6 ms·

Desperation-Induced Focus

104 points by deadcoder0904 5y ago

harrybr 5y ago
Perhaps this is a useful counterpoint: Aviation Psychologist David Beaty on the phenomenon of ‘Set’ (1991): “‘Set’ is a survival characteristic we have inherited. The human brain evolved to help individuals live and survive circumstances very different from our own. It predisposes us to select our focus on that part of the picture paramount at the time – a vision often so totally focused that it ignores the rest of the environment. Once something is identified […] it takes on a reality of its own and sticks in the mind like a burr which is difficult to dislodge. […] The mind becomes tunnelled on a particular course of action. Add to that the ingredient of fatigue and it is not difficult to see that a ‘set’ as hard as concrete can result. Furthermore, ‘set’ is infectious. There is a follow-my-leader syndrome. So it is easy to see why most aircraft accidents are caused by ‘silly’ mistakes in the approach and landing phase. […] ‘Set’ has been a factor in many aircraft accidents. [In a case in 1972 over Florida], the crew of a Tristar were not sure that their undercarriage was down. The accident sequence was begun by a burned out light bulb in the system which is designed to show that the undercarriage is down and locked. […] the crew examined every possible of finding the trouble. The flight engineer crawled down into the nose, while the captain and the first officer tried every combination of switches and circuit-breakers. […] the three members of crew did not notice that the autopilot had become disengaged and the aircraft was sinking […] eventually crashing into the Everglades. Because they had become preoccupied with an unsafe landing-gear indication, they failed to monitor the critical altimeter readings. Ironically, the air traffic controller noticed on his radar that the aircraft was losing height, but instead of pointing this out simply asked diplomatically “How are things coming along there?”. The crew, still obsessed with their landing-gear problem, assuming he referred to that, for they could thing of nothing else, replied seconds before the crash, “Everything is all right!” – Paraphrased from The Naked Pilot by David Beaty (Ch.6) https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Naked_Pilot.html?id=66R8AwAAQBAJ https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Naked_Pilot.html?id...
- doctor_eval 5y ago
  This isn’t really a fair comparison though. More than once I’ve encouraged my team to take chances and break rules and skip processes because “nobody will die if we get this wrong”. That is not remotely true of flying a plane.
lkrubner 5y ago
I like this very much: "In reality, process is not my problem. It’s what discussions around new processes often preview within a company. Lack of focus. Peacetime thinking. Complacency." I recently wrote a small book for small startups called "One on one meetings are underrated; group meetings waste time" and I have gotten a lot of pushback regarding my emphasis on intuition, pragmatism, and favoring direct action over process. And over and over again, people reach out to me with some variation of "So you think the people who run Google are stupid? You think the people who run Apple are stupid? You think all of these brilliant people are actually idiots?" And my defense has been: "No, I just think those companies are large, and my advice is for small startups. Small startups are different." It should be common sense to say that small startups are different, and need to operate by other rules. But I have noticed, there are some people in the tech industry who seem to think that the way a small startup becomes a huge tech giant is by imitating that huge tech giant exactly, including all of that tech giant's "best practices." But what is "best practice" at a huge company will not work at a small startup. In fact, many of those processes would be fatal, at a small company. They'd cause you to move too slowly, and they'd also cause you to give up the few advantages that you actually have as a small company, such as the ability to trust one another (when the whole team is just 5 people, it is easier to trust one another than when you've a company of 10,000 people).
- p0larboy 5y ago
  Any chance we get to see that book? I constantly trying to improve my company process (we are small, < 10 people) and I like to see how others are handling operation.
- doctor_eval 5y ago
  While my experience matches yours exactly, I just wanted to add to this point: > "One on one meetings are underrated; group meetings waste time" My rule of thumb is, “up to 5 people is a meeting; more than 5 is a presentation.”
  - mark_undoio 5y ago
