If failure means homelessness, avoid failure.
If failure means you lose your one chance in your life of completing a marathon, be conservative.
If the difference between failing and succeeding is minimal in your life, burn the bridges! This was not his first marathon, and even if he bonked, he'd likely still be able to finish it, albeit slowly.
That's when I realized it was much easier to take those risks when you knew you had a safety net to fall back on and you didn't have to worry about winding up homeless sleeping under an overpass.
If someone bets a million bucks on stock A, but is worth a billion bucks, then that’s not $1m conviction, it’s <1% conviction. And that information is then factored into the size of my bet.
Unfortunately I also learned this the hard way.
43 Calling his disciples to him, Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put more into the treasury than all the others. 44 They all gave out of their wealth; but she, out of her poverty, put in everything—all she had to live on.”
Mostly Folk match expectations, I.e. upsides
Downside fear is a very great motivator
A lack of consequential downsides can make folk sensibly choose to cut their losses and move on.
Sometimes this is invisible as parents bailing you out is not known before and may be a private discussion.
All or nothing downsides can mean folk will work themselves close to death to win ( or just not lose )
It also effects how much someone will gamble to get a unicorn rather than settle for a comfy income
Have the downside discussion early on
- What impact does the change have?
- How do you get out of that change, and how long does that take?
- And what is your confidence into the change, and the bail-out plan?
And honestly, if you have a high-confidence, fast bailout plan, you can be downright brazen/#yolo about changes. We've recently had to update a central and critical IDP, but we eventually realized: We have the old docker images, and it has a 200MB sized DB. We can dump + restore that in 2 minutes. So if the upgrade goes wrong, we have high confidence to rollback in like 5 minutes. At such a point.. why not just go with it?
Similar things are developing with Postgres upgrades. Setup 1 leader + 3 replicas, upgrade 2 replicas, failover, see how much explodes and at worst, fall back. If we can test beforehand, alright.
Other teams plan complicated upgrades requiring coordinated actions of 6 other teams. And like 3 know how to possibly take back that change? And like 4 know what to actually do? Ugh, this ended up in a fun weekend.
The author’s analogy was about burning ships, not bridges, but your quote about burning bridges reminds me of related scenario I’m seeing more frequently among young people I’ve mentored: The idea that burning bridges is not a big deal because there are always more opportunities.
I’m in a big Slack where people come to ask for advice on tech careers. An alarming number of questions in recent years are from people who want to leave their jobs with a bang: Quitting without notice, intentionally making things difficult for their successor, unloading their grievances with specific people as they leave, posting big angry messages on the company Slack on their last day, and other ill-advised ideas.
They’re always disappointed when the Slack unanimously tells them it’s a bad idea to intentionally burn bridges like that. I guess it’s not until later in your career that you realize the value of being able to call on old managers and coworkers for referrals or job opportunities. They see leaving a job as the last time they’ll ever see any of those people. We have to remind them every time that networking is important and therefore they don’t want to leave a lasting negative impression on a place where they spent years building a reputation. Just do your two weeks notice and quietly exit.
Tangential, but it comes up enough in these scenarios about taking on new risks that I thought I’d mention it.
I have found that a bad network is often worse than no network in that the type of people that work in a way you hate will lead you to jobs that are not right for you. Going back to the point above, this all depends on your risk capacity. I speak that as someone with a high risk capacity. For someone who has not built up reserves, that is terrible advice.
Strongly disagree here. There are many marathons. Push yourself as hard as you can. Worst case, you miss and can’t attempt again. But you had fun and have plenty of other things you can do with your time and physique.
I very strongly want to distance myself and my argument from the ones put forward in the video. Furthermore, I also strongly shun the rhetoric in that video that mostly reminds me of a Ben Shapiro "owns" video. I do not find that kind wall building useful or good.
I was specifically countering this assumption. Our human mind doesn't have absolute hierarchy of preferences, they might even be circular (A is preferred to B, B is preferred to C and C is preferred to A). If I asked the mountaineer, would he like to be homeless. He would say no. But his context specific wish is to die on a mountain trying to summit which contradicts his desire to not be homeless.