From my experience in the tech industry I can say with utmost confidence that "not smart"/"talentless" people who are determined and hard-working lead to significantly better real world results than geniuses who are lazy, unmotivated or overall not action oriented. The vast majority of problems at any company are easy and don't need any big technological breakthroughs to solve. They are instead held back by (1) lack of effort or (2) lack of organization. If you can manage either (or preferably both) you will have a good career in the industry.
PSA for people that believe they are somewhat smart, have cool ideas yet seemingly no power whatsoever to actually work on them. If you believe you are chronically lazy and feel it is causing issues in your life. If you feel you are living at 10% your true potential:
Get tested for ADHD. If that is your problem, know that the chemical fix for it is extremely effective.
It's taken me 30+ years of self-hate, a suggestion en passant from someone that I might have ADHD, diagnosis, medication and my life has completely turned around in ways unimaginable before (3 years and counting).
Email's in the profile if you wanna chat about it.
EDIT: I did write a post last year about my experience and research on the topic: https://combo.cc/adhd/
> If you imagine someone with 100 percent determination and 100 percent intelligence, you can discard a lot of intelligence before they stop succeeding. But if you start discarding determination, you very quickly get an ineffectual and perpetual grad student.
It really depends what you're referring to as tech work here... Low IQ people in my opinion are almost incapable of tackling certain technical problems – generally those which require complex maths or reasoning ability.
That said, most tech work isn't that. In fact, most tech work isn't even technical. Designers or product owners are tech workers, but don't necessarily need to be "smart". And even the technical roles tend to be basic UI work or building a CRUD backend in which case you're 100% correct.
There's an old interview with Rasmus Lerdorf somewhere on the net, where he talks about just hacking something together and make it work. It doesn't have to be good or the best way of doing things, then some "computer science guy" can come along and fix it later.
In many ways that's a good way of creating security issues, but it's also an excellent way of actually getting a feature build. The smarter people is being given a sense of direction, by being shown the bad implementation and tasked with improving it.
You still have to be reasonably intelligent to be personally well-organized, which is a key component. Also, getting a company (or just your group) organized and maintaining task-focus is definitely a type of talent. So yeah, you don't have to be a math genius or software expert to be the next Steve Jobs, you just need find a lot of Wozniaks who will do what you tell them and let you keep most of the money. Which is extremely difficult.
The article made me think of General Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord's officer classification:
"I distinguish four types. There are clever, hardworking, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and hardworking; their place is the General Staff. The next ones are stupid and lazy; they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the mental clarity and strength of nerve necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is both stupid and hardworking; he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always only cause damage."
"Be audacious. Most people who are talented or smart are scared of doing things."
In general smart people want to understand what they are doing before they do it. This means you can often beat them at a task by simply doing without understanding, which is why General Kurt told us to be wary about such people.
Your comment makes me think of taoism's wu wei. Sometimes the best thing to do is nothing. And when you do do nothing, you'll look like a lazy person for sure.
A minor flaw: it is said in a way like it is 2 choices out of 4, which gives you 6 combinations. But it is more like two choices each for 2 independent “axes”, which gives you 4 combinations, exhausted in the elaboration that follows.
(For example, someone who is both clever and stupid, and someone who is both hardworking and lazy don’t make sense.)
This is just good advice in general. The number one thing that has led to my career success (albeit at the cost of much stress) is following my Grandfather's adage: "Someone has to do it, and it might as well be me." I struggle day-to-day to convey to engineers that a grind is required, and sometimes work just needs to be done. People would rather take 60 hours writing a script, instead of just doing work that takes 10 hours (and I'm not even being facetious with that estimate).
I'm a big believer in the fact that you have to hear the right lesson in the right way from the right source. This piece might not resonate with everyone, but it really spoke to me. I needed to hear it.
This is good advice, but I think it is for people who think they are not smart, but are actually just inexperienced. I feel like someone who was actually not smart would have trouble executing on these steps
A group I've encountered that this could help are those without tenacity. I have smart friends who are hugely into tech who somehow remained unemployable even during the boom times in that industry.
I try and try to push them towards opportunities but they argue 'I just have no natural talent for that' and stop before they even get started.
Eg. they tried programming for 3 days, still hadn't fully groked it (because no one does in that amount of time!) and gave up with the above line. Somewhat frustrating to deal with as a friend and also clear cut in what's holding them back as an outside observer: they simply aren't aggressively fighting internal and external demons that tell them they aren't good enough for something. The mere suggestion that you can't possibly do something should fill you with burning determination and it's a positive emotion to feel in that scenario but they seem to just roll over.
