> 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.
This is exactly why I’m wary of ever attempting a developer-focused startup ever again.
What’s not mentioned is the utter frustration when you can see your own output is not up to your own expectations, but you can’t execute on any plan to resolve that discrepancy.
“I know what developers want, so I can build it for them” is a death knell proportionate to your own standards…
The most profitable business I built was something I hacked together in two weeks during college holiday break, when I barely knew how to code. There was no source control (I was googling “what is GitHub” at the time), it was my first time writing Python, I stored passwords in plaintext… but within a year it was generating $20k a month in revenue. It did eventually collapse under its own weight from technical debt, bugs and support cost… and I wasn’t equipped to solve those problems.
But meanwhile, as the years went on and I actually learned about quality, I lost the ability to ship because I gained the ability to recognize when it wasn’t ready… it’s not quite “perfectionism,” but it’s borne of the same pathology, of letting perfect be the enemy of good.
I'm confused. I often say of every genAI I've seen of all types that it is totally lacking in taste and only has skill. And it drastically raises your skill floor immediately, perhaps all the way up to your taste, closing the gap.
Maybe that actually is what you were saying? But I'm confused because you used the opposite words.
This is not what Ira Glass meant by taste gap. What he rather means is that taste is important. It’s what gets you into the field and what makes you stick around. Happy to be corrected on this.
I don't know much about Ira Glass and I'm not going to be a 5 minute wikipedia expert about it, so maybe I'm missing out on very relevant philosophy (I hope someone links the must read thing), but those would be very intentionally inverted meanings of the taste/skill dichotomy.
LLMs are good at things with a lot of quantity in the training set, you can signal boost stuff, but its not perfect (and its non-obvious that you want rare/special/advanced stuff to be the sweet spot as a vendor, that's a small part of your TAM by construction).
This has all kinds of interesting tells, for example Claude is better at Bazel than Gemini is, which is kind of extreme given Google has infinite perfect Bazel and Anthropic has open source (really bad) Bazel, so you know Gemini hasn't gotten the google4 pipeline decontamination thing dialed in.
All else equal you expect a homogenizing effect where over time everything is like NextJS, Golang, and Docker.
There are outlier events, like how Claude got trained on nixpkgs in a serious way recently, but idk, maybe they want to get into defense or something.
Skill is very rarely the problem for computers, if you're considering it as district from taste (sometimes you call them both together just skill).
If anything it's the opposite, except maybe at the very low end: AI boosts implementation skill (at least by increasing speed), but not {research, coding, writing} taste. Hence slop of all sorts.
There's no meaningful taste-skill gap in programming because programming doesn't involve tacit skills. If you know what you're supposed to do, it is trivial to type that into a keyboard.
The taste-skill gap emerges when you intellectually recognize what a quality creation would be, but are physically unable to produce that creation, and judge the creations you are physically capable of producing as low quality
The oft cited example is drawing a circle. Everyone knows what a perfectly round circle looks like, but drawing one takes practice.
It doesn't take practice to type code. If you know what code you're supposed to write, you write it. The problem is all in the taste step, to know what code to write in the first place.
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.
> Congratulations: you have successfully turned your cool idea into a chore.
The article gave me a vague, off-topic sense of unease but your comment crystallised the feeling for me.
I really wish less emphasis is placed on this kind of blue-sky, "strategic" thinking, and more placed on the "chores". Legwork, maintenance, step-by-step execution of a plan, issue tracking, perspective shifting etc. are all, in my opinion, critically important and much more deserving of praise and respect than so-called "strategic" thinking.
Which, IME, most people can't do anyway! After they've talked their big talk you suggest that there's a practical, on-ground problem and they look at you accusingly, like you're sabotaging their picture. And I'm like, no, my friend; reality is sabotaging your picture, it's just the two of us here and you're not losing any face by me pointing that out, and also if you were an actual strategic thinker you'd have taken my on-ground problem into account already...
> It’s just a lot of trivial typing and package management and it might not even be all that impressive when it is done.
> What might happen then is that you try to keep it interesting by making it more impressive
This feeling is something that immediately sets off an alarm in my head.
IRL every time I tried to impress someone, I said or did stupid things. These experiences are now part of cringe memories about myself.
