alt Hacker NewsBeing too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage
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I think this is why it helps a lot to build something you actually use. Because then, the barometer for what is good becomes a lot more defined: "Did I solve the problem I had", and then slowly build up from there.
Instead of trying to imagine a thing that someone else might or might not need.
I've been slowly chipping away at a heroku alternative called Canine [1] for the better part of a year now on the side, and for once, I don't feel tons of pressure or self loathing for not working on it quickly enough.
I use it every day now, and whenever I come across something that I wish was a little better (at the moment, understanding how much memory is used by the cluster is a pet peeve), I ruminate on it for a few days before hopping in and making some changes. No more, no less. It helps me get away from "what is the perfect solution", to "can i fix this thing that annoys me right now"
To be strategic, you think hard enough how to get somewhere and carefully plan and eliminate unknowns until you reach a point when getting there is no longer interesting.
Congratulations: you have successfully turned your cool idea into a chore. It’s just a lot of trivial typing and package management and it might not even be all that impressive when it is done.
Your idea is not at all a path well-trodden, but it is a path down which you’ve sent a high-resolution camera FPV drone so many times that you doubt you will see anything new in person.
What might happen then is that you try to keep it interesting by making it more impressive and raising the bar, by continuing to think and plan even harder. Why not write it in Rust? Why not make it infinitely extensible? More diagrams, hundreds more of open tabs…
It can absolutely lead to cool ideas with strategic and well-defined execution plans. Unfortunately, it is also difficult to break this loop and actually implement without an external force or another mind giving you some reframing.
In the spirit of July 4, John Lewis Gaddis explores a similar theme in "On Grand Strategy". This is one of my favourite explorations, where he compares Abraham Lincoln and John Quincy Adams:
> Compare Lincoln’s life with that of John Quincy Adams. Great expectations inspired, pursued, and haunted Adams, depriving him, at critical moments, of common sense. Overestimations by others—which he then magnified—placed objectives beyond his reach: only self-demotion brought late-life satisfaction. No expectations lured Lincoln apart from those he set for himself: he started small, rose slowly, and only when ready reached for the top. His ambitions grew as his opportunities expanded, but he kept both within his circumstances. He sought to be underestimated.
The point -- being too ambitious can slow you down if you're not strategic.
It's funny, I was aspiring to be a game developer when I was a child and developed some games on Game Maker when I was like 12, and those were the best games I made.
Then, I attended to University but never found my skill enough to develop a game worthy of my tastes.
> At semester's end, all the best photos came from the quantity group.
My parents once owned a photography studio. My stepfather often said something like, "A great photographer doesn't only take great photos; he takes many photos of various quality, and never shows anyone the bad ones."
The first two sections reminded me of an observation I've made about myself: the more I delay "doing the thing" and spend time "researching" or "developing taste", the more I turn into a critic instead of a creator.
> Your taste develops faster than your skill
> "the quality group could tell you why a photograph was excellent"
They are critics now. People with a huge taste-skill gap are basically critics — first towards themselves and gradually towards others. I don't want to generalize by saying "critics are just failed creators", but I've certainly found it true for myself. Trying to undo this change in me and this article kind of said all the words I wanted to hear. :)
It's both dense and beautifully written. Feels like every paragraph has something profound to say. This kind of "optimizing-for-screenshot-shares" writing usually gets overdone, but since this actually had substance, it was amazing to read.
(See how I turned into a critic?)
> At semester's end, all the best photos came from the quantity group.
The quantity group learned something that cannot be taught: that excellence emerges from intimacy with imperfection, that mastery is built through befriending failure, that the path to creating one perfect thing runs directly through creating many imperfect things.
This reminded me of Roger Federer, who has won 82% of all matches but only 54% of all points.
I really enjoyed this article and also believe that in many cases doing is superior to planning.
Just a word of caution: the author doesn’t account for cost. All examples given are relatively low-cost and high-frequency: drawing pictures, taking photos, writing blog posts.
The cost-benefit ratio of simply doing changes when costs increase.
Quitting your high-paid job to finally start the startup you’ve been dreaming of is high-cost and rather low-frequency.
I don’t want to discourage anyone from doing these things, but it’s obvious to me that the cost/frequency aspect shouldn’t be neglected.
I’m very good at one thing (thank goodness), but I do some other things that I’m not good at, to remind myself how nice it feels to just do something without the pressure of having to be good at it.
I also think being a beginner at other things reminds me that failure is what learning feels like, which gives me some perspective when my “real” job feels difficult although I’m supposedly so good at it.
When I look back at big things I’ve done, they’re all the result of just “doing the thing” for a long time and making thousands of course corrections. Never the result of executing the perfect crystalline plan.
>The quantity group would be graded on volume: one hundred photos for an A, ninety photos for a B, eighty photos for a C, and so on.