> This is a blog post aimed at people who want to do important work or make meaningful contributions to work, but **feel** they aren’t that smart and don’t have any talent.
So yeah, it's not for people who truly are not smart, it's for people who limit themselves as a result of mispercieving their own abilities.
This is really interesting but I disagree that this advice only applies to the "not smart" folks and likely applies to everyone, I like to think everyone is smart in their own domain until they are not the only smart person in the room.
If you ask a smart person do the grunt work for their own work, they will be scared,a little clueless and might feel its unnecessary too but someone smarter than them asks them to do all this for them. The then smart person now thinks that they could help the smarter person achieve something they themselves cannot, extending their own intellect which will help them become a little smarter.
I think the range of being smart of most people is very wide, extending all the time.
If you want to do big things, there is something else: borrow one or more smart persons. I was once part of an infrastructure project that I (and others on it) simply didn't know how to advance. At some point a few really smart folks got into a room and thought hard about it, and wrote a detailed roadmap. It was still hard to implement, but doable by us mortals. Sometimes you just have to admit defeat and ask for help.
I always wonder why these articles are focused on the individual rather than teams or organizations. It is easier to leverage intelligence in a good organized team that individually. Even if it is an individual with enough resources (e.g. social capital) it he/she can recognize its own weakness and left other solve thos problems where you are not good or capable at.
This is the importance of the vision (what) rather than the "how". The secret in execution is balancing these two things beyond focusing in the individual talent that is more connected with ego.
For example, if suddenly you want to build and indy game and don't know about games but you have a good idea, team up with other people who know about that.
Last, if time is not a hard pressure be patient. Look for example at people who apend years polishing ideas and creating software that is a craft [1].
Be the person that solves problems.
Employers want people that can solve their problems. they may not even care how it gets solved... as long as they problem they have will get solved so they can move forward.
Often this takes talent and skill, but in my live I've found that sheer bloody minded persistence and doing things the hard way will often be exactly what is needed and appreciated.
Maybe also "be the one who understands the problem." Often times the problem that actually needs to be solved may be simpler than the problem you're tasked with solving, and being a small-brained person can help you from getting bogged down in unnecessary complexities.
You do not have to be successful in any time frame.
Just put in tine learning.
Make one small goal after another, and burn hours until you are pretty good.
People who are "natural athletes" often just spent their childhood practicing every sport they knew about. "Natural engineers" aften spent their childhood playing with test equipment. They git good through many years of practice not through being loud or audacious.
> I'd always admired Adaobi Adibe from many of our interactions. Whenever our paths crossed, I found that she spoke with a frankness and transparency that was rare to find, and often reiterated the importance of authenticity even in the most challenging of spaces. Her curiosity led her to build Jargon, technology which translates online jargon and makes information more accessible to the masses. She's also a researcher exploring organ manufacturing, and is currently undertaking a fellowship with the Old Vic. Adaobi is a woman with a great mind, but equally a woman on a mission.
> At the age of 25, she has end-stage kidney failure. It's a life threatening condition which has had a considerable impact on her day-to-day life. However, it has also considerably altered her pursuits too. In her mission to build great things, kidney failure was not enough to deter her from her work, and in fact was inspired to look into solutions for end-stage kidney failure, and the distrust in medical professionalism which runs rampant in Black communities.
Meet Adaobi - a woman on a mission.
I think the writer just suffers a huge case of imposter syndrome! Most seemingly 'smart' and 'talented' people are just people who know that 'Hard work beats talent when talent fails to work hard'
Hey no kidding, some pretty insightful stuff in their more newsletter/blog-y posts. Their medical research is way over my head but also seems extremely cool.
What about people who seem to be able to do things on their own but when they ask for help they turn totally stupid?
Like I have a guy in my company who seems to handle some stuff well, but obviously for things where he lacks knowledge would often seek help. And then if you have him in a videocall, telling him how you think you would do he just turn into a robot that just type what you ask him to do with no sign of understanding what he is doing, like he put himself in cruise control mode.