In software, the paradox is often that making something simple is difficult, but easily reproducible and unimpressive for most people. It is kind of like the engineers' version of when people say that their 4yo kid could do the same drawings as Picasso.
Just go through the last 90% and finish the thing. Like Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said, perfection is reached not when there's nothing else to add, but when there's nothing more to remove.
Then put the V1.0 tag on it and move it to maintenance mode. Then move to the next project, which very well might be about covering a different set of needs in the same area.
Planning as a dopamine hit, turning creativity into project management, then raising the complexity bar just to feel engaged again. It's like chasing novelty within the sandbox instead of stepping outside it
RIP the project Ive spent 5 years on. Spent more time doing thinking than doing. Shifted goals higher and higher and never felt satisfied with what I had done. And now at the supposed end even my perfect goal seems completely uninteresting
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"
I really think that's the wrong question, but I don't know how to formulate it any better... it should be somewhere between playful curiosity ("how did it advance me a step in my own interests?"), pragmatic foresight ("how did it open up new possibilities?"), and bland reflection ("why was it the necessary thing to do at that moment?").
> "can i fix this thing that annoys me right now"
Whatever your questions might be, I sure hope they won't only aim for a boolean answer.
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.
Some people grow to both crave praise but also when they get it not really value it; they want people to be always surprised at cool stuff they can do but are not motivated to do boring uninteresting work. This may be accompanied by one or more of: perfectionism, narcissism, rejection anxiety, etc.
I suspect this might have to do with praise patterns in childhood.
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.
For those who haven’t run across it, I like the man in the arena speech from Theodore Roosevelt to put things in perspective when I turn into a critic, or get harsh feedback from a critic.
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
> 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.
That's a really important point, and I completely agree.
This perspective reminds me of an excellent book I recently read, How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors That Determine the Fate of Every Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration and Everything In Between by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner.
This book focuses on extremely high-cost "megaprojects" and emphasizes the critical importance of thorough "planning" before execution. This stands in stark contrast to the low-risk creative activities discussed in the article, which makes the point about cost even more compelling.
However, rather than being a complete counter-argument, I see a significant overlap. The book advocates *for low-risk, low-cost experimentation and creative exploration during the planning phase* through methods like miniature prototyping and CAD simulations. In this sense, both the article and the book highlight the value of iterative approaches, whether it's through frequent, small-scale actions or through meticulous, low-cost trials before committing to high-cost endeavors.
> This reminded me of Roger Federer, who has won 82% of all matches but only 54% of all points.
This is in large part just a function of the way the rules of tennis work. e.g. consider gambling games, where there are games where the house only has a 1% edge, but if you play long enough, the casino will get 100% of your money.
> 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."
I think the lesson at the end of that semester is a bit muddied. It says the quantity group figured out a bunch of stuff due to multiple photos being taken, but there are a couple things we don't know:
1-Just because the single photo group only submitted one photo, they may have taken just as many as the quantity group
2-How were "best" photos determined (by prof? by class vote?)
If quality group took as many photos, then the issue is really about the subjective selection of "best" photo. The first group had 100x as many photos to choose from than the 2nd group, so it could be more about how well each person in the 2nd group was able to select best photo from their collection compared to however "best" photos were selected out of all photos.
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.
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".
I feel a bit shaken after reading this comment, to be honest. I don't think I've ever heard someone so perfectly describe such a major component of my life experience. It's like you read my mind.
I was a "gifted kid", now I'm a lonely adult living by herself constantly cycling between complacency, failure, panic, and productivity. Diagnosed ADHD, choose to stay unmedicated, sometimes the best employee in my office, usually one of the laziest and most disappointing employees in my office. Constantly daydreaming about how better circumstances would change things for the better even while knowing deep down I'd cause the exact same set of problems for myself all over again even if I got my Dream Job.
Spent my whole life being told I was exceptional, and, to be fair, I lived up to it as a kid. These days I'm so terrified of regressing to being "normal" that I sabotage myself at every turn.
Thank you for leaving this comment. I may bring up the concept with my therapist and see what she thinks of it.
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.
>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.
100% - the quality group only had one chance to impress the teacher, whereas quantity group had dozens. The conclusion drawn from this in the text seems to be based on assumptions. We don't actually know how many intermediate photographs the quality group took as well, and without knowing that and also checking the quality of those, it's hard to say anything useful.
