Comment by pilgrim0 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pilgrim0 | Hacker News Reader

IMO simply striving to gain power or money is easier than to achieve greatness and mastery, in general. Mainly because one can lie their way into power and money, countless examples of that both at a local level and global level. Now, mastery requires the opposite of lying and pursuing easy to achieve goals. It’s the hardest path because frustration is constant, and it requires one to keep stretching the limits of their own capabilities, and it never gets easier. Self control in that scenario is not necessarily about getting things “done”, but rather to not give up, and keep trying restlessly. The lack of nuance in the summary of that paper makes me think it’s not worth reading it. For me, I have greater admiration and respect for someone who has failed majestically at being great, than for someone who deals purely with median or below median expectations. The former will have amazing stories to tell, the latter usually don’t. The summary given by this blog, and likely the paper, too, is heavily tainted with the idea of “being for others”, rather than the idea of “being for self”. Again, being for others is super easy because it’s simply a matter of controlling the information you give, people do that all the time in social media. This doesn’t work for “being for self” because one can’t fool oneself indefinitely. Like the summary hints at, striving for greatness indeed involves fulfilling many achievements in the process of pursuing the greater achievement. This usually doesn’t count for observers, though, because the crowd has no taste or time for the story, but only for conclusions. Again illustrating how “being for self” is harder, as you’re set to be perceived as less than what you’re really trying to become. A functional remedy for that is simply to not be so public about your desires, which has the upside of protecting you from all sorts of exploitation.

> IMO simply striving to gain power or money is easier than to achieve greatness and mastery

While my ego would want to agree the truth is staying in power and making money exponentially isn't easy either, and you can't lie your way to lifelong power and fuck you money because eventually people figure you out, your reputation plummets and then you have less power and less opportunity to make money.

That said you choose what game you want to play, if you care more about your craft focus on perfecting it even though that's not gonna make you as much money as pursuing money for its own sake.

> you can't lie your way to lifelong power and fuck you money because eventually people figure you out, your reputation plummets and then you have less power and less opportunity to make money.

Surely we do have very notable exceptions to this.

I'm not saying top earners never lie, I'm saying overall they have to be somewhat trustworthy. There are exceptions to this rule of course but I do believe it's a rule.

Take Elon, he does overpromise and you could say he lies about self-driving capabilities but overall he does deliver

I think luck and lying is essentially the method to real wealth. Find me someone who got there without those two elements. Wealth is an expression of your ability to manipulate other people into devoting their labor to your enrichment. You don't get there without some deception.

i.e like your worldview. good to know

?

Both great points. One way to think about it is that pursuit of wealth simply has more competition—the opportunities for the upper tiers are very few relative to the population that aspires to them. It is objectively hard to get there regardless of whether you lie or not. One thing is certainly true though, you can't get there without incredible social leverage of some sort, otherwise why would tens or hundreds of thousands multiples of per capita GDP be routed to you?

The answer is: you kind of have to bring something uniquely valuable to the table. Exceptional skill with people and general intelligence are certainly valuable ingredients, but to really crack the upper tier some kind of domain mastery is what really pushes you over the top. Bonus points if it's a new domain, fast to monetize and scale, hence the rapid rise of tech in the Fortune 500 over the past couple decades through the web and smart phone revolutions.

We just need to look at politicians and voters, to know, that it is not necessarily true, that ones power and opportunities vane, when people discover the truth about ones lies.

Also lying is not that easy. Humans have evolved various tools to spot liars. I would bet that the average person is better at detecting lies and liars than they are at lying.

The exceptions people talk about, of people gaining power by lying, are all exceptionally good at lying.

> "For me, I have greater admiration and respect for someone who has failed majestically at being great, than for someone who deals purely with median or below median expectations. The former will have amazing stories to tell, the latter usually don’t."

This helps give me words to understand my mixed feelings about an old post I found on a language learning forum recently, about a person who shared an ambitious goal that appeared unrealistic to achieve on their proposed timeline of six months. The person aimed to start studying as a complete beginner with a language and achieve a 'C1 level' certification by that time (this is an advanced exam that evaluates for fluency in a spoken debate on a scholarly topic, thorough comprehension of spoken debates on the radio, and the ability to write a timed persuasive essay with a limited number of flaws on a nuanced topic).

The responses to the post at the time were largely discouraging. On the one hand, I quietly agreed from personal experience with the other users that the goal simply wasn't feasible for most people: it would have been ambitious (but doable) to employ the same stretch of time to go from the B2 level (the level just below, which is sufficient for immigration to major countries that used the language officially) to the C1 level. But on the other hand, I did feel sympathetic toward the idea of the person setting an ambitious personal goal. The person even tried to make this concrete by including a plan of intense hours of tutoring and television watching per week. The post was a year old when I read it, so I checked the person's user profile to see if they reported the outcome. But the person never gave a written update (neither a post, nor a comment, nor an edit), though the account was active with recent unrelated comments.

My conclusion is that it's best to be supportive of people with ambitious goals to better themselves, but it's most practical to draw a distinction between goals in the short, medium, and long-term. Ambitious goals for self-betterment on any of these timelines ought to be celebrated. But there are risks with short-term goal that skirt too far outside of realism: this can cause someone to push themselves too much to the point of burnout and quitting (it's unclear, but possible, that this might have happened to that person). In my week-to-week life, I've personally seen beginner's burnout happen with overly-eager novices in martial arts.

A set of attainable short-term goals in service of ambitious goals over a longer timeline would be more sustainable. But if one wishes to pursue an ambitious goal in the short-term, that ought to be okay too—as long as the individual understands the burnout risks upfront, to lower the odds of abandoning their goal if they fall short.

Fantastic comment, thanks

Well said

The thing obstructing all progress is the wanton deployment of generalizations that hold no obligation other than to reflect the reality of their distributor

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