Comment by jawns | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jawns | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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'

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.

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.

> 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 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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com