Getting results or becoming rich has a magical property where overnight you are viewed as turning into a genius! ;)
Having persistence and constantly monitoring yourself so that I did't get trapped in the weeds! That's how I got stuff done anyway, and I've never been considered very talented or smart! Except of course after I started to get results, at which point some people started to consider I was talented and smart :)
I am sad that I have but one up vote. I have made a career out of some of the behaviors described here. Asking dumb questions has saved me countless bad outcomes on projects. Being bold and just talking with the people who use the tools you build. So much of these soft skills are just ignored for being able to code a freaking linked list or some nonsense on a whiteboard.
Yes and of course they weren't dumb questions. As a young student beginning to attend research seminars I remember that it tended to be those at the top of the academic pecking order who asked the supposedly dumb questions most of us thought would likely make us look stupid.
Here's another blog post that got popular on HN a few years ago and explains how doing much of what this article advises (not all) will get you nowhere: https://noidea.dog/glue
I don't think either are fully right or wrong, but I thought it was interesting to see the difference of opinion.
I'm not sure if this was intended to "flip the script" on the talented & smart, as this is sage advice for any entrepreneur. It wouldn't surprise me if the author was trying to give the "T&S" permission to do things without getting in the way of themselves.
I recently completed a project on behalf of a privately-held company in the financial sector. Big, successful, and very corporate. The owner (a single individual) was in town and spoke to a few leaders (biz, tech, marketing) in my group. His message: get in the weeds, learn the business, understand every function, ask questions, get outside your comfort zone, be persistent, act with urgency, and finish things. (Those were literally my notes from that meeting.)
He gave his team room to do the things necessary to let their talent & smartness be most effective.
[+] [-] paxys|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sph|2 years ago|reply
Get tested for ADHD. If that is your problem, know that the chemical fix for it is extremely effective.
It's taken me 30+ years of self-hate, a suggestion en passant from someone that I might have ADHD, diagnosis, medication and my life has completely turned around in ways unimaginable before (3 years and counting).
Email's in the profile if you wanna chat about it.
EDIT: I did write a post last year about my experience and research on the topic: https://combo.cc/adhd/
[+] [-] nomilk|2 years ago|reply
> If you imagine someone with 100 percent determination and 100 percent intelligence, you can discard a lot of intelligence before they stop succeeding. But if you start discarding determination, you very quickly get an ineffectual and perpetual grad student.
Not the same source, but similar message and very much worth the watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8TwkfxEdJ0
[+] [-] kypro|2 years ago|reply
That said, most tech work isn't that. In fact, most tech work isn't even technical. Designers or product owners are tech workers, but don't necessarily need to be "smart". And even the technical roles tend to be basic UI work or building a CRUD backend in which case you're 100% correct.
[+] [-] chii|2 years ago|reply
(3) lack of reward
I say the former 2 is caused by 3. Why would anyone put in over-time to solve a problem, if they dont know how well they'd get rewarded by it?
It's why small/founder owned startups get more done with less, because they know themselves how much reward they'd get when putting in the hard yards.
[+] [-] mrweasel|2 years ago|reply
In many ways that's a good way of creating security issues, but it's also an excellent way of actually getting a feature build. The smarter people is being given a sense of direction, by being shown the bad implementation and tasked with improving it.
[+] [-] hackerlight|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DonsDiscountGas|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MontgomeryPi2|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jensson|2 years ago|reply
"Be audacious. Most people who are talented or smart are scared of doing things."
In general smart people want to understand what they are doing before they do it. This means you can often beat them at a task by simply doing without understanding, which is why General Kurt told us to be wary about such people.
[+] [-] neonlights84|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eschulz|2 years ago|reply
https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2010/12/27/dumb-and-gets-thin...
[+] [-] justanotherjoe|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KolenCh|2 years ago|reply
(For example, someone who is both clever and stupid, and someone who is both hardworking and lazy don’t make sense.)
[+] [-] lloydatkinson|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vasergen|2 years ago|reply
I am thinking is in IT industry 'too clever and hardworking'the same as 'stupid and hardworking'?
[+] [-] lencastre|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] AlbertCory|2 years ago|reply
I'm reminded of the hero in Idiocracy who claimed, "Whenever someone said 'lead, follow, or get out of way', I got out of the way."
[+] [-] StopHammoTime|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tonyedgecombe|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maxverse|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] e2021|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AnotherGoodName|2 years ago|reply
I try and try to push them towards opportunities but they argue 'I just have no natural talent for that' and stop before they even get started.