The word "ambition" comes with a variety of connotations.
>There are doers and there are talkers.
There are those who use their ambition to define a goal and then work tirelessly to achieve it. Think of the mountaineer who plans and trains for decades to eventually ascend Mt Everest.
Then there are those who share their ambition by talking about it. Seeking recognition, etc for "being ambitious". Staying with the mountaineer theme, those who refuse to climb a lesser mountain as not being important enough to expend their precious talents upon. It is these folks that if they somehow make enough money in some form, end up chartering a helicopter and sherpas to climb Mt Everest.
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.
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.
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.
I don't want to psychoanalyze but it seems your sense of dissatisfaction is a little different from what the author is describing? Your dissatisfaction is from not accomplishing the possibly implausible goal of being the very best at something without being a professional competitor, while the author is describing a case of not even getting started on creative projects out of a fear of them not living up to a made up standard in your mind.
They're both arguably unreasonable standards but one is for the end-product (i.e. a novel/album/software project) as opposed to reaching some apparent level of general skill at your hobby. The latter is full of traps because for subjective hobbies like arts, how does one even evaluate that?
To have such capacity and drive, as well as critical self-reflection is a rare thing. I would first suggest some appreciation for the interesting and curious state of being that you seem to have developed. Nicely done!
My own route out of this trap was to explore theories of mind and, more profoundly, practices of no-mind. Doing nothing is much harder to achieve than doing something and can create a space for insight that the analytical mind cannot access. From this place, which is free of comparison and judgement, incredibly beautiful things can emerge.
If you would like to get to the root of it, I would suggest Taoist teachings and reading a few things by Krishnamurti. To understand the fundamental limitations of the mind can tell you something about who you through negation. For me, this has brought a deep sense of peace as well as an ability to use my mind in a more satisfying way.
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.
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.
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.
I hate the title but actually a pretty decent article.
> We are still the only species cursed with visions of what could be. But perhaps that's humanity's most beautiful accident. To be haunted by possibilities we cannot yet reach, to be driven by dreams that exceed our current grasp. The curse and the gift are the same thing: we see further than we can walk, dream bigger than we can build, imagine more than we can create.
> And so we make imperfect things in service of perfect visions. We write rough drafts toward masterpieces we may never achieve. We build prototypes of futures we can barely envision. We close the gap between imagination and reality one flawed attempt at a time.
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 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
Unconstrained curiosity is a superpower. Some of the greatest people in history have had immense curiosity. Think Newton, Darwin, Feynman. In fact pretty much any great scientist is great because of their wide curiosity. It's often the crossover between things that seem unrelated where the breakthroughs lie.
It's a joy to have "the pleasure of finding things out" and I pity anyone who lacks it.
To you maybe. People get satisfaction and purpose from different things. Unbounded curiosity can often drive tangible outcomes too. You might even have that curiosity to thank for methods and tools you use in your own persuits!
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 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. =)
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.
For me it helps to reflect on my desire to finish, which is mostly just a fragment of my day job. On my side projects, I can go as deep into the rabbit hole as I want, and enjoy the journey. Of course it feels great to publish something eventually, but the zen garden effect of just bike shedding to your hearts content is really something you shouldn’t dismiss immediately.
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
The "architecture astronaut" syndrome is particularly endemic in software - we design elegant systems in our heads that would take 10x the time to build than a simple solution that actually ships.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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):
>Creation is not birth; it is murder. The murder of the impossible in service of the possible.
What a stupid quote. You know why it's stupid. Because murder is creation. It is the creation of death while destroying life.
Just use the word the way it's meant to be used. Don't come up with quotes that sound clever and trick the mind into thinking a statement is profound when really it's just more word trickery.
I thought the phrase was a whimsical/poetic way of saying something that rings true to me: that all the possibilities in your mind get narrowed down to a single imperfect one when actually materializing/putting them into practice -- in a way getting "destroyed" and replaced with an imperfect but existing version -- and that we sometimes get anxious about this.
It's not the only way of looking at it, but it is one way, and it's not wrong.
meander_water|8 months ago
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.
chatmasta|8 months ago
What’s not mentioned is the utter frustration when you can see your own output is not up to your own expectations, but you can’t execute on any plan to resolve that discrepancy.