    > My rule of thumb is, “up to 5 people is a meeting; more than 5 is a presentation.” I like this. I do think it's possible to still have an effective meeting with more people (up to, I don't know maybe 8-10?) but it becomes increasingly important to have tight rules around how the meeting runs and what it's supposed to achieve.
philipswood 5y ago
I always think the Spider-Man maxim needs to be turned around: “With great responsibility comes great power” If you need someone to have amazing output, rather than shackling them with a process, give them responsibility and the corresponding power to make decisions and to execute.
philipswood 5y ago
There is a kind of process that I think is worth it: a group protocol on how we do things that allows you to walk into a situation and understand what’s being done and how to proceed without needlessly needing to talk to others that where involved before you. * The documentation will be here and look like this. * The deployment is done using code that lives here. * The code would have been in a PR here. Etc.
- mindtricks 5y ago
  People need to internalize that more. The gut-check reaction from most people is that process = overhead. It may be true that it creates that from time to time, but essentially a process should help align, remove confusion, maintain flow, and open up organizational capacity to do higher-level and more impactful work.
  - throwaway889900 5y ago
    Because for most big organizations: Help align -> More meetings Remove confusion -> More meetings Maintain flow -> More meetings Open up organizational capacity -> Meetings about having less meetings
GnarfGnarf 5y ago
Totally agree. Fear is the mother of invention. I run my own small company, haven't had a performance review in twenty seven years. Bliss.
throwoutway 5y ago
I think it depends on the process? Process isn’t a boogeyman. If a team is consistently deploying to production wrong and customers aren’t happy, you need a process. A peacetime process though, then I’m. To agree
- malfist 5y ago
  Yeah, I agree with you here, and not the source article. Process is scar tissue. It's there to prevent the same mistake from happening twice, but yes, sometimes it can be inflexible and make it hard to effect change. Sometimes that's a good thing. It's all a balance right? Sometimes process helps you guide decision making and make decisions faster. Sometimes it helps keep people from making the same mistake in the past. Sometimes it keeps you from tinkering with something that's working (i.e., don't fix what isn't broken). Process can also be wrong, it can keep you from exploring needed changes. It's a fine line to walk between preventing "fixing" a not broken system, and being tomorrow's ice shippers. Take for example, the US government. The process to pass laws is extremely complicated and difficult. That's on purpose. It keeps the government from meddling without cause and often forces compromise. Is it perfect? Absolutely not. But it's better than a dictatorship or simple majority rule.
garyrob 5y ago
Maybe only somewhat relevant, but the title phrase resonated with me. Given my ADHD, desperation-induced focus was the only thing that got me through college with good grades. I wouldn't study until the night before the big exam because I was unable to focus under normal circumstances, or even pay any attention to what was being said in class, but the desperation-induced focus of the big exam in the morning finally enabled me to study, and in that circumstance, to study very well and do just fine on the test.
- pinephoneguy 5y ago
  Eventually this burns me out and I stop focusing anyway. I haven't figured out what to do then other than just lay low for a year while I recover.
FabHK 5y ago
Tangentially related: For a while, I had a girl friend who had a remarkable propensity to get herself into serious trouble, often while I was on a different continent. We noticed that when I got apprised of these acute situations, far away, unable to do anything about it, I would often score exceptional high scores on my favourite games. The stress and desperation I couldn’t put to good use to help instead manifested itself in laser focused game performance…
cmehdy 5y ago
Definition of desperation 1 : loss of hope and surrender to despair 2 : a state of hopelessness leading to rashness Am I missing something or is it a term that is coopted to romanticize something particularly horrible? I'm not a native english speaker so perhaps I am missing something, but with severe depression and suicidal attempts I had understood states of a certain learned helplessness to be what desperation is about. Adversity and hope are what I believe small struggling companies hold on to, which seems wholly different from "desperation" and much more conducive to growth and creation.. but perhaps I'm not understanding what natives would understand.
- escapedmoose 5y ago