> The quality group only need to present one perfect photo.
> At semester's end, all the best photos came from the quantity group.
I think the more interesting experiment would be to give both groups the same assignment in terms of volume, but tell the quality group they had to submit N photos but designate one as their choice, to be graded on the quality of it. I think this would be interesting because my hypothesis is that people differ in what they consider "good" and the quality group would end up indicating the "wrong" photo as their choice nearly 100% of the time.
> “There is a moment, just before creation begins, when the work exists in its most perfect form in your imagination.”
I think TS Eliot said this exact thing, but more poetically, in “The Hollow Men” (1925):
> “Between the conception and the creation, falls the Shadow”
Which remains one of my all time fave pieces of writing. So much said in so few words.
This syndrome is called "eternal child" (puer aeternus) in psychology.
You were destined to great things. You were exceptional as a child, you learnt to associate your great potential with all the good in yourself, you built your identity around it. You were ahead of your peers in elementary school, whatever you applied towards - you exceled at.
So you value that potential as the ultimate good, and any decision which reduces it in favour of actually doing something - you fear and avoid with all your soul. Any decision whatsoever murders part of that infinite potential to deliver something subpar (at best - it's not even guaranteed you achieve anything).
Over time this fear takes over and stunts your progress. You could be great, you KNOW you have this talent, but somehow you very rarely tap into it. You fall behind people you consider "mediocre" and "beneath you". Because they seem to be able to do simple things like it's the simplest thing in the world, while you somehow can't "motivate" yourself to do the "simple boring things".
When circumstances are just right you are still capable of great work, but more and more the circumstances are wrong, and you procrastinate and fail. You don't understand why, you focus on the environment and the things you fail to achieve. You search for the right productivity hack or the exact right domain that will motivate you. But any domain has boring repeative parts. Any decision is a chance to do sth OK in exchange of infinite potential. It never seems like it's worth it, so you don't do it.
You start doubting yourself. Maybe you're just an ordinary lazy person? Being ordinary is the thing you fear the most. It's a complete negation of your identity. You can be exceptional genius with problems, you take that any time if the alternative is "just a normal guy".
If this sounds like you, I highly recommend reading "The Problem of the Puer Aeternus".
You can definitely skip a lot of the tedious bits where the author essential copy-pastes other books for analysis, but this is a very common pattern where people tend to hold themselves back because doing the unambitious, rather pedestrian next step forward requires one to face these preconceived notions about oneself, e.g. "I should've done this long ago", etc.
I love the term "taste-skill gap". I work with people who are good at making movies and people who are good at making video games. There is always this awkward thing that people who are good in one area are convinced they would be great in the other. I don't think I have ever met a film director that didn't think he would be a great video game designer if he put the time into it and really good game designers (well the narrative game ones) don't understand why they wouldn't be a good choice to direct a movie.
Taste comes quicker and can be more generalized. It's also pretty easy to express. Skill has many hidden components, takes experience to hone and is typically very specific.
Thank you for sharing, it's a fantastic article. When you feel like giving up, that's when the real work begins.
What is "too ambitious"?
Are there dreamers who overthink and never get anything done? Absolutely!
Are there also people who do what other people regularly say is impossible? Also an absolute yes.
Ambition has nothing to do with it. There are doers and there are talkers.
Being lazy is a clever form of productivity
“I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.”
― Bill Gates
Good article. Verified by years of observing my own and others' failures and successes. Do-Learn is a great positive motto. Compared to the nihilistic break things, or fail fast, etc.
Must say, it was a bit long. At the beginning, and after looking up the author, I confess to thinking "Oh no another pretty face influencer". But it built up very well. My respect level increased a lot when I saw Olin College of Engineering on her bio. Had checked it out for my daughter and came away very impressed by their approach. Most all American engineering colleges are so full of theory and so little doing, when it should be the other way around. Kudos.
Recognizing delusions is probably the highest form of wisdom. It can help us avoid entire wasted lives.
That said, "Do-learn" sort of begs the question, and it's only a half-step. How do you know when you're polishing a turd? Who's to say this cycle is virtuous or vicious?
The second part is that after you drop your self-centered delusion of seeking perfection, you actually start to find and solve other people's problems.
It might not be pretty or fun, but that's what has value.
If you're interested in building companies, the key factor is not the technology or even the team, but the market -- the opportunity to help.
Then it's not really your ambition: it's a need that needs filling, and the question is whether you can find the people and means to do it, and you'll find both the people and the means are inspired not by your ambition, but by your vision for how to fill the need, in a kind of self-selected alignment and mutual support.