“I know what developers want, so I can build it for them” is a death knell proportionate to your own standards…
The most profitable business I built was something I hacked together in two weeks during college holiday break, when I barely knew how to code. There was no source control (I was googling “what is GitHub” at the time), it was my first time writing Python, I stored passwords in plaintext… but within a year it was generating $20k a month in revenue. It did eventually collapse under its own weight from technical debt, bugs and support cost… and I wasn’t equipped to solve those problems.
But meanwhile, as the years went on and I actually learned about quality, I lost the ability to ship because I gained the ability to recognize when it wasn’t ready… it’s not quite “perfectionism,” but it’s borne of the same pathology, of letting perfect be the enemy of good.
furyofantares|8 months ago
Maybe that actually is what you were saying? But I'm confused because you used the opposite words.
theshrike79|8 months ago
He can't really play an instrument, but he knows exactly what works and what doesn't and can articulate it.
Loughla|8 months ago
Detractors say it's the process and learning that builds depth.
Proponents say it doesn't matter because the tool exists and will always exist.
It's interesting seeing people argue about AI, because they're plainly not speaking about the same issue and simply talking past each other.
simianwords|8 months ago
benreesman|8 months ago
LLMs are good at things with a lot of quantity in the training set, you can signal boost stuff, but its not perfect (and its non-obvious that you want rare/special/advanced stuff to be the sweet spot as a vendor, that's a small part of your TAM by construction).
This has all kinds of interesting tells, for example Claude is better at Bazel than Gemini is, which is kind of extreme given Google has infinite perfect Bazel and Anthropic has open source (really bad) Bazel, so you know Gemini hasn't gotten the google4 pipeline decontamination thing dialed in.
All else equal you expect a homogenizing effect where over time everything is like NextJS, Golang, and Docker.
There are outlier events, like how Claude got trained on nixpkgs in a serious way recently, but idk, maybe they want to get into defense or something.
Skill is very rarely the problem for computers, if you're considering it as district from taste (sometimes you call them both together just skill).
milkey_mouse|8 months ago
nickelpro|8 months ago
The taste-skill gap emerges when you intellectually recognize what a quality creation would be, but are physically unable to produce that creation, and judge the creations you are physically capable of producing as low quality
The oft cited example is drawing a circle. Everyone knows what a perfectly round circle looks like, but drawing one takes practice.
It doesn't take practice to type code. If you know what code you're supposed to write, you write it. The problem is all in the taste step, to know what code to write in the first place.
strogonoff|8 months ago
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.
raynr|8 months ago
The article gave me a vague, off-topic sense of unease but your comment crystallised the feeling for me.
I really wish less emphasis is placed on this kind of blue-sky, "strategic" thinking, and more placed on the "chores". Legwork, maintenance, step-by-step execution of a plan, issue tracking, perspective shifting etc. are all, in my opinion, critically important and much more deserving of praise and respect than so-called "strategic" thinking.
Which, IME, most people can't do anyway! After they've talked their big talk you suggest that there's a practical, on-ground problem and they look at you accusingly, like you're sabotaging their picture. And I'm like, no, my friend; reality is sabotaging your picture, it's just the two of us here and you're not losing any face by me pointing that out, and also if you were an actual strategic thinker you'd have taken my on-ground problem into account already...
astrobe_|8 months ago
This feeling is something that immediately sets off an alarm in my head.
IRL every time I tried to impress someone, I said or did stupid things. These experiences are now part of cringe memories about myself.
In software, the paradox is often that making something simple is difficult, but easily reproducible and unimpressive for most people. It is kind of like the engineers' version of when people say that their 4yo kid could do the same drawings as Picasso.
Just go through the last 90% and finish the thing. Like Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said, perfection is reached not when there's nothing else to add, but when there's nothing more to remove.
Then put the V1.0 tag on it and move it to maintenance mode. Then move to the next project, which very well might be about covering a different set of needs in the same area.
eleveriven|8 months ago
andoando|8 months ago
czhu12|8 months ago
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"
[1] https://canine.sh
whilenot-dev|8 months ago
I really think that's the wrong question, but I don't know how to formulate it any better... it should be somewhere between playful curiosity ("how did it advance me a step in my own interests?"), pragmatic foresight ("how did it open up new possibilities?"), and bland reflection ("why was it the necessary thing to do at that moment?").
