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From the comments, I think readers are generally failing to take an opportunistic attitude toward this article. Dig out useful ideas and ignore what doesn't hel
by brlewis 11y ago
From the comments, I think readers are generally failing to take an opportunistic attitude toward this article. Dig out useful ideas and ignore what doesn't help.
Yes, there are situations where working too quickly will bite you, so you can't always do it. But the key idea here is that by working quickly you reduce your expectations of how costly a new effort is. Then you'll actually start it. Inertia is a powerful adversary. Any weapon you can put on your belt to fight it is worthwhile. I'm keeping this idea.
- marcosdumay 11y ago"Opportunistic attitude" looks too much like "confirmation bias" to me to be comfortable with it.
- brlewis 11y agoIf it's an idea you're already using, then it isn't an opportunity.
- jkaunisv1 11y agoThe phrase may put you off but I think the sentiment is sound. Too many dismiss something/somebody in entirety because of one flaw. I think it's better to try to find value in everything; even if it's 99% shit, you can still learn from that 1%.
- Retra 11y agoOr you could find something that's 95% shit and learn from its 5%. You can't learn everything, so why would you spend your time learning the 1% good things and dealing with 99% shit? There are too many easy ways to find value out there to be spending your time panning for scraps in sludge.
- nostrademons 11y agoWhat's your search cost? If you have to hit "back" on 5 articles that were 99% shit to find the one that's 95% shit, you were better off just taking your 1% tidbits. (In practice, I've found that anything that's >50% shit or so isn't worth wasting time on. Stuff that's >50% good, informative stuff is usually qualitatively different from stuff that's 5% good informative stuff; go where the former is.)
- Retra 11y agoI think that's really a matter of what level of mastery you are looking to achieve, and how broadly you intend to achieve it. If you're looking to be the best of the best in one single, narrow subject, you might quickly run out of <50% shit resources and need to dig into some really bad stuff to find little, rare bits of good knowledge.
- nostrademons 11y agoIf you want to be the best of the best in one single, narrow subject, then listening to what other people think is useless. Rely on direct experience instead; perform your own experiments, test out your own ideas. That's what it means to be the "best of the best": you're the one injecting new data into the ecosystem.
- jkaunisv1 11y agoWell, I was referring more to the situation where you're already reading something, or finished reading it. Obviously there is an opportunity cost that you could have sought out something better to read, but now that you're there - take what you can from it. In my experience a lot of people will dismiss an entire article based on one wrong fact or crazy opinion. And when extended to people - just because someone says something stupid or wild doesn't mean everything they say is that way.
- _yosefk 11y agoOne good takeaway: be slow at things you don't want to do a lot. Be slow in answering the kind of email you don't want to receive again, etc.
- qznc 11y agoI like to call this "intentional incompetence" :)
- shkkmo 11y agoI don't think that is accurate without an additional assumption about the reason you don't want to do something. If I prioritize quick responses and turn arounds to requests that are important, provide value, and allow me to improve important skills, that is not incompetence. If you de-prioritize items, regardless of their importance and value but simply because you don't want to do, that could quite conceivably be called incompetence. However that rests on the assumption that you don't want to be competent. I generally want to be competent. When there are things I don't want to do, it is usually because they are part of a bad, inefficient process that I haven't managed to change yet.
- qznc 11y ago... and if you consider that bad, inefficient process beyond your influence in the foreseeable future, then intentional incompetence is the good strategy to avoid doing it. Such situations easily arise once you work within larger organisations.