  Many people use the word “desperation” in a diluted way that doesn’t necessarily imply learned helplessness or suicidal thoughts. (I’m a native speaker) Example: “The team’s desperation increased as their opponent continued to score more points.”
  - cmehdy 5y ago
    So that's a common hyperbole I guess? I've encountered the term "desperate situation" in writing (fiction) used to highlight subsequent achievements, but I assumed that every instance of "desperation" could at least be replaced with "hopelessness" - which doesn't have to be as harsh as the realities I know, but certainly go exactly opposite to the hope required for a small company to survive and thrive.
    - CharlesW 5y ago
      > So that's a common hyperbole I guess? It's contextual, so if a friend is "desperate for a drink", it's not meant to be taken literally. When the author says, "When I think of my time at Instacart, I remember desperation", I assume they were feeling actual hopelessness.
    - Minor49er 5y ago
      Desperation is often used as an opposite of hopelessness, but frequently close to one another. Desperation is typically resorting to careless or carefree means with the hope that a goal is achieved. It usually comes about when the typical or expected avenues of that outcome are closed, but there is still a strong desire for that outcome and a belief that it can still be achieved. For example, an employee is shooting for a big promotion. He's hopeful that he's going to get it. But his boss tells him that he's still not doing enough and won't get the role. If he was hopeless, he would simply give up, believing that there's no chance that he's going to get it this time. But if he was desperate, he would take additional uncouth or unexpected actions, like begging and pleading, or sabotaging the coworkers who also have a chance at the promotion. If those desperate attempts failed, then it would be hopeless.
Invictus0 5y ago
> But now they are different. Most big companies aren’t focused on creating things out of nothing. Someone else made the magic money-making machine, and they assume that it will just keep working. With the one thing that actually matters taken care of, they care about luxuries like making sure as high a percentage of the company as possible feels included in the planning process. Or creating performance review frameworks with an ever-increasing number of boxes and categories. Or something else that matters even less than that. This lack of focus is a luxury and a disease. Absolutely brilliant paragraph, couldn't have said it better. I wonder if this is some function of "idle hands do the devil's work": that is, people with not enough work to do find some moderately useless thing to do that feels like work and seems like work but is actually wasting time or even counterproductive. Perhaps a properly lean company always has a bit more work to do than it has the capacity to do it.
kelseyfrog 5y ago
This echos "Desperate Ground"[1] or "Death Ground" in Sun Tzu's Art of War. I've put myself deliberately in this position many times in order to succeed. The day-to-day uses of this idea tend to be far less dramatic than the name implies. I've even applied it to process where I would phrase it as, "Create processes when you must, not when you can." 1. https://suntzusaid.com/book/11 https://suntzusaid.com/book/11
mavelikara 5y ago
The post seems to have two separate topics - one I agree with, one I don't. One is about keeping things simple and having focus. Could not agree with it more. On every proposal, ask, "What problem does this solve?", "Is the cure worse than the disease?", "If this is added, what else can be removed so that the overall weight stays the same?". All good points; I don't think that is controversial. But then, the post goes into what I can only describe as a rant. Something about going to the whiteboard. About desperation. Some random tangent on bottle deposits. I don't agree with this. A "small company" is not synonymous with a "poorly-run company". Sure, Mario Andretti's quote "If everything seems under control, you're not going fast enough" applies to almost every startup. There always will be some portion of the company that needs urgent attention. But valorizing constant struggles, throwing your hands up saying "Duh, startup" is poor leadership, IME. The big tell for me is that Ravi does not explain what is a good process. There never is a "no process" world. The choice is between a stated, well-understood process OR a poorly-specified, poorly-understood, inefficient process. A few years ago, startups used to say, "Oh, we have a flat organization - no hierarchies," and wear that as a bad of honor. Not really; there always is a hierarchy - except now it is based on who hangs out with who. I notice that most startup leaders understand this now, and the "no hierarchy" line is not trotted out these days. The "no process" bit is also like that, IMO.