I've faced this problem for almost every task in my life, from the creative stuff already mentioned too less obvious things, like socializing (Seeing what you said wrong without knowing how you could have said it better). Because of this, the only things I have been able to bear "practicing" are ones that are outside of any public view. Ones were my taste was nonexistent. Code is one of them. We don't see much code (good or bad) in public, and so it's one of few areas where my taste could only improve after I saw the failures in my own work after I had produced it, rather than during.
I thought I wasn’t going to enjoy the article from the title, but it turned out to be bang on the money with regards to creativity.
This resonates a lot with me. In fact it's a trait that has made me unhappy for as long as I can remember.
I'm seeing a therapist later this month because in a talk with my GP she saw strong enough hints of ADHD to send me there, and the kind of situations and some feelings talked about in the article came up a lot in the conversation.
I size up my oil paints against the old masters, not the old ladies in the atelier. I paint miniatures way better than average but hang around with Golden Demon winners so I always find myself wanting. Can play beautiful Renaissance pieces on my uke, but infuriatingly not at a professional performance level. Can win many sim races, but not against the top 0.1%, yet I size myself against their telemetry and laptimes. I dabble in Chess but being forever stuck around lowly 1300 ELO makes me feel dumb. My dead side projects cemetery has subdirectories approaching 3 figures. I go out and cycle with my brother but I huff and puff while he tops the Strava segments and wins the regional amateur championship again.
So too many days I just sit and do nothing, or just look for something else to enjoy for a few months until I become an unhappy promising beginner at yet another thing, adding to the overall problem.
If you consider any creative endeavor as a burden, I suggest you relook at why you're doing it. You have to love the process (not just the outcome), and in this case, that "gap" Ira Glass refers to usually acts like fuel on the fire.
Let's be honest, this is us taking a few terms from a few neuroscience and cognitive psychology papers and running with it.
There are two claims in this post: Initial goals get adjusted as we discover operating constraints, and it is easier to work with fewer variables to pay attention to.
I didn't like these sentences in this post:
- "I see this in wannabe <people trying>..."
- "Here's what happens to those brave enough to actually begin ..."
Here the author was brave enough to put themselves on a pedestal; like a true wannabe profound.
I'm just starting a software project and, again, it is ambitious and somewhat complex (multi-sig signoff solution). I envy people that can identify a simple project and execute it successfully. But the challenge of building something more complex is what's interesting for me. And I'm not sure I would have more success with a simpler project, I'd get bored rapidly.
I don't get this at all.
WTF is "too ambitious"? When people *don't* want to make the only necessary "sacrifice" aka exchange/trade off? It's usually time that is otherwise spend on something else, which includes family, friends, other hobbies but the latter can be taken off the list because implicit to ambition is the higher priority of the thing or state aspired and worked on.
The ability to recognize quality grows quicker because of the amount of people who have successfully made the exchange and either improved their skill or found and implemented acceptable workarounds.
Most post-modern creation is fractal remixing. It's just effort put into time. The most untalented people can create superb stuff if they just keep grinding adequate levels of skill and workarounds.
The beauty, IMO, is in accepting the process of others and to support, motivate, inspire them, with anything one can provide. That will help them grow both, skill and taste, which in turn augments your world and raises your ambition.
Look at it this way: if you poison your neighbors you lower the quality in your environment which lowers the quality of your personal IO, input and output. You even lower the standards of the evaluation of your IO. Both, those of others and your own. You basically keep yourself low, and thus, your own creation. That applies to content, products, code and any writing.
People are stuck in the old hierarchical ways of thinking. That's not even annoying. Please hone your sense for quality. You don't owe that to the old world and guard but it would prove their effort was not for nothing.
I find it surprisingly difficult to lower my standards once I feel committed to an idea. I wish this article leaned a little more into ways to address that sort of dilemma.
Don't get me wrong, I agree fully with the article. I put it into practice plenty well in many areas of my life. I've made great progress with my diet, self-care, and physical fitness routines by keeping my goals SMART.
And yet, a few years ago, I got this idea in my head for a piece of software I wanted to create that is, if not too ambitious, then clearly asking all of me and then some. The opening paragraph of the article really resonated with me -- "The artwork that will finally make the invisible visible."
And so, I've chipped away at the idea here and there, but I find myself continually put off by "the gap" - even though I know it's to be expected and is totally human.
Part of me wishes I had never dared to dream so big and wishes I could let the idea go entirely. Another part of me is mad and ashamed for thinking like that about a personal dream.
Anyway, don't know where I'm going with all this. Just felt like remarking on the article since it struck close to home.
P.S. if you haven't seen the Ira Glass video, I'd take a look. It's pretty inspirational. Here's Part 3 which is what the article was referencing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2wLP0izeJE
It's closely related to another truth:
Unconstrained curiosity is a vice, not virtue.
> your brain begins to treat planning as accomplishing
So project managers accomplish nothing?
Well-written but not really anything new or groundbreaking. I think most people are well aware of this kind of idealization/perfection that prevents progress.
