrogance). In British English, the traditional meaning of "a nemesis" was someone with a greater power that inflexibly punished the lower-rank person. A recent meaning has emerged, where "a nemesis" is simply a long term rival. In American English, the Oxford dictionary defines a nemesis as "a person or a thing that is very difficult to defeat".

Across the post, the word seems to variate significantly. In many cases (e.g. Nadal-Federer) it's pompous word for "rival" or "strong opponent". Overall, so many words for so little content.

> I will always prefer watching Magic-versus-Bird over those Michael Jordan highlight films—even though I realize the sheer superiority in athleticism of the latter. Without a nemesis, Jordan could win championships, but he couldn’t create the kind of Greek tragic drama of the encounter with the other.

Michael Jordan did have a nemesis 1988-1991: Isiah Thomas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulls–Pistons_rivalry

I kinda disagree. Sure, having a nemesis will drive up your wish to learn more stuffs & outperform him, but at the end of the day, you must hate each other's guts to become each other's nemesis. Which is very unhealthy if you are needed to work in the same working environment, since each of you'll have to deal with the other one all day long.

Just basing off the title alone: Having a nemesis works if you can figure out / already know the directions to bridge the gap between where you're at and where your nemesis is at. Knowing what you'd like to accomplish != knowing the directions to reach the destination.

Wonderful antithetical headline aside, this is a bad idea on its face. Your nemesis goes in trying to limit and destroy you, while a mentor tries to support and build you up.

Related: Have an Enemy

https://basecamp.com/gettingreal/02.5-have-an-enemy

Very related (if not inspired by) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZN-9RlGfRg

Nemesis learning is good, but can also lead to taking shortcuts and sloppy and lazy processes and procedures.

These are behaviors and patterns a good mentor will recognize and curtail.

started to read and he claims sportsmanship is the most neglected thing in athletics.

I say, sportsmanship is the most neglected concept in ANY field.

I really despise the us american culture of FPS games: "take that you cunt teabaging an enemies corpse"

how about just playing the game? do you guys (specifically those who act like that) HAVE to be assholes or can you play like decent people too?

I’m an autodidact and I hate myself, I’m laughing!

What! An entire post on nemeses and no mention of Mario vs Wario?

That von Cramm anecdote is also perhaps complicated by the fact that he was playing for a Germany ruled by the Nazis.

I don't think I've ever really had a nemesis though, at least in programming, although I do get the feeling I might have been other people's nemesis.

on edit: Thinking more about von Cramm, he was called a traitor for the admitting his error and thus losing, and I guess the person calling him a traitor was really working as a Nazi official at that time.

In reading about him https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottfried_von_Cramm I can't help but wonder if he didn't admit the error as a form of protest against Nazism.

It's substack - authors expressing veiled admiration for Nazis is par for the course on there.

He expressed admiration for the sportsmanship of von Cramm, who had lots of problems with the Nazi regime it would seem.

nemesis is a strong word, competitor sounds much better

Like Gary to Ash!

Top 10 anime tropes of all time.

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