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What makes people successful is _focus_ not hard work. When you focus on something fully, eliminating distractions as far as possible, you have the highest chan

by harryf 7y ago

What makes people successful is _focus_ not hard work. When you focus on something fully, eliminating distractions as far as possible, you have the highest chance of that thing becoming a success, depending on your capabilities, because you've given it the depth of attention required to make it work. People that work hard tend to spend longer hours on a problem so focus often comes as a side effect, which in turn leads to people correlating hard work with success. But there are a ton of people "working hard" in the digital age and getting nowhere. If you see what they're up to, a big chunk of their time multi-tasking between random push messages and similar. What's missing is focus.

ravenstine 7y ago
> But there are a ton of people "working hard" in the digital age and getting nowhere. If you see what they're up to, a big chunk of their time multi-tasking between random push messages and similar. What's missing is focus. It's not just push messages, but a lack of clear organization. The bigger a company gets, the less organizes it seems to become, and while this is a natural law of growth, the amount of disorganization that seems to be the norm is inexcusable. It amazes me how people will have no idea who knows what, who is in charge of X, or where feature requests are coming from. All these tools we use to manage "tickets", notes, roadmaps, and documentation don't seem to be helping that much. They're mostly a veneer to cover people's general carelessness. For years, I've been wasting time bouncing between parties trying to figure out who wants what and why, often running into the roadblock of two parties of interest looking at the same "ticket" and coming to a completely different conclusion about what it means and its scope. Planning is almost always an exercise in bullshit, and is a glorification of receiving a cargo container of new "tickets". I won't get into feedback processes that really just lead to an indefinite cycle of backseat-coding. For people who aren't lazy, lots of time gets wasted because of the effort-debt created by carelessness and poor communication practices. All it takes is 10% of team members to be careless and a system of unclear webs of power to cause bottlenecks for the people who get most of the work done. The mental overhead caused by confusing systems almost completely destroys the ability for someone to get in the zone and actually focus. Focus isn't even respected a lot of the time. In meetings about improving developer experience(which never change anything), I've brought up the focus factor multiple times, only to be met by blank stares. At that point, you've just got to accept that your work is going to be needlessly complicated and stressful, and that there's only so much you can do about it. Muting as many push notifications is one thing that can be done, and so is never working harder or longer than you are being paid to. Sadly, this borders on disengagement.

by harryf 7y ago

ravenstine 7y ago

> But there are a ton of people "working hard" in the digital age and getting nowhere. If you see what they're up to, a big chunk of their time multi-tasking between random push messages and similar. What's missing is focus. It's not just push messages, but a lack of clear organization. The bigger a company gets, the less organizes it seems to become, and while this is a natural law of growth, the amount of disorganization that seems to be the norm is inexcusable. It amazes me how people will have no idea who knows what, who is in charge of X, or where feature requests are coming from. All these tools we use to manage "tickets", notes, roadmaps, and documentation don't seem to be helping that much. They're mostly a veneer to cover people's general carelessness. For years, I've been wasting time bouncing between parties trying to figure out who wants what and why, often running into the roadblock of two parties of interest looking at the same "ticket" and coming to a completely different conclusion about what it means and its scope. Planning is almost always an exercise in bullshit, and is a glorification of receiving a cargo container of new "tickets". I won't get into feedback processes that really just lead to an indefinite cycle of backseat-coding. For people who aren't lazy, lots of time gets wasted because of the effort-debt created by carelessness and poor communication practices. All it takes is 10% of team members to be careless and a system of unclear webs of power to cause bottlenecks for the people who get most of the work done. The mental overhead caused by confusing systems almost completely destroys the ability for someone to get in the zone and actually focus. Focus isn't even respected a lot of the time. In meetings about improving developer experience(which never change anything), I've brought up the focus factor multiple times, only to be met by blank stares. At that point, you've just got to accept that your work is going to be needlessly complicated and stressful, and that there's only so much you can do about it. Muting as many push notifications is one thing that can be done, and so is never working harder or longer than you are being paid to. Sadly, this borders on disengagement.