I’ve personally done both. I was once well-paid to discern the difference from afar.
It’s unfortunate but true that the ICM, adderall-abusing, 20hrs/day people just fucking crush the folks who kayak on the weekend.
Being a monster in technology isn’t everything, but being the best in anything is inherently extreme.
Olympians don’t have a “healthy body image”.
They’ll do anything to win.
I think the point is to let go of that measuring stick. If you measure them by how satisfied they are with their lives, kayakers are the ones crushing it. Being the best at something and the extreme work that requires does not necessarily make a better life than just walking your own path at a pace that works for you.
Neither should that diminish anyone who truly does want a life where they push to the extreme to be the best. If that works for them, great. But that is not for everyone.
I am rather impatient, as you can likely tell, with people’s endless efforts to conflate that with elite technical ability, either individually or in a team.
I ground it out over decades with no education and for at least one of those decades, no mentorship.
I’m not advising anyone to take that path, but I’ll always get grumpy if someone triple equals that with learning some scripting language and being good at GitHub.
Not at kayaking.
And I'm only being slightly facetious. "Winning at coding/tech career" is just one dimension of many, many alternatives.
It's frustrating when a "this is my life" person relies on a "this is my job" person and the latter is too busy planning their next kayak trip to carry their pack. It would be the equivalent of the former constantly poking holes in the latter's kayak.
The latter can and should be challenged. I 100% agree someone not really engaging at work can have a highly negative impact.
IMO we should aim for "highly engaged 9 to 5 - but then enjoy life"!
I agree, but that perspective doesn't reconcile with the point higher up in the thread from somebody who works in the field of identifying high performers. I believe their point was that the "work is a job" people can't really compete with the "work is my life" group. Naturally then, the latter group would then be constantly outpacing the others.
You can crush it and give your all in your 20s, and take a difference pace later on at the right time for you, and that can work very well for people, it often does!
The original article is cautioning against an all-in-one-basket approach that - rather than launch you into the career achievement place you expect - ends up taking more than you can give and burning you out.
It's also not all-or-nothing. Consider a Normal Distribution of achievement, it's entirely OK to be in the top 25% or 10% rather than top 1%. None of us I'm sure wants to be in the bottom percentiles, but it's fine to not even aim for the very very top. That's my view anyway, others will definitely disagree!
I guess it speaks to finding your tribe of people with similar values.
Sounds like a perfect opportunity for personal growth on the part of the former.
I'd say I've done some of the worst work of my career during the weeks of deepest crunch time. Many of the people I've known closely who've worked like that long term have had stress-induced medical problems.
It's also interesting to point to Olympians here...elite athletes follow carefully planned training programs to balance training and rest to avoid overtraining, and while the best of the best can work up to massive training loads, there is a point for every human where additional training hours start to negatively impact your performance. To my understanding, recent research actually suggests elite athletes should sleep a couple of hours per night more than most people, so in some way a key piece of "doing anything to win" involves scheduling time to do nothing at all.
I hate that knowing your craft and not being embarrassed about it is a faux pas around here.
When did people who haven’t put in the time become a protected class? It’s not borderline racist to know why Electron apps suck ass in excruciating detail.
The Kayaker is building experiences and growing as a person, and probably allowing their subconscious to solve the difficult problems while they are consciously enjoying nature. I think that having a diverse set of experiences ultimately makes you a better problem-solver since you can apply abstract concepts from one domain to another. From an entrepreneurial perspective, you can see a need within one of your hobbies that needs to be fulfilled, and apply your technical skills to it. Meanwhile the adderall person has churned out 1000 lines of business logic for their employer.
There is obviously more nuance to it than that, but the most intelligent people I have met were all incredibly well-rounded. I have also met people who probably had the potential to be equally as intelligent, but their laser focus on a single subject stunted their growth and they can only talk about/entertain ideas within their super specific niche. They become boring and unable to work with others.
But there is also that crowd of people who know that a more holistic set of experiences helps them get ahead in their career.
> Kayaker is ... allowing their subconscious to solve the difficult problems while they are consciously enjoying nature
To an extent taking your mind off a problem and mulling over it helps. But there's no subconscious doing the work, in the end spending the weekend thinking about a problem with a few breaks will definitely make more progress than a weekend Kayaking and not thinking about work.
Besides, nobody's gonna sponsor a boring Olympian.
I dunno what sports might require "sacrificing ice cream" but AFAIK Olympians are nuts and have very little life after their events.
I'd say with that framing you can go kayaking and you'll be constantly vigilant about kayakers around you, building your status, watching their speed, noting their achievements, etc.
On the other hand, take me, I go to work and, miraculously, I don't feel being "crushed" by any adderall-abusers. I know many people who commit a lot more than me, I know many CEOs or managers decade younger than me, my old roommates are now tenured professors at respectable universities, and you got me wonder just now, maybe I just have a blind spot and they are "crushing" me day by day somehow, going in circles while firing their machine guns at me. Who knows? I sure don't feel it in any way, they all seem really decent folks, so maybe it turns that ignorance is bliss after all, no?
I struggle to even image how would that be done, but I have some ideas. Maybe if I cared about certifications, or went extensively to every meetup, or tried to lead a community, or bragged about my salary, maybe then I would have opened a hatch to get signals from those people. I don't, so I won't.
Maybe it has something to do with me keeping all too many hobbies (I'm thinking about dropping two or three of them actually, and that includes hn) plus my kids?
Maybe, but at some point - hopefully before they burn out - they'll realize they are drug addicts without any meaningful life outside of work, and then they take up kayaking on the weekends.
I’m a little burnt out on these articles that talk about work life balance, 4 day work weeks, UBI. Not working isn’t going to bring you meaning in life, it’ll probably make you more sedentary and feel more isolated from the world (or at least it does for me).
That's not to say that kayaking has zero value, but I find it hard to imagine someone saying "I was in a really hard spot in life, but then I went kayaking and it changed everything".
I find it a lot easier to imagine someone saying "I built a chrome extension as a side project and there's a small community that loves it. It brings me a lot of pride to hear from them in the Discord that it's really helping them"
Not sure what ICM means, but if it's coding on adderall, 20hrs/day is not going to make great code. And this is assuming all of the requirements are perfectly written and understood. Especially if you're not taking adderall therapeutically.