Ambition can be poison
37signals.com
37signals.com
The objective of a car race is to win.. especially if you have the best team and car. You should be somewhat dejected if you didn't. It is the nature of competitive events.
This article has first world rich boy problems written all over it.
A far better example of this topic would be a friend of mine. He started his own business. Worked day and night to get it running. He always said he would enjoy the spoils of his work. He didn't. He had more and more success but he got sucked into chasing ambition and achievement. He never eased up or stepped back. His life became chasing More. His wife left him. He continued to work excessive hours until he completely burnt out. It was only when he met someone else that he learnt to take a step back and appreciate and enjoy what he had created.
If i enter a race in my Punto it is going to be fun. I have little expectation of winning, I am there to say I did it.
DHH went to Le Man's to win. He didn't. This isn't poisonous ambition. This is missing the target.. much like this article. If he went to experience it, got caught up in winning and didn't enjoy any of it then perhaps he would have some sort of point.
I thought that was his point. He's super successful but still not happy, and it seems to me like this was part of him working through that. I mean, the whole tone of the article seemed, to me, to say "gee, it seems like I am pretty ungrateful, and this is a problem."
I think you might be right but he certainly could have been more clear.
Hard to differentiate "I'm so rich and successful I have problems you can't even understand. First World Problems."
vs
"What's wrong with my mentality that I can't enjoy coming in 2nd place in a race I've loved my whole life and only dreamed about competing in at a high level."
If he went to experience it, got caught up in winning and didn't enjoy any of it then perhaps he would have some sort of point.
How do you know he didn't get into racing for the experience of it? Seems like that's what his whole point is -- he got 2nd at Le Man's ('rich boy' or not, still a good thing), but instead of enjoying such an achievement, he's caught up in the fact that he didn't win.
It was effortless. It was easy to play with these things. It was like uncorking a bottle: Everything flowed out effortlessly. I almost tried to resist it! There was no importance to what I was doing, but ultimately there was. The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate.
[1] http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~kilcup/262/feynman.html
DHH is ambitious, successful, and contributed a lot of value (much of it open-source) to the world. His disappointment does not justify this sort of demeaning commentary -- least of all on HN.
Just because he created value somewhere else doesn't mean he is immune to commentary on what he does (and then blogs about, no less).
Why is it okay to dismiss his example as "just another privileged rich guy" and then you give an example of a friend who started a business. Being in a position to start a business is extremely privileged compared to most people.
I'm not in the financial position to start a business, can I dismiss your example as "just another privileged rich guy (relative to me)"?
Not my impression at all. I read it as quite humble and self-insightful. He's basically debugging himself and pinpointing how his utility function works, and hinting at how it might be improved (the bit about flow at the end of the post).
Fill your bowl to the brim
and it will spill.
Keep sharpening your knife
and it will blunt.
Chase after money and security
and your heart will never unclench.
Care about people's approval
and you will be their prisoner.
Do your work, then step back.
The only path to serenity.
Stretch a bow to the very full,
And you will wish you had stopped in time;
Temper a sword-edge to its very sharpest,
And you will find it soon grows dull.
When bronze and jade fill your hall.
It can no longer be guarded.
Wealth and place breed insolence.
That brings ruin in its train.
When your work is done, then withdraw!
Such is Heaven's Way.
It may be difficult for us to relate to his particular situation, but if we look for the lesson he's trying to teach and apply it to our own lives, even superficially, we may learn something of value.
I am much more appreciative of the Journey now than I was when I was younger.
I'm not talking about money, because that's actually fairly equalized. Great developers and bad ones at the same age/experience level and location will be within 20% of each other, in general, salary-wise. It's all the other stuff: esteem, autonomy, creative control, advancement. If you don't get that, and if you're also forced to subordinate to others, you lose motivation pretty quickly.
Most people do VC-funded startups to buy their way out of having to work, but most of these companies have horrible cultures and make working a lot worse, which is counterproductive to the spirit of that goal. As a society, we should instead try to fix work, because we're a long way from being able to buy everyone out of it.
This statement captures the essential conflict that I have sought (and largely) resolved within myself.
The term "reward disparities" is the cancer that eats away at appreciating the journey. In my case it was just code for "winning" or "not winning". You won if you got the highest reward, if you did not get the highest reward you did not win. Letting go of 'winning' or 'losing' removes the reward disparities as an influence on enjoying the journey. That was essentially what dhh wrote, and what I resonate with. I'm much happier having realized that I was letting those disparities destroy my appreciation of those around me and the opportunities I got to participate in.
The Stoic view - "The perfect archer is concerned to take perfect aim, to do everything an archer can do to hit the target. Actually hitting the target is secondary. If any unpredictable gust of wind carries the arrow away and it misses the target, this does not reflect on his mastery of the art and hence does not really affect the archer."
