Clever, Brave, Persistent
camhashemi.com
camhashemi.com
I wonder: is there anything more predictive of success than being clever, brave, and persistent?
I also don’t buy the skill-will distinction at all, especially since they eventually say matters of will can be “practiced more intentionally”. The bones are there, but the details are kinda arbitrarily determined by ideological bias IMO. I think the author would love modern psychology lit on “Executive Functioning”, has a lot to say about how often a typical human is able to choose to will something!
Good article otherwise. Provocatively written, and refreshingly concise - def made me think. Also, obviously, inspiring!
1. Luck. Plenty of lucky successful people out there. Not to say only luck gets you there, or that luck alone is always enough, but it makes a massive difference.
2. Lack of understanding of risk. Probably not an overall good thing, but a common thing among successful people (IME). Quite often the backstory involves some hideously crazy risks the person took at some point that paid off, but the cost of failure would have been unbearable.
In reality, those bets are all around us. They are the very basis of life itself. Resource scarcity makes us behave as scavengers or hunter-gatherers, depending on the generosity of the environment instead of planting seeds and waiting for the harvest.
I’m focused on the qualities we should focus on in our adulthood to maximize our personally determinable chances of success. I believe all adults should do that for our own lives.
With that view, the question is whether homeless people benefit from being clever, brave, and persistent more than any other mix of traits, for example towards the pursuit of getting off the streets. I would say yes!
What do you think?
The issue is that as resource availability plots towards the corner of the graph, the potential actions become more and more constrained, and inherently, the benefits of being clever and brave are constrained with those limitations. Eventually you get down to the point of eating cockroaches because the option is death from starvation.
It’s certainly a matter of scale, but I think the point is that the scale isn’t linear, and that the benefits of strategic risk tolerance scale exponentially with resource abundance.
As with most things in life, the playing field isn’t level. I guess the real question here is should it be? To what extent does it benefit society at large to make it more level, and how much more level is optimal?
What I meant between skill and will is that a skill is multivariate, whereas will is more unidimensional: you choose to do something or not.
That unidimensionality levels the playing field a lot. Let’s say someone is struggling to communicate well. They might need to learn and practice having an audible voice, avoiding verbal tickets, and having an understandable line of thought. If someone is struggling to be brave, they just need to practice going for what they believe to be right.
That’s not to say that there’s nothing which increases the probability that one may be brave, but I believe it does ultimately come down to that next decision. You may be more brave by having a better track record of bravery, but it can be washed away with a single cowardly decision. The playing field is much more level.
Regarding wealth, it’s a good point. Perhaps I should have clarified that “success” is relative. Success for someone born into poverty is different than someone born into royalty. I’m focused on the post-adulthood qualities we should focus on to maximize our personally determinable chances of success.
What do you think?
You need to get lucky, and if that doesn't work, then yes persistence is the next most important thing – keep trying until you do get lucky.
After becoming adults, luck rarely falls into our laps. We have to make decisions that make us lucky.
Through that lens, bravery is the will to buy a ticket. Many people don’t. Cleverness is the quality of the ticket, since they have different probabilities of success. And persistence is the decision to keep playing the game, even after you’ve lost every other.
So I think the three qualities are aligned with the view that success is just another word for luck.
you can expect to win if you buy a ticket every week for the next 6 million years
An interest in a market/subject that has the potential for growth, and the ability to execute on said interest.
The first one probably has at least a bit of a luck element to it. If your interest ties into a hyped up technology or field (like with crypto a few years ago or AI recently) then opportunities for wealth open up left and right, while if your interests relate to something society/capitalism doesn't value as much, then you're out of luck. At least unless you can force yourself to change interests/passions.
You also need good timing, though you could make a good argument for that aspect being luck, skill or both.
- mental flexibility / open-mindedness
- learning from others / humility
- seeking out breadth
- aggressively addressing blind spots, removing ignorance and correcting weaknesses by constantly evolving to add new, orthogonal competencies. (Note that you can bypass some of this work by working with people who have orthogonal competencies)
These traits are not captured by cleverness. You can be clever, brave and persistent but still fail by exploring too narrowly: applying a narrow range of techniques to a narrow range of problems which turn out to not admit any particularly fruitful paths.
Our brains tend strongly toward consistency (following the same cognitive grooves that we have previously etched in). We naturally shy away from things that are unfamiliar, uncomfortable, or that remind us of past failings. This tendency was probably useful in some evolutionary contexts but very clearly counterproductive when seeking sparse pockets of abundance in high dimensional spaces; cognitive dissonance is usually a strong sign that we have something valuable to learn, and thus dissonance should be approached with curiosity rather than avoided in a dismissive or fearful way. (In the ancient past, cognitive dissonance and unfamiliarity often meant there was a real chance of death if we proceeded in that direction!) Deliberately counteracting this tendency toward consistency, stubbornness and tunnel vision is a consistent theme among people from Charles Darwin to Charlie Munger. [0]
I would even bet that this attribute could replace a fair amount of cleverness. Someone who is persistent, brave, mentally flexible and who aggressively seeks out best practices from others will almost certainly be successful.
[0] An example from a book I read last week: the Google founders were initially stubborn about not putting ads on their site because of preconceived notions that ads would necessarily corrupt the integrity of search ranking. For a while they kept trying to make money by licensing search as a service to other businesses. This simply didn't work, and they were rapidly running out of the money necessary to buy the servers to keep scaling Google with the Web's growth. Fortunately they eventually bumped into Overture which was pioneering pay-per-click advertising. They studied the business model open-mindedly and found a number of distasteful things, but they also saw that these were false fails. More importantly they realized that 1) that business model actually works, 2) Google could maintain search integrity by simply displaying a clear boundary between ads and normal search results, and 3) they could provide real value by returning ads for items and information that people actually wanted based on their search results, and 4) they could avoid the pop-ups and obnoxious banner ads that they detested and keep the search UI clean and respectful. "To their eternal credit, Larry and Sergey both lighted on what was happening with [Overture's] business model and came to understand pretty rapidly what an attractive business that was...it made sense to go where the money was being spent. And it was being spent in the advertising business much more readily than in the licensing business." (The Google Story, p.87-89) There are a number of good lessons in here: the value of aggressively seeking breadth in exposure, learning from others' discoveries, open-mindedness over stubbornness, and the fact that if you view something as a huge tradeoff you are probably just not being creative enough.