104 points by deadcoder0904 5y ago

Perhaps this is a useful counterpoint: Aviation Psychologist David Beaty on the phenomenon of ‘Set’ (1991): “‘Set’ is a survival characteristic we have inherited. The human brain evolved to help individuals live and survive circumstances very different from our own. It predisposes us to select our focus on that part of the picture paramount at the time – a vision often so totally focused that it ignores the rest of the environment. Once something is identified […] it takes on a reality of its own and sticks in the mind like a burr which is difficult to dislodge. […] The mind becomes tunnelled on a particular course of action. Add to that the ingredient of fatigue and it is not difficult to see that a ‘set’ as hard as concrete can result. Furthermore, ‘set’ is infectious. There is a follow-my-leader syndrome. So it is easy to see why most aircraft accidents are caused by ‘silly’ mistakes in the approach and landing phase. […] ‘Set’ has been a factor in many aircraft accidents. [In a case in 1972 over Florida], the crew of a Tristar were not sure that their undercarriage was down. The accident sequence was begun by a burned out light bulb in the system which is designed to show that the undercarriage is down and locked. […] the crew examined every possible of finding the trouble. The flight engineer crawled down into the nose, while the captain and the first officer tried every combination of switches and circuit-breakers. […] the three members of crew did not notice that the autopilot had become disengaged and the aircraft was sinking […] eventually crashing into the Everglades. Because they had become preoccupied with an unsafe landing-gear indication, they failed to monitor the critical altimeter readings. Ironically, the air traffic controller noticed on his radar that the aircraft was losing height, but instead of pointing this out simply asked diplomatically “How are things coming along there?”. The crew, still obsessed with their landing-gear problem, assuming he referred to that, for they could thing of nothing else, replied seconds before the crash, “Everything is all right!” – Paraphrased from The Naked Pilot by David Beaty (Ch.6) https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Naked_Pilot.html?id=66R8AwAAQBAJ https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Naked_Pilot.html?id...

doctor_eval 5y ago
This isn’t really a fair comparison though. More than once I’ve encouraged my team to take chances and break rules and skip processes because “nobody will die if we get this wrong”. That is not remotely true of flying a plane.

lkrubner 5y ago

I like this very much: "In reality, process is not my problem. It’s what discussions around new processes often preview within a company. Lack of focus. Peacetime thinking. Complacency." I recently wrote a small book for small startups called "One on one meetings are underrated; group meetings waste time" and I have gotten a lot of pushback regarding my emphasis on intuition, pragmatism, and favoring direct action over process. And over and over again, people reach out to me with some variation of "So you think the people who run Google are stupid? You think the people who run Apple are stupid? You think all of these brilliant people are actually idiots?" And my defense has been: "No, I just think those companies are large, and my advice is for small startups. Small startups are different." It should be common sense to say that small startups are different, and need to operate by other rules. But I have noticed, there are some people in the tech industry who seem to think that the way a small startup becomes a huge tech giant is by imitating that huge tech giant exactly, including all of that tech giant's "best practices." But what is "best practice" at a huge company will not work at a small startup. In fact, many of those processes would be fatal, at a small company. They'd cause you to move too slowly, and they'd also cause you to give up the few advantages that you actually have as a small company, such as the ability to trust one another (when the whole team is just 5 people, it is easier to trust one another than when you've a company of 10,000 people).

p0larboy 5y ago
Any chance we get to see that book? I constantly trying to improve my company process (we are small, < 10 people) and I like to see how others are handling operation.
doctor_eval 5y ago
While my experience matches yours exactly, I just wanted to add to this point: > "One on one meetings are underrated; group meetings waste time" My rule of thumb is, “up to 5 people is a meeting; more than 5 is a presentation.”
- mark_undoio 5y ago
  > My rule of thumb is, “up to 5 people is a meeting; more than 5 is a presentation.” I like this. I do think it's possible to still have an effective meeting with more people (up to, I don't know maybe 8-10?) but it becomes increasingly important to have tight rules around how the meeting runs and what it's supposed to achieve.

philipswood 5y ago

I always think the Spider-Man maxim needs to be turned around: “With great responsibility comes great power” If you need someone to have amazing output, rather than shackling them with a process, give them responsibility and the corresponding power to make decisions and to execute.

philipswood 5y ago

There is a kind of process that I think is worth it: a group protocol on how we do things that allows you to walk into a situation and understand what’s being done and how to proceed without needlessly needing to talk to others that where involved before you. * The documentation will be here and look like this. * The deployment is done using code that lives here. * The code would have been in a PR here. Etc.