Miyamoto Musashi addresses the same issue in his "Book of Five Rings"
To set the cause above renown,
To love the game beyond the prize,
To honor while you strike him down,
The foe that comes fearless eyes.
To hold the life of battle good,
And dear the land that gave thee birth,
and dearer yet the brotherhood
that binds the brave of all the earth.
I love this quote, it succinctly puts in words the uneasy feeling I've had with ambition.
Luckily, I was thrown into a foreign country where I was able to feel failure every single day at school until I was no longer overly resistant to it.
- If all these facts are indeed true then it does not seem too ambitious to expect to win the race. And one should be meaningfully disappointed at losing. I think there's some confusion here between over achieving and under achieving.
If they were such underdogs (resources, experience, team) that a Top 25 finish seemed unlikely then I can understand how beating yourself up over 2nd would be too overly ambitious. This though seems like healthy "We kind of under achieved given what was possible going into this"
Edit: Maybe not under achieved but understandably disappointed we didn't go one spot better.
Wow. Having done plenty of amateur racing myself, I can say that his accomplishment is an amazing feat of determination, focus and skill. One day I'd love to do the same - not out of ambition, but because I love to race.
Determination can be poison. Curiosity, compassion, and patience, too -- all are good traits to have but will poison you from within if you start molding your entire life around them, without moderation.
I like my eggs with Sriracha, but they're gonna be pretty bad eggs if I drown them in it.
DHH's point seems to be falling on deaf ears for a large portion of the audience out of resentment for his financial status rather than embraced for exemplifying the law of diminishing returns at the emotional level.
This post is about the realization that an imbalanced life can rob from you the satisfaction of living. A singular focus can propel a person or team, but each incremental improvement comes at a higher cost than the last. Becoming the best is more exhaustive emotionally than it is financially; there is a certain solitude at the top. Rapid growth is chaotic—harder to manage, especially emotionally. I've noticed a trend of deeply emotional, saddening stories of this ambition overload and solitude DHH talks about, right here on HN.
Within our community it's easy to compare ourselves to our peers. Someone we know had their made-it-big moment, but they obviously just got lucky, or we're better than them. It's easy to seek validation through "success" or some external ideal, fueled by ambition and blinded by our own self-interest.
Slow down. Find a mentor who's been there. Learn to enjoy the process. Look to deliver happiness to those around you, and receive it graciously when they give it back. Don't seek happiness for yourself; create it for someone else.
—Melville, Moby-Dick
I have tried in sports and in other areas of life to win and be awesome and it does sting when you come up just short. I've failed so much that it's easier for me to accept it now. What other choice do I have? Get debilitatingly bitter over things? That's not productive.
The way he writes about it doesn't sound right to me. Did he write one big long humblebrag?
Thumbs up for this, but let me add that it can lie in the fulfillment of the unexpected, the happiness of discovery and exploration, and of ending up creating things that are very different from what you set up to create in the first place. This kind of "exploratory happiness" is my drug of choice ;)
Ambition is no bad thing, as long as it's tempered. I think a problem with this piece is that he identified his issue, but never asked the killer question:
If he (and his team) had been both ambitious and thoroughly enjoying the entire experience, would they have won? There's much to be said about "being in the zone", and it feels from his writing that his ambition dulled this side for him. I'd be interested to hear what the experiences of the 1st and 3rd placed teams were, in comparison.
Of course, this is his leisure, so the question is doubly important: if you're in a business you can rationalize not enjoying the experience of making your $500 million victory whilst enjoying the outcome. In leisure, the entire point is enjoying the whole thing.
[0] http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1ff8j3/java_on_...
I sincerly thought he was going to talk about how the fact that someone died in a car crash two days ago at Le Mans ruined the party. Then I realized he was talking about his own ambition. Not saying he's selfish because of that though, it's pretty human to care first about your own life. http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/motor/2013/06/22/allan-...
Not true.
The use of "universally" should be limited to a few universal truth and for jokes about people thinking their limited scope is the universe.
Examples of probable universal truths (other than mathematic or physic laws): - Mother universally smile to their infants. (Few exceptions) - Incest taboo is near-universal. - Fear of the unknown is almost universal.
Wrongs: - Men universally prefer big waist and boobs. - Religion is universal. - Everyone loves pets/sport/music.
And no, the quote above is not a figure de style, it is just poorly thought writing.
Poison implies something that slowly devours you and your body with little ability to control/quell it. I see ambition as inherently good. It's the "constant pursuit of perfection".
This "poison" is easy to deal with - just go again next year and win it.
At what cost, though? From DHH's post:
When you expect to win, it’s merely a checked box if you do — after the initial rush of glory dies down.
