The Psychology of Tackling Hard Problems
davidvaldman.com
davidvaldman.com
One point I'd like to add is that history gives a very misleading picture. History is divided into people who worked through hard problems and triumphed (these are called "geniuses") and people who either gave up or died trying (these are called "failures"). Those seem like opposites, but it's only hindsight that makes them so. Psychologically, when you're in the middle of it, which is when it really matters, there's no way to know. All you know for sure is that you've been walking down a dark tunnel for a really long time.
An interesting question, more interesting than it appears, is: why would someone do that? That is, at some point, having walked down the tunnel for quite some time, the rational thing would appear to be to turn back. Why would someone not turn back?
Start with a strong theory that you pursue until you know it's 99% wrong, sob ,get a new hunch (if you're really masoc.. passionated), repeat.
After many cycles likes these two things happens :
- the tunnel ain't that dark anymore, you can see shades, sometimes even shiny spots*. You get a carnal feeling that those little details you dismissed earlier have a lot more value.
- you went from 100% blind to 99.9% blind.
Tackling something vast and unknown by yourself should be discussed more often, I feel it's a large human nature myth in `modern` cultures. We rely too much on society to accelerate problem solving and get stuck into a little spot of dependencies.
ps: oh and by the way, fear/anger triggered by failure was adressed by stoicists somehow. ( at least according to wikipedia ~_~ )
Category A : walking in the dark tunnel is enjoyable
1) having fun so keep walking
Category B: its not fun
2) Peer pressure, either family, friends, investors, cofounders/employees
3) Expected upside at the end of the tunnel is greater than the walk back
In reality its a combination of 2) & 3) and why pg&co strongly recommend co-founders. e.g. 3) starts you out, 2) keeps you going.
What I find interesting is that this comes from within. The other two motivations you list are external. I wonder if the external ones burn out sooner.
When your motivation is intrinsic (that is, you have a felt sense of the work and you know what it is and you think it's important) you have a basis for deciding when to listen or not listen to other people's opinions. But when it's extrinsic, you're more likely to do what other people say and perhaps give up if it doesn't work.
Edit: another thing about intrinsic motivation is that because other people don't have the same sense that you do, what you're doing may seem absurd and they will tell you you're doing it wrong. So the challenge of this path is not just the work is hard and that you fail a lot; it's also that it will probably force you beyond the pale of social proof, something humans are not hard-wired to enjoy.
Resisting failure can manifest itself very subtly, but the most common manifestation for me is resisting something because it involves new learning ("I just want to solve the core problem, this is never going to end!"), or doing something that I "know" I won't be as good as others at e.g. the user interface.
It's obviously better to get something working than not, and knowing this keeps me committed to working in principle. So I don't abandon the project outright. What actually happens is more insidious: I do something else to avoid the pain of dealing with the problem at hand. As time passes, I (a) lose momentum on the project and (b) the likelihood of a bright, new shiny idea occurring to me, with challenges I "know" I can solve, increases.
When (b) happens, I move on, and it feels good because I'm making progress whereas with the other project I "couldn't" make progress. I never specifically or intentionally abandon the original project, but in effect I do, with the rationalisation that I have a higher priority item to focus on i.e. something I believe I can 'make progress' on. At least, as it turns out, according to my dysfunctional definition of progress, which is rooted in perfectionism.
What I've learned is to monitor my objective progress: did I take steps to solve the problem, and can I solve it for the bulk of the use cases that are really important, and if not can I find somebody else to solve it? e.g. do I have a user interface yet or not, and do I need to find somebody to do it for me? Not my subjective progress: e.g. "I really want this to look great and professional like all those other sites out there, and I'll never get there because I don't know how and I don't want to blow money on this because I'm not even sure how I want it to look, maybe I should research more and find something similar, this is boring it's not what I want to do, I'm making no progress, etc."
Sunk cost fallacy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_costs#Loss_aversion_and_th...
However, I find the difficulty and uncertainty of research mathematics much worse than anything I encountered even in research-heavy startups. Depends on what you're working on, I guess.
I think fear can be a valuable signal. If your success rate is a discouraging 1%, fear might be trying to tell you that you need to find a smarter way to solve the problem than blind (or even moderately educated) guessing. Often in mathematics, at least, you can discover things about the structure of a solution before you find it, things which in turn can help you find the solution. Often the discouragement of a few failed attempts pushes me to step back and trying to think about the problem in a deeper and smarter way.
This immediately rang out to me...any time I'm having problems outside of working (relationship/depression), it kills my ability to be resilient and work through a problem until it's solved..I think working through emotional pain is an excellent skill on its own.
