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Counterpoint- this feeling, while it makes you miserable, might actually be adaptive if all the "high performers" you know express feeling it. The desire to ho

Counterpoint- this feeling, while it makes you miserable, might actually be adaptive if all the "high performers" you know express feeling it. The desire to honestly face your progress, judge it as wanting and then do something about it is necessary for improvement. The author is correct that wallowing doesn't help, but it's possible that the guilt that prevents you from excusing yourself will also keep you on track.

ianai 6y ago
The feeling of "being behind" is probably mostly anxiety or jealousy. Clearly many people are led astray by those feelings. It can blind a person from what is actually in front of them because they're stuck imagining where they're not. Maybe they've been highly successful following the "pro-forma" until they fail to realize they're in a novel situation and make a critical mistake applying the "pro-forma" solution.
Causality1 6y ago
Exactly the point I was going to make. Just because something is unpleasant doesn't make it destructive. Resisting junk food is unpleasant. Obeying the speed limit is unpleasant.
- haswell 6y ago
  Taken to an extreme, feeling "behind" all the time can also lead to a different outcome: giving up, or choosing not to start something at all. As is so often true, the ideal state is likely somewhere in the middle. A healthy recognition of ones goals and progress against those goals...without self judgement. To your point, unpleasant does not automatically equal destructive. But unpleasant without perspective on why that unpleasant thing is also beneficial is going to lead to some negative outcomes. Generally, people understand why the speed limit exists, and there is enough info about healthy eating that most people get it. I'd argue that something like feeling behind in ones life is not so clear cut. That feeling can be beneficial in the long run, depending on where it comes from. It can also be destructive, if perspective is lacking.
  - matwood 6y ago
    I think it's important to understand what someone is feeling behind to. Am I feeling behind to my neighbor? Who cares. Am I feeling behind in what I know I can do, now that's different. At the end of the day this is all rooted in our ego. We want enough ego that pushes us to get better, but at the same time be able to check that same ego when it gets in the way. I've related many HN items to Jiu-Jitsu and here is another. First, there is always someone better than you. And in some ways it's worse because the person who kicks your ass might be younger, smaller, older or a different gender. It takes an ego to step on to the mat and find out. Then after getting your ass gets kicked it takes checking your ego to learn what happened and go again. Like a lot of life, it's the personal journey that matters.
    - maroonblazer 6y ago
      Well put. My undergrad degree was in music. That career lasted 10 years and then I pivoted to marketing. With no relevant degree under my belt and no resources to go back to school, I felt perpetually behind. That feeling motivated me to read and self-study anything and everything I could get my hands on. I believe I'm a better professional because of it and, combined with some good luck, allowed me to capitalize on opportunities that wouldn't have happened otherwise.
paxys 6y ago
The problem is that we only hear about outliers. Genius teenage whizkids and college dropout billionaires are constantly in the news, but successful tech founders are, on average, 40-45 years old. So if you feel like a failure at 28 it doesn't mean that you are necessarily on the wrong path, more likely just looking at bad data.
- dale_glass 6y ago
  And some of those are badly misrepresented. Gates didn't drop out of college because he smoked too much pot, or was too lazy. He was getting excellent grades and his teachers were very impressed. It was because he already had a business going, and wanted to concentrate on that. Plus, as a business owner nobody was going to require him to have a degree, so it didn't really matter so long he had the skills he needed for his business. Also, his parents were rich and supportive, and no doubt would have supported him if he had failed. He'd have no trouble getting back to Harvard had the business not worked out. That's a very different kind of "dropout" than most.
  - EvilEy3 6y ago
    Exactly. People think that Jobs and Gates succeeded because of dropping out(from the ivy league schools nonetheless!) and not despite.
  - Dracophoenix 6y ago
    And initially he didn't even drop out. He took two leaves of absences and could practically return at his leisure. So he had a fallback.
tdeck 6y ago
I came here to post a version of this. The tough part is that I don't know if it's useful or not. I feel like this kind of self-criticism motivated me and "keeps me honest", but maybe it just induced anxiety and causes me to avoid tasks? I didn't feel like this article addressed the issue enough to increase my confidence in either possibility.
readme 6y ago
I don't know any high performers who think this way. Do you? I find usually people use "i'm behind" as an excuse not to even try because they can never be as good as so and so. The high performers are usually the people who think it's never too late to learn something new, in my experience.
- themacguffinman 6y ago
  The article author explicitly notes that "The feeling of being behind is one of the most destructive feelings to harbor and yet almost every high performer I have ever met suffers from it." If you google "celebrity imposter syndrome" you'll see endless pages of articles of varying quality noting that many successful businessmen/leaders/artists have imposter syndrome, and they're evidently high performing.
- mattnewton 6y ago
  I do know people who have expressed it to me often, and the author of the article goes as far to say "yet almost every high performer I have ever met suffers from it." I agree that high performers must feel that they are capable to make performing feel tractable - I think that's necessary. But also they have to be motivated to do so.
- sharms 6y ago
  High performers are often aware of the large space of potential subjects they lack expertise on (hence feeling behind). Low performers are often not aware, and would self-evaluate as high performers due to not being aware of their own knowledge gaps, and how far behind they are. There is an excellent graph to illustrate this: https://understandinginnovation.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/dunning-kruger-0011.jpg https://understandinginnovation.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/...
  - readme 6y ago
    feeling like you're "behind" and acknowledging the amount you don't know about a field are two different things one is a social comparison, the other is an epistemological observation
emsal 6y ago
Ideally you'd be able to accurately gauge your progress without having intense negative emotions attached to it. Certainly it shouldn't undercut a person's feeling of validity in the world. I think "feeling behind" means different things for different people, depending on the experiences in their formative years they have associated with the thought of being behind. The ideal response to the feeling depends on what the feeling is.
- bckr 6y ago
  Yep. I think that if we have a bad feeling about being behind, it's more likely because there's something else that we Actually feel bad about, but "being behind" is an easy thing to attribute it to. More likely there are some childhood/family/psychiatric issues being unaddressed. At least, I've discovered this about myself.
munificent 6y ago
Most personality traits and psychological features have a mixture of adaptive and maladaptive characteristics. Few are all good. A deep sense of the opportunity cost of time—which I how I think of the author's point—can be good and bad at the same time. If it fills you with renewed vigor to make the most of today, great. If it leaves you riddled with remorse and convinced that you have already lost the game and there's no point in trying, not so great. It can be a delicate balancing act to fix the maladaptive parts of our brains without throwing off the adaptive parts too.
rektide 6y ago
none of the high perfomers (except the scary ones) are competing against anyone but themselves. true high perfomers have the confidence to follow themselves. (or at least, to seize the potential of where they are lead, to draw from & grow themselves well, seek the opportunity.) a lot of not so high performers also can decouple themselves from the busy world about, from it's projected images, and can search for their own truer, prime/primer/primest selves too. and sometimes they get way behind, and that dissonance is real, and we have to keep living with that distamce between our better selves and us, or we can adapt & be flexible and shift, or just triple down, try to push on, figure out new strategies or reform better fitting goals.