mindtricks 5y ago
People need to internalize that more. The gut-check reaction from most people is that process = overhead. It may be true that it creates that from time to time, but essentially a process should help align, remove confusion, maintain flow, and open up organizational capacity to do higher-level and more impactful work.
- throwaway889900 5y ago
  Because for most big organizations: Help align -> More meetings Remove confusion -> More meetings Maintain flow -> More meetings Open up organizational capacity -> Meetings about having less meetings

GnarfGnarf 5y ago

Totally agree. Fear is the mother of invention. I run my own small company, haven't had a performance review in twenty seven years. Bliss.

throwoutway 5y ago

I think it depends on the process? Process isn’t a boogeyman. If a team is consistently deploying to production wrong and customers aren’t happy, you need a process. A peacetime process though, then I’m. To agree

malfist 5y ago
Yeah, I agree with you here, and not the source article. Process is scar tissue. It's there to prevent the same mistake from happening twice, but yes, sometimes it can be inflexible and make it hard to effect change. Sometimes that's a good thing. It's all a balance right? Sometimes process helps you guide decision making and make decisions faster. Sometimes it helps keep people from making the same mistake in the past. Sometimes it keeps you from tinkering with something that's working (i.e., don't fix what isn't broken). Process can also be wrong, it can keep you from exploring needed changes. It's a fine line to walk between preventing "fixing" a not broken system, and being tomorrow's ice shippers. Take for example, the US government. The process to pass laws is extremely complicated and difficult. That's on purpose. It keeps the government from meddling without cause and often forces compromise. Is it perfect? Absolutely not. But it's better than a dictatorship or simple majority rule.

garyrob 5y ago

Maybe only somewhat relevant, but the title phrase resonated with me. Given my ADHD, desperation-induced focus was the only thing that got me through college with good grades. I wouldn't study until the night before the big exam because I was unable to focus under normal circumstances, or even pay any attention to what was being said in class, but the desperation-induced focus of the big exam in the morning finally enabled me to study, and in that circumstance, to study very well and do just fine on the test.

pinephoneguy 5y ago
Eventually this burns me out and I stop focusing anyway. I haven't figured out what to do then other than just lay low for a year while I recover.

FabHK 5y ago

Tangentially related: For a while, I had a girl friend who had a remarkable propensity to get herself into serious trouble, often while I was on a different continent. We noticed that when I got apprised of these acute situations, far away, unable to do anything about it, I would often score exceptional high scores on my favourite games. The stress and desperation I couldn’t put to good use to help instead manifested itself in laser focused game performance…

cmehdy 5y ago

Definition of desperation 1 : loss of hope and surrender to despair 2 : a state of hopelessness leading to rashness Am I missing something or is it a term that is coopted to romanticize something particularly horrible? I'm not a native english speaker so perhaps I am missing something, but with severe depression and suicidal attempts I had understood states of a certain learned helplessness to be what desperation is about. Adversity and hope are what I believe small struggling companies hold on to, which seems wholly different from "desperation" and much more conducive to growth and creation.. but perhaps I'm not understanding what natives would understand.

escapedmoose 5y ago
Many people use the word “desperation” in a diluted way that doesn’t necessarily imply learned helplessness or suicidal thoughts. (I’m a native speaker) Example: “The team’s desperation increased as their opponent continued to score more points.”
- cmehdy 5y ago
  So that's a common hyperbole I guess? I've encountered the term "desperate situation" in writing (fiction) used to highlight subsequent achievements, but I assumed that every instance of "desperation" could at least be replaced with "hopelessness" - which doesn't have to be as harsh as the realities I know, but certainly go exactly opposite to the hope required for a small company to survive and thrive.
  - CharlesW 5y ago
    > So that's a common hyperbole I guess? It's contextual, so if a friend is "desperate for a drink", it's not meant to be taken literally. When the author says, "When I think of my time at Instacart, I remember desperation", I assume they were feeling actual hopelessness.
  - Minor49er 5y ago
    Desperation is often used as an opposite of hopelessness, but frequently close to one another. Desperation is typically resorting to careless or carefree means with the hope that a goal is achieved. It usually comes about when the typical or expected avenues of that outcome are closed, but there is still a strong desire for that outcome and a belief that it can still be achieved. For example, an employee is shooting for a big promotion. He's hopeful that he's