The more I live, the more I realize that this statement isn't about moralizing and is about a fundamental truth about our psychology.
However, in my senior year of high school, I ended up putting in much more time and dedication to track (as well as joining the cross country team, making it an all year commitment), so I spent an average of ~22ish hour/wk doing workouts related to that over the course of the year. I expected the little time I spent on school to drop to zero, however I was surprised that I was actually much more motivated to work on my relatively easy/unstimulating schoolwork. After working hard at running before and after school, it just felt unnatural to not work hard at schoolwork.
However, I can't help but feel that a lot of Abrahamic teachings seem to be mostly about increasing the mimetic fitness of the faith. For instance: "go forth and multiply" is always good for keeping the size of your congregation up; evangelism likewise; "you shall not boil a kid in its mother's milk" reads to me as "don't eat your future dairy animals", a handy survival tip in the bronze age; and so forth.
It seems obvious: if you don't launch, you can't fail.
A subtle fear of rejection is understandably common in a population that experienced it frequently in their formative years.
"I've failed" != "I'm a failure"
No one gets everything right all of the time. Accepting that and seeing hard problems as a challenge to overcome rather than a potential failure waiting to happen is, in my opinion, the way forward.
>>..you run out of steam--that is, dopamine
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erd%C5%91s
"His colleague Alfréd Rényi said, "a mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems", and Erdős drank copious quantities. (This quotation is often attributed incorrectly to Erdős himself. The German original, "Ein Mathematiker ist eine Maschine, die Kaffee in Sätze verwandelt"[11] of the sentence is a wordplay on the double meaning of "Satz": "theorem" or "residue of coffee", lost in the English translation)[12]
After 1971 he also took amphetamines, despite the concern of his friends, one of whom (Ron Graham) bet him $500 that he could not stop taking the drug for a month.[13] Erdős won the bet, but complained that during his abstinence mathematics had been set back by a month: "Before, when I looked at a piece of blank paper my mind was filled with ideas. Now all I see is a blank piece of paper." After he won the bet, he promptly resumed his amphetamine use."
As they say in The Men Who Stare at Goats, "Amphetamines- Not to be abused, but very fucking handy."
EDIT / Disclaimer: If you (the reader) decide to try this, do your own, thorough research. It IS risky and it can end very badly for some people. You've been warned.
Nootropcis, which may be interesting to the hackers aboard. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nootropic
Focus XT has been nice for me (like a steady pot of coffee (which is inefficient with tolerance building) at a steady rate without any jittery crashes.
In other words, cheer yourself on for ruling out apparently promising solutions as well as successfully solving problems.
Though I agree that keep trying (and obviously failing many times along the way) is often necessary to get to where you want to go.
"...French writer. Total loser. Never had a real job. Unrequited love affairs. Gay. Spent 20 years writing a book almost no one reads. But he's also probably the greatest writer since Shakespeare. Anyway, gets down to the end of his life, and he looks back and decides that all those years he suffered, Those were the best years of his life, 'cause they made him who he was. All those years he was happy? You know, total waste. Didn't learn a thing."
We use words like "persistence" or "learn from your failures" so much that we think we know what they mean; so much, in fact, that they become boring. That confuses repetition with understanding. What's valuable about the OP (and the comments are just reflecting this) is that he put into words a tiny bit of that experience in a way that isn't just repetitive.
It can be a heavy burden at times, but being prepared mentally helps a lot.
As my dad always taught me growing up, "attitude is everything."
Plus, tackling a large stack of problems, and iterating until successful feels so rewarding. Both during and after the fact.
Failure is key to success.
Kind of takes the fun out of it eh?
Never gave much thought to my early interest in juggling or the juggling books I read when I was young and how it could possibly be later related to my approach to life and career.
I'm a modest juggler at best, and still young in my professional career in the tech world, but that quote and general sentiment gives me new perspective on how my opinion of failure was shaped growing up.
You learn to embrace the negative data. At the very least, you've just ticked off one thing that assuredly does not resolve the issue.
That way, each mistake I make (and realize/correct) is me leveling up
1. The problem in hand may not have a good solution. This is especially true of research type problems. You have to pick the right one, otherwise it can be a frustrating experience. This is where a broad knowledge of the subject and previous research help.
2. Some potential solutions may be very difficult to implement or explore, so one tends to explore the simpler options first. When these are not enough, you tend to loose faith.
For me, the hard part is that an experiment can be a lot of work... all that effort, for NOTHING. :(
Though Tesla has more geek cred these days, Edison also did some stuff. He said: (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thomas_Edison)
I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.