To be great, be good, repeatably (2019)
blog.stephsmith.io
blog.stephsmith.io
"A person’s success in life is determined by having a high minimum, not a high maximum. If you can do something really well but there are other things at which you’re failing, the latter will hold you back. But if almost everything you do is up there, then you’ve got a good life."
Although I’m not quite sure how it relates to the article.
I'm paraphrasing, but he essentially said he didn't try to make his best performances better, he tried to make his worst performances better.
That idea has been hugely impactful for me -- it's resulted in far less anxiety and self-flagellation in the pursuit of excellence, while still probably resulting in about the same overall improvement.
> “If you cannot do great things, do small things a great number of times”.
People want to "plan" themselves into being Great. So they go into a spiral of "I'm not good enough" and don't actually complete anything. They don't produce anything, no one sees their work, so it's much harder to improve.
In practice, if we produce a lot of stuff, and pay attention, the quality will increase over time. We'll become Great according to the article...
... I'd call it "Good Enough". Producing and analyzing and getting better takes time, energy, and focus. It's not fun. Once our result is Good Enough we move on and focus on another thing we want to produce.
Source: writing a book on (Developer) Feedback Loops
> “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.” - Albert Einstein
Does anyone writing that really think Einstein said that? Apart from it being completely apocryphal, it’s a terribly shallow appeal to authority.
Besides being a shallow appeal to authority, it's just a very stupid thing to say. It's not just wrong, it's bad to believe in.
Hate to break it to you, Mr Albert Einstein, but the definition of insanity can be found, like every other definition, in a dictionary. And thats not what it says in the dictionary under insanity.
Producing good work consistently means you are good overall. Being great means you produce great work consistently.
One of the linked articles in the piece contradicts the notion that consistently being good would lead to greatness. (Well a link to a tweet of images of the article -- https://autotranslucence.com/2018/03/30/becoming-a-magician/). That author argued that while they were consistently very good at body painting (top 5 in the world championships), they were not able to conceive how the 2016 winner produced the work they did in the same amount of time (6 hours). Even though they were improving incrementally, they were so far behind the winner's work that they couldn't wrap their head around what sorts of improvements they would need to add in order to reach the same level of competency. So it was not just a matter of being consistent. Their mental model was off.
That seems to fit reality and greatness more than the original article. A good mathematician does not simply reach the level of Terence Tao by being consistently good over time.
Software is a particularly good form of this. You can't really just vomit out a codebase that's perfect immediately. If we could do that then there wouldn't be so many versions of even the most mundane tools on your computer.
Even though when you look at a great piece of spftware you can just look ay the whole completed thing, it didn't just pop into existence that way. It was honed over time.
Rather greatness here is simply being close to one's true potential. Whether you are Lebron James or a random bench-warmer, the trick is to show up everyday and consistently improve. LeBron is great because his floor is higher than most other player's ceilings. There are many players who can give a brilliant performance on their day, but can't do much on others. If you've watched any sport, the great players are very very good even on their worst days. On their best days, they are unbeatable.
If you can identify the area where you can achieve the same and put in the work, then you're on the path to greatness (at your level).
I think that that author would be able to improve her article by many orders of magnitudes simply by incorporating the images she is referring to (his own, and the winner's).
That she is incapable of understanding how poor a written comparison of pictures is when making a point of comparison tells me that she might have difficulty understanding things in general, not just the visual art she is, ironically, only able to talk about and not show.
Like, no. In 99% of contexts, you literally just have to do the basics well, and you will already be beating AT LEAST half of your competition, probably closer to 80% of your competition.
Are these motivational articles about "ordinary" careers? If you want an ordinary career just be ordinary, no need to worry about greatness.
For example, many/most? professional musicians struggle to make ends meet, but a small number make millions.
By comparison e.g. tech careers are nowhere near winner-take-all.
To be clear, of course there are CEOs who really are the best, but in my experience yeah someone being a CEO doesn't mean they're smarter or better at business or whatever even than the average employee at the company lol.
Politics provides lots of examples.
"A series of small steps, faithfully completed, does great things".
It's influenced so much of my life. Especially in the small, quiet hours when I think about cutting corners.
I was just talking with my spouse about this in the last couple of days. She’s editor of the main journal in her academic field and junior colleagues ask her how she ended up there. Her answer: by doing my reviews on-time every time.
Great advice. I wish it was listened to more in tech - there's a lot of effort spent trying to jump up to the next big level in commercial performance, at the cost of not just improving things continuously and benefiting from compounding returns.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34331416
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29652029
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25169061
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20167310
etc
To be great, be good repeatably - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20167310 - June 2019 (46 comments)
I realize your point was a different one about how many times the link gets submitted, but on HN, reposts are allowed unless the thread has had significant attention in the last year or so. A few submissions over a few years, involving one major thread, isn't excessive!
(1) the previous submission is 8 hours old or less; or
(2) the previous submission is less than a year (or so) old and got significant attention.
You shouldn't get redirected to a submission that is a few months old and didn't get many upvotes or comments. If the latter is what you're seeing, it might be a bug. Do you remember the link?
is it not do anything well? so try doing a few good things?
I will do the good things well.
also I read "Don't let the great be the enemy of the good"
etc.
But sometimes you have to stop doing a lot of small good things to do great things.
are the good things part of a great thing? or are they merely distractions?
It seems perfectionism is a fault, but really the perfectionists are the ones we read about in the history books.
So in that sense, someone who is good very often is "more good" than someone who is good less often. But in my own personal opinion that doesn't make them great.
Be good often, rather than great once.