> "can i fix this thing that annoys me right now"
Whatever your questions might be, I sure hope they won't only aim for a boolean answer.
anontrot|8 months ago
cl42|8 months ago
> 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.
strogonoff|8 months ago
I suspect this might have to do with praise patterns in childhood.
MichaelZuo|8 months ago
e.g. By definition the 99.9th percentile person cannot live a 99.999th percentile life, if they did they would in fact be that amazing.
kretaceous|8 months ago
> 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?)
al_borland|8 months ago
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
baxtr|8 months ago
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.
t_hozumi|8 months ago
This book focuses on extremely high-cost "megaprojects" and emphasizes the critical importance of thorough "planning" before execution. This stands in stark contrast to the low-risk creative activities discussed in the article, which makes the point about cost even more compelling.
However, rather than being a complete counter-argument, I see a significant overlap. The book advocates *for low-risk, low-cost experimentation and creative exploration during the planning phase* through methods like miniature prototyping and CAD simulations. In this sense, both the article and the book highlight the value of iterative approaches, whether it's through frequent, small-scale actions or through meticulous, low-cost trials before committing to high-cost endeavors.
Marsymars|8 months ago
This is in large part just a function of the way the rules of tennis work. e.g. consider gambling games, where there are games where the house only has a 1% edge, but if you play long enough, the casino will get 100% of your money.
gcanyon|8 months ago
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."
RaftPeople|8 months ago
1-Just because the single photo group only submitted one photo, they may have taken just as many as the quantity group
2-How were "best" photos determined (by prof? by class vote?)
If quality group took as many photos, then the issue is really about the subjective selection of "best" photo. The first group had 100x as many photos to choose from than the 2nd group, so it could be more about how well each person in the 2nd group was able to select best photo from their collection compared to however "best" photos were selected out of all photos.
satyrun|8 months ago
If you look at a book of Picasso's drawings/paintings he has thousands of examples of half finished, complete shit.
The masterpieces are the result of picking the best output.
wrs|8 months ago
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.
eleveriven|8 months ago
thrwwXZTYE|8 months ago
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".
mkaic|8 months ago
I was a "gifted kid", now I'm a lonely adult living by herself constantly cycling between complacency, failure, panic, and productivity. Diagnosed ADHD, choose to stay unmedicated, sometimes the best employee in my office, usually one of the laziest and most disappointing employees in my office. Constantly daydreaming about how better circumstances would change things for the better even while knowing deep down I'd cause the exact same set of problems for myself all over again even if I got my Dream Job.
Spent my whole life being told I was exceptional, and, to be fair, I lived up to it as a kid. These days I'm so terrified of regressing to being "normal" that I sabotage myself at every turn.
Thank you for leaving this comment. I may bring up the concept with my therapist and see what she thinks of it.
joewhale|8 months ago
wordpad|8 months ago
So, what is the lesson here?
Gotta let go of pride and risk it for the biscuit (ship something)?
scuol|8 months ago
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.
gcanyon|8 months ago
> 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.
sweezyjeezy|8 months ago
thenthenthen|8 months ago
matthewsinclair|8 months ago
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.
pedalpete|8 months ago
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.
GianFabien|8 months ago
>There are doers and there are talkers.
There are those who use their ambition to define a goal and then work tirelessly to achieve it. Think of the mountaineer who plans and trains for decades to eventually ascend Mt Everest.
Then there are those who share their ambition by talking about it. Seeking recognition, etc for "being ambitious". Staying with the mountaineer theme, those who refuse to climb a lesser mountain as not being important enough to expend their precious talents upon. It is these folks that if they somehow make enough money in some form, end up chartering a helicopter and sherpas to climb Mt Everest.
hackable_sand|8 months ago
eleveriven|8 months ago
amirmi78|8 months ago
labrador|8 months ago
“I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.”