I've definitely spent more time designing "the perfect system" than using it. There's a seductive comfort in planning that real execution just doesn't offer because actual work has feedback, friction, failure
There's the flip side to it too... I'm just waiting for an overly ambitious non-technical colleague in what should be a technical management role to overreach in terms of role and promotion.
I read the title. Immediate reaction:
"Jeepers - they're on to me!"
The «taste-skill» thing is something you often see in music. Those with great taste, but limited ability, tend to pursue roles like promotion, agents, producing, etc.
"The gap" is probably what allowed humans to evolve complex solutions. Rather than just bang things together, they had to think of how they would do it before they even began. That seems to be the differentiator between other animals and humans: we can shave a lot more yaks.
I have spent a year on a project that is not really much closer to completion than when I started. But I have been shaving yaks like a motherfucker. Research, design iterations, acquiring tools, making jigs, creating space. (I have also wasted a lot of time due to coping with ADHD and depression)
I could have done it sooner if I had compromised more. But I wasn't yet experienced enough to know what compromises to make and still end up with an acceptable solution. Many things have come up that I didn't expect in my initial dream. If I'd known then what I know now, I would have dialed things down.
Ignorance amplified my ambition, and my ambition exceeded my grasp. But if you never give up, it's not sabotage: it's perseverance. And I refuse to quit. My grasp is getting stronger. I'm moving forward faster, getting better. So my ambition (in this case) is a stupid form of self-improvement. It turns out I'm not building a camper. I'm building Me.
> The algorithmic machinery of attention has, of course, engineered simple comparison. But it has also seemingly erased the process that makes mastery possible. A time-lapse of someone creating a masterpiece gets millions of views. A real-time video of someone struggling through their hundredth mediocre attempt disappears into algorithmic obscurity.
Honestly, I have found that the most important reason something gets a million views is because it got 999,999 views (so the algorithm likes it more). Lots of popular content doesn't demonstrate that mastery at all; it demonstrates a dumbed-down presentation of relatively little actual content, while the really good stuff is something you only stumble upon by random chance, buried in hundredth-mediocre-attempts.
> I see this in wannabe founders listening to podcasts on loop, wannabe TikTokkers watching hours of videos as “research,”
... Which feeds right into that. It becomes too easy to mistake fluff for content and convince yourself of the value of that research. I think it's something specific to watching video content, too.
One of my own possibly-self-sabotaging ambitions is video rendering software that I would then use to produce my own content. But then, on top of the actual software, I would have to figure out how to actually write the shorter-but-still-compelling scripts that I imagine to be possible. And I would spend the whole time expecting my work to be ignored and despairing over that anyway.
I started my most ambitious project in February. A few years ago I wouldn't have even dreamed of ever starting let alone finishing it, but now I have a Claude Code Max Pro subscription and it goes forward in a steady pace. I expect the first version of it to be finished within the year. Even it's written mostly by AI, it's still a lot of work to get it to do the right thing, but I'm getting better at it.
Clearly, this author could sell ice cubes to penguins. What a splended piece!
The word that kept coming to my mind as I read this was convergence.
I enjoyed the writing here a lot - it’s a nice, clearly explained idea. I can recognize myself in this.
Even if some people are not ready for the day, it cannot always be night.
Prioritisation! It's very hard. Deciding what to do and therefore what not to do.
Have to admit (I added to a snark comment about Substack and productivity blogs when this was posted), it addresses a problem that is plaguing myself.
Still not sure if it will help me overcome this, but the "quitting point" concept and the drawing example made it a good read for me.
Not 100% the same, but I've also heard there is a correlation between procrastrination and perfectionism, narcisissm (not only grandiosity, also vulnerabity and low self-esteem):
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11353843/#sec3-ijer...
Relevant proverbs are plenty... "There is no failure except in no longer trying" etc
Rare Hackernews W. Thanks for posting. This is a really great read.
> being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage
Nice, I‘m clever!
Ambition is the enemy of consistency.
I'll be fired if I create my worst
Scope creep.
I tend to find if it isn't ambitious enough, than it is just low hanging fruit for competitors... Chances are someone already published something similar.
The market usually doesn't want advanced technology, but rather the comfortable nostalgic dysfunctional totems they always purchased in the past. =)
"The Man In The White Suit" ( 1951)
> the "taste-skill discrepancy." Your taste (your ability to recognize quality) develops faster than your skill (your ability to produce it). This creates what Ira Glass famously called "the gap," but I think of it as the thing that separates creators from consumers.
This resonated quite strongly with me. It puts into words something that I've been feeling when working with AI. If you're new to something and using AI for it, it automatically boosts the floor of your taste, but not your skill. And you end up never slowing down to make mistakes and learn, because you can just do it without friction.