ianai 6y ago

The feeling of "being behind" is probably mostly anxiety or jealousy. Clearly many people are led astray by those feelings. It can blind a person from what is actually in front of them because they're stuck imagining where they're not. Maybe they've been highly successful following the "pro-forma" until they fail to realize they're in a novel situation and make a critical mistake applying the "pro-forma" solution.

Causality1 6y ago

Exactly the point I was going to make. Just because something is unpleasant doesn't make it destructive. Resisting junk food is unpleasant. Obeying the speed limit is unpleasant.

haswell 6y ago
Taken to an extreme, feeling "behind" all the time can also lead to a different outcome: giving up, or choosing not to start something at all. As is so often true, the ideal state is likely somewhere in the middle. A healthy recognition of ones goals and progress against those goals...without self judgement. To your point, unpleasant does not automatically equal destructive. But unpleasant without perspective on why that unpleasant thing is also beneficial is going to lead to some negative outcomes. Generally, people understand why the speed limit exists, and there is enough info about healthy eating that most people get it. I'd argue that something like feeling behind in ones life is not so clear cut. That feeling can be beneficial in the long run, depending on where it comes from. It can also be destructive, if perspective is lacking.
- matwood 6y ago
  I think it's important to understand what someone is feeling behind to. Am I feeling behind to my neighbor? Who cares. Am I feeling behind in what I know I can do, now that's different. At the end of the day this is all rooted in our ego. We want enough ego that pushes us to get better, but at the same time be able to check that same ego when it gets in the way. I've related many HN items to Jiu-Jitsu and here is another. First, there is always someone better than you. And in some ways it's worse because the person who kicks your ass might be younger, smaller, older or a different gender. It takes an ego to step on to the mat and find out. Then after getting your ass gets kicked it takes checking your ego to learn what happened and go again. Like a lot of life, it's the personal journey that matters.
  - maroonblazer 6y ago
    Well put. My undergrad degree was in music. That career lasted 10 years and then I pivoted to marketing. With no relevant degree under my belt and no resources to go back to school, I felt perpetually behind. That feeling motivated me to read and self-study anything and everything I could get my hands on. I believe I'm a better professional because of it and, combined with some good luck, allowed me to capitalize on opportunities that wouldn't have happened otherwise.