Winning isn't everything, and in fact can mean very little. Spending exorbitant sums of money (LMP2 isn't cheap) and risking your life (not everyone who started Le Mans on Saturday lived to finish) might not be worth it.
You are supporting the author's point.
Ambition is simply a tool for achieving goals, thus it cannot be inherently good or bad. It is the worthiness and nature of the goals which define whether a particular tool is good or bad. For example, I would argue the "constant pursuit of perfection" in child-rearing is bad approximately always.
But without ambition, were you alive to be poisoned in the first place?
> In the right dose
---
I casually watched the race and it was cool seeing dhh on the board. I was rooting for his #24 car!
This is before even considering his influence because of Ruby on Rails.
I think you missed the entire point of the article.
> the greatest motor race in the world: 24 hours of Le Mans
The entire southern half of the U.S. begs to differ. Personally, I'd go with the Monaco Grand Prix if we're talking cars. If we're talking about "motor races" in general, it'd definitely be the Isle of Man TT. Hell, any one of the 18 yearly Moto GP races is probably better than Le Mans.
Whatever you think of DHH, there is an important point in this article, and thanks to the people who upvoted this comment, the people talking about it are relegated to the bottom of the thread.
Maybe making younger low scored/recently upvoted comments sink even slower could fix that?
In the meantime I use Chrome extension to fold those.
if a comment is truly so mean or dumb that the moderators choose to kill it, allow them the option of applying a karma penalty to anyone who upvoted it (which should come with an automated warning message so people know why their karma suddenly dropped). It's, in a sense, a way of voting on votes.
People might still upvote such comments, but at least then they'll know they're taking a risk by violating HN standards.
The reality is that DHH's material success has little to do with whether setting overly ambitious goals sets people up for psychologically painful failures. If anything, it accentuates his point; you'd think that having DHH's resources would cushion the blow of not winning the 24 Hours Of Le Mans.
The fact that you fail to understand why so many people agreed with that comment is equally mortifying. Is your blind sympathy for "rich guy problems" overpowering your ability to read between the lines?
Do you really think that he thought "I'm going to brag, I just need an angle!"? Or, should he simply avoid writing because his situation is more privileged than most people?
If you think Le Mans is not one of the most competitive and prestigious races in the world you are sorely mistaken. To say it is any more or less prestigious than winning Monaco is a purely subjective manner. The idea that the opinion of motorsport fans in the southern US has any weight is laughable. They are generally the most ignorant of other forms of motorsport and least well informed motorsport fans.
It is worth pointing out however that DHH does not compete at the highest level in Le Mans. He is one class below.
Of course it's subjective, and anyone who would declare a particular race "the greatest in the world" is obviously full of it. Someone just couldn't resist stroking his own ego a little more. I know DHH has a reputation for being arrogant and opinionated, but this post was over the top.
> The idea that the opinion of motorsport fans in the southern US has any weight is laughable. They are generally the most ignorant of other forms of motorsport and least well informed motorsport fans.
I bet you couldn't walk 10 feet at a NASCAR event without tripping over someone who could fix your car. I'd be amazed if you could find a single person like that sitting in the stands of a Formula 1 Grand Prix event.
Do people not have personal favourites that they might, even with self-realising bias, call "the greatest in the world"? And if you were then talking, or writing, about this awesome experience, wouldn't you easily use those words to describe your feelings, rather than to statistically analyse race rankings?
But then, that's just my opinion as someone who races a modern, fuel injected, naturally aspirated, RWD vehicle. A vehicle which has a pushrod V8.
Likewise, you are off base both on whether Le Mans is one of the greatest motorsport races, and in focusing in on that seriously non-central part of the article.
Haha, that's exactly what I was thinking.
It's the humble brag.
He talks about ambition like everyone thinks it's great.
I don't know him personally, but if all of his projects get in the way of being a decent father, then it ain't worth it, in my opinion.
You wrap the bragging around a larger point which acts like the red herring to distract from the bragging. So you get to mention your "fastest and most reliable car, the best-prepared team, and two of the fastest team mates in the business" appearing almost sheepish and incidental.
Or here is another of the same, saying something like this while making a point about anything:
"This experience has been a painful realization of everything that Alfie Kohn wrote about in Punished by Rewards and a reminder of the wisdom of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow."
I have no clue who that is. But it sounds impressive which most things you have never heard of tend to do.
The entire southern half of the U.S. also begs to differ with the rest of the world on when the Earth was formed, whether homosexuals deserve marriage rights, and other things. Hint: they're usually wrong.
Judging the entire region by the loudmouths just gives them an even louder voice than they had. There are plenty of great people in the south, maybe if you'd shut up with your generalizations and stereotypes they'd engage the rest of the world and drown out the bigots.