Eg. they tried programming for 3 days, still hadn't fully groked it (because no one does in that amount of time!) and gave up with the above line. Somewhat frustrating to deal with as a friend and also clear cut in what's holding them back as an outside observer: they simply aren't aggressively fighting internal and external demons that tell them they aren't good enough for something. The mere suggestion that you can't possibly do something should fill you with burning determination and it's a positive emotion to feel in that scenario but they seem to just roll over.
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unwise-exe|2 years ago|reply
So yeah, it's not for people who truly are not smart, it's for people who limit themselves as a result of mispercieving their own abilities.
[+] [-] vidyesh|2 years ago|reply
If you ask a smart person do the grunt work for their own work, they will be scared,a little clueless and might feel its unnecessary too but someone smarter than them asks them to do all this for them. The then smart person now thinks that they could help the smarter person achieve something they themselves cannot, extending their own intellect which will help them become a little smarter.
I think the range of being smart of most people is very wide, extending all the time.
[+] [-] gniv|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iSnow|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wslh|2 years ago|reply
This is the importance of the vision (what) rather than the "how". The secret in execution is balancing these two things beyond focusing in the individual talent that is more connected with ego.
For example, if suddenly you want to build and indy game and don't know about games but you have a good idea, team up with other people who know about that.
Last, if time is not a hard pressure be patient. Look for example at people who apend years polishing ideas and creating software that is a craft [1].
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1624540/Storyteller/
[+] [-] senectus1|2 years ago|reply
Be the person that solves problems. Employers want people that can solve their problems. they may not even care how it gets solved... as long as they problem they have will get solved so they can move forward. Often this takes talent and skill, but in my live I've found that sheer bloody minded persistence and doing things the hard way will often be exactly what is needed and appreciated.
[+] [-] krackers|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RHSman2|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RecycledEle|2 years ago|reply
You do not have to be successful in any time frame.
Just put in tine learning.
Make one small goal after another, and burn hours until you are pretty good.
People who are "natural athletes" often just spent their childhood practicing every sport they knew about. "Natural engineers" aften spent their childhood playing with test equipment. They git good through many years of practice not through being loud or audacious.
[+] [-] kleton|2 years ago|reply
> I'd always admired Adaobi Adibe from many of our interactions. Whenever our paths crossed, I found that she spoke with a frankness and transparency that was rare to find, and often reiterated the importance of authenticity even in the most challenging of spaces. Her curiosity led her to build Jargon, technology which translates online jargon and makes information more accessible to the masses. She's also a researcher exploring organ manufacturing, and is currently undertaking a fellowship with the Old Vic. Adaobi is a woman with a great mind, but equally a woman on a mission.
> At the age of 25, she has end-stage kidney failure. It's a life threatening condition which has had a considerable impact on her day-to-day life. However, it has also considerably altered her pursuits too. In her mission to build great things, kidney failure was not enough to deter her from her work, and in fact was inspired to look into solutions for end-stage kidney failure, and the distrust in medical professionalism which runs rampant in Black communities. Meet Adaobi - a woman on a mission.
[+] [-] eddy_chan|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wharvle|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] punkspider|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ketzo|2 years ago|reply
Thanks for the rec!
[+] [-] prmoustache|2 years ago|reply
Like I have a guy in my company who seems to handle some stuff well, but obviously for things where he lacks knowledge would often seek help. And then if you have him in a videocall, telling him how you think you would do he just turn into a robot that just type what you ask him to do with no sign of understanding what he is doing, like he put himself in cruise control mode.
[+] [-] zubairq|2 years ago|reply
Having persistence and constantly monitoring yourself so that I did't get trapped in the weeds! That's how I got stuff done anyway, and I've never been considered very talented or smart! Except of course after I started to get results, at which point some people started to consider I was talented and smart :)
[+] [-] robviren|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vixen99|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iLoveOncall|2 years ago|reply
I don't think either are fully right or wrong, but I thought it was interesting to see the difference of opinion.
[+] [-] jroseattle|2 years ago|reply
I recently completed a project on behalf of a privately-held company in the financial sector. Big, successful, and very corporate. The owner (a single individual) was in town and spoke to a few leaders (biz, tech, marketing) in my group. His message: get in the weeds, learn the business, understand every function, ask questions, get outside your comfort zone, be persistent, act with urgency, and finish things. (Those were literally my notes from that meeting.)
He gave his team room to do the things necessary to let their talent & smartness be most effective.
[+] [-] broth|2 years ago|reply
I think the working hard mentality should be approached with gumption and attention to detail as this can lead to high quality results.