― Bill Gates
dplgk|7 months ago
georgeecollins|8 months ago
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.
w10-1|8 months ago
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.
gizajob|8 months ago
fcatalan|8 months ago
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.
whatevertrevor|8 months ago
They're both arguably unreasonable standards but one is for the end-product (i.e. a novel/album/software project) as opposed to reaching some apparent level of general skill at your hobby. The latter is full of traps because for subjective hobbies like arts, how does one even evaluate that?
willguest|8 months ago
My own route out of this trap was to explore theories of mind and, more profoundly, practices of no-mind. Doing nothing is much harder to achieve than doing something and can create a space for insight that the analytical mind cannot access. From this place, which is free of comparison and judgement, incredibly beautiful things can emerge.
If you would like to get to the root of it, I would suggest Taoist teachings and reading a few things by Krishnamurti. To understand the fundamental limitations of the mind can tell you something about who you through negation. For me, this has brought a deep sense of peace as well as an ability to use my mind in a more satisfying way.
Just my two cents :)
tayo42|8 months ago
Just don't drive your self crazy over it?
avcix|8 months ago
Then, I attended to University but never found my skill enough to develop a game worthy of my tastes.
CommenterPerson|8 months ago
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.
joduplessis|8 months ago
dismalaf|8 months ago
> We are still the only species cursed with visions of what could be. But perhaps that's humanity's most beautiful accident. To be haunted by possibilities we cannot yet reach, to be driven by dreams that exceed our current grasp. The curse and the gift are the same thing: we see further than we can walk, dream bigger than we can build, imagine more than we can create.
> And so we make imperfect things in service of perfect visions. We write rough drafts toward masterpieces we may never achieve. We build prototypes of futures we can barely envision. We close the gap between imagination and reality one flawed attempt at a time.
Wilsoniumite|8 months ago
SeanAnderson|8 months ago
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
thehappyfellow|8 months ago
Unconstrained curiosity is a vice, not virtue.
jebarker|8 months ago
james-bcn|8 months ago
Unconstrained curiosity is a superpower. Some of the greatest people in history have had immense curiosity. Think Newton, Darwin, Feynman. In fact pretty much any great scientist is great because of their wide curiosity. It's often the crossover between things that seem unrelated where the breakthroughs lie.
It's a joy to have "the pleasure of finding things out" and I pity anyone who lacks it.
bGl2YW5j|8 months ago
nilirl|8 months ago
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.
Joel_Mckay|8 months ago
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)
https://archive.org/details/TheManInTheWhiteSuit1951_201810
unknown|8 months ago
[deleted]
raphinou|8 months ago
9dev|8 months ago
eleveriven|8 months ago
ethan_smith|8 months ago
mrbluecoat|8 months ago
So project managers accomplish nothing?
0xbadcafebee|8 months ago
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.
sonicvrooom|8 months ago
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.
Simon_O_Rourke|8 months ago
eleveriven|8 months ago
uncivilized|8 months ago
ezekiel68|8 months ago
"Jeepers - they're on to me!"
amai|7 months ago
aswegs8|8 months ago
TrackerFF|8 months ago
juggli|8 months ago
d4rkn0d3z|8 months ago
The word that kept coming to my mind as I read this was convergence.
luckystarr|8 months ago
scottgg|8 months ago
deadbabe|8 months ago
zahlman|8 months ago
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.
bravesoul2|8 months ago
mmsc|8 months ago
moritzwarhier|8 months ago
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
xchip|8 months ago
We already know that too much of anything is bad and that virtue is in the middle.
Please stop writing articles like this.
wizzwizz4|8 months ago
unknown|8 months ago
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moooo99|8 months ago
Nice, I‘m clever!
gregjw|8 months ago
hamilyon2|8 months ago
b0a04gl|8 months ago
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anonreeeeplor|8 months ago
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alganet|8 months ago
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Myzel394|8 months ago
moritzwarhier|8 months ago
CHUCKZZZ|7 months ago
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r33b33|8 months ago
ninetyninenine|8 months ago
What a stupid quote. You know why it's stupid. Because murder is creation. It is the creation of death while destroying life.
Just use the word the way it's meant to be used. Don't come up with quotes that sound clever and trick the mind into thinking a statement is profound when really it's just more word trickery.
the_af|8 months ago
It's not the only way of looking at it, but it is one way, and it's not wrong.
jiriro|8 months ago
Ha ha, you are funny:-)
This is the whole point of a (natural) language – the meaning of words is inevitably floating.
Do not nail down a meaning of a word, it’s impossible. Instead, try to imagine there is no word;-)