paxys 6y ago

The problem is that we only hear about outliers. Genius teenage whizkids and college dropout billionaires are constantly in the news, but successful tech founders are, on average, 40-45 years old. So if you feel like a failure at 28 it doesn't mean that you are necessarily on the wrong path, more likely just looking at bad data.

dale_glass 6y ago
And some of those are badly misrepresented. Gates didn't drop out of college because he smoked too much pot, or was too lazy. He was getting excellent grades and his teachers were very impressed. It was because he already had a business going, and wanted to concentrate on that. Plus, as a business owner nobody was going to require him to have a degree, so it didn't really matter so long he had the skills he needed for his business. Also, his parents were rich and supportive, and no doubt would have supported him if he had failed. He'd have no trouble getting back to Harvard had the business not worked out. That's a very different kind of "dropout" than most.
- EvilEy3 6y ago
  Exactly. People think that Jobs and Gates succeeded because of dropping out(from the ivy league schools nonetheless!) and not despite.
- Dracophoenix 6y ago
  And initially he didn't even drop out. He took two leaves of absences and could practically return at his leisure. So he had a fallback.

tdeck 6y ago

I came here to post a version of this. The tough part is that I don't know if it's useful or not. I feel like this kind of self-criticism motivated me and "keeps me honest", but maybe it just induced anxiety and causes me to avoid tasks? I didn't feel like this article addressed the issue enough to increase my confidence in either possibility.

readme 6y ago

I don't know any high performers who think this way. Do you? I find usually people use "i'm behind" as an excuse not to even try because they can never be as good as so and so. The high performers are usually the people who think it's never too late to learn something new, in my experience.

themacguffinman 6y ago
The article author explicitly notes that "The feeling of being behind is one of the most destructive feelings to harbor and yet almost every high performer I have ever met suffers from it." If you google "celebrity imposter syndrome" you'll see endless pages of articles of varying quality noting that many successful businessmen/leaders/artists have imposter syndrome, and they're evidently high performing.
mattnewton 6y ago
I do know people who have expressed it to me often, and the author of the article goes as far to say "yet almost every high performer I have ever met suffers from it." I agree that high performers must feel that they are capable to make performing feel tractable - I think that's necessary. But also they have to be motivated to do so.
sharms 6y ago
High performers are often aware of the large space of potential subjects they lack expertise on (hence feeling behind). Low performers are often not aware, and would self-evaluate as high performers due to not being aware of their own knowledge gaps, and how far behind they are. There is an excellent graph to illustrate this: https://understandinginnovation.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/dunning-kruger-0011.jpg https://understandinginnovation.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/...
- readme 6y ago
  feeling like you're "behind" and acknowledging the amount you don't know about a field are two different things one is a social comparison, the other is an epistemological observation

emsal 6y ago

Ideally you'd be able to accurately gauge your progress without having intense negative emotions attached to it. Certainly it shouldn't undercut a person's feeling of validity in the world. I think "feeling behind" means different things for different people, depending on the experiences in their formative years they have associated with the thought of being behind. The ideal response to the feeling depends on what the feeling is.

bckr 6y ago
Yep. I think that if we have a bad feeling about being behind, it's more likely because there's something else that we Actually feel bad about, but "being behind" is an easy thing to attribute it to. More likely there are some childhood/family/psychiatric issues being unaddressed. At least, I've discovered this about myself.

munificent 6y ago

Most personality traits and psychological features have a mixture of adaptive and maladaptive characteristics. Few are all good. A deep sense of the opportunity cost of time—which I how I think of the author's point—can be good and bad at the same time. If it fills you with renewed vigor to make the most of today, great. If it leaves you riddled with remorse and convinced that you have already lost the game and there's no point in trying, not so great. It can be a delicate balancing act to fix the maladaptive parts of our brains without throwing off the adaptive parts too.

rektide 6y ago

none of the high perfomers (except the scary ones) are competing against anyone but themselves. true high perfomers have the confidence to follow themselves. (or at least, to seize the potential of where they are lead, to draw from & grow themselves well, seek the opportunity.) a lot of not so high performers also can decouple themselves from the busy world about, from it's projected images, and can search for their own truer, prime/primer/primest selves too. and sometimes they get way behind, and that dissonance is real, and we have to keep living with that distamce between our better selves and us, or we can adapt & be flexible and shift, or just triple down, try to push on, figure out new strategies or reform better fitting goals.