Having trouble finishing projects? Let me guess: you think you’re fairly smart.
On February 21 2010, a distressed user posted an open question to Hacker News: ”I am a horrible finisher,” he wrote. “I consider myself reasonably smart […] but the one thing holding me back is my [in]ability to finish a project.” ”Help me,” the title of his post reads. “Please.”
One day (and 150 responses) later, Hacker News had more than a little great advice to show for itself. Here are a few of the more valuable ideas, which I have sprinkled (liberally) with relevant scientific insight:
Your intelligence works against you.
As a kid, your parents might have told you that you’re really smart. I know mine did, and I know most of my friends did. But that might not be a good thing. A post by a user named sunir cites a Scientific American article whose (hefty, decades-running) collation of research suggests that parents who tell their kids that they are smart actually end up stunting their abilities later in life.
Kids like this, first of all, tend to believe they are intrinsically better than their peers, and therefore don’t have to do as much work to get to the same places. And maybe it’s true that they don’t have to work as hard on the microcosmic level of one or two decisions, but it’s not a stretch to imagine that children who have a much higher propensity for shortcutting and slacking off end up in a very different place than those who are average but work really, really hard.
Intelligence is not what you think.
Another thing that can hurt kids like these — and I know this was the case for myself — is that they often believe that the reason they are smarter is because they were born smarter, that there is something innate and irreducible to their intelligence, or worse still, that other people couldn’t be this smart even if they wanted to.
But in many cases your intelligence may have very little to do with how much faster you are than your peers, and everything to do with how much of a head start you have. Many people measure how smart they are by how they fare compared to their peers, but what if they are not actually intrinsically smarter than their peers? What if, instead, they simply have the advantage of starting further down the road?
Here is what the studies (see cited below) have shown us: if the last day you can be born and still be starting school this year is August 31, you stand a much higher chance of being really successful with school if you are born closer to the 31st. Likewise, if you are born just before the sports-starting cutoff, you have a much higher chance of making it to your respective professional league. In fact, generally, if you are competing with someone, if you are born just before the cutoff, you tend to do a lot better.
It’s not that talent doesn’t matter, or that there aren’t people who are simply smarter. It clearly does, and there clearly are. But children that are born just before the cutoff are a whole year older than the children who are born just after the cutoff. Especially at an early age, when development (and in particular, that of the brain) is rocket-fast, this is not a trivial difference. Being smart may be a required ingredient for certain successes, but our standard metric for measuring this intelligence off-center enough that most people aren’t even aware that success is something that they mostly control. The result is that, in many cases, it is relatively easy to see how any advantages one might have had at the beginning could disappear by adulthood.
Success is a learned skill.
The good news is that many of us — and I include myself in this metric — have had to learn to be successful at what we do. The trick, as with most things, actually consists of just a few simple (and maybe even obvious) points.
1. Do what you love.
Over the years, this line of advice has gotten a pretty horrible rep, and in some ways, that’s because the people who say it tend to be inarticulate, self-helpy, or outright stupid.
What you might not have realized is that it’s also very true. Here’s why: imagine you’ve just landed a job at a prestigious law firm. As it turns out, though, you hate the law. In fact, you find it detestable, dishonest, and boring. So when you are supposed to be doing work, you catch yourself daydreaming. And as the years progress, this catches up to you: since you don’t like your work, you have trouble getting up and putting your heart into it. You burn out.
So, here’s a question: who do you think is going to be better at your job — you, or the person who looks out the window and daydreams about being a lawyer?
It isn’t an accident that pretty much every successful person (example) in history has said this in one way or another. It isn’t a coincidence that companies like Google will only hire people for whom this is true. There isn’t a VC out there of any repute who will advise you to hire anyone else but these people.
2. Love the process, not the result.
a. Learn self-control.
“The sad truth is that not everyone is destined to be great.”
How many times have you heard that? I’ve heard it hundreds of times. While it might be true, the good news is that, empirically, the greatest determiner of you success is arguably whether you need constant reward or praise to continue along your path. If you do, you will probably not be successful. If you don’t, you probably will. That means that your success is at least partly in your hands.
So yes, work hard. But as a corollary to what was said in the last point, the trick is NOT to pick something whose reward is what you want, but to pick something whose process is what you want. Consider that law job. If you like the fame and prestige, but hate the actual job itself, are you going to be very good at it compared to someone who likes the fame and prestige, but *loves* the process? Of course not!
Much of life can clearly and fairly be described as a lot of boring tasks with minimal rewards. Let me be clear: suffering through is a skill that you need. But make it easy on yourself, for chrissakes! Enjoy what you do, not the result of what you do.
In conclusion…
Of course, like pretty much any thing that’s worth knowing, there’s more nuance to this than you can describe in a simply blog post. The point of this article is not to enumerate every little thing that you need to be successful, but rather, to question some of the presumptions people have about success, and to start you on your way.
That said, there is, however, one last thing that should be said:
3. Do what it takes to be happy.
People change. Interests change. Companies change. Being successful in many ways depends on being happy. How many of us have worked for, and hated, a boss who was miserable? Google Exec Vic Gundotra tells a story about how he left Microsoft: apparently one day he was at lunch with his kids and some friends, and they all had a question they couldn’t answer. His very young child (I remember her being 3 or 4, but couldn’t swear on it) suggested “phone”, which Mr Gundotra eventually realized meant, “use your phone to Google it”. Eventually, he decided that if a 3-year-old knows that you can use a phone to answer almost any question, then the work is important. So he left Microsoft for Google.
Mr Gundotra needed to be doing important work to get satisfaction out of his job. If you are taking notes, you would do well to learn from this example. Be happy in what you do.
If you aren’t happy for too long, you need to find something else.
Studies Cited
- K Anders Ericsson, Ralf Th. Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Romer, “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance,” Psychological Review 100, no. 3 (1993)
- Werner Helsen, Jan Van Winckel, and A Mark Williams, “The Relative Age Effect in Youth Soccer Across Europe,” Journal of Sports Sciences 23, no. 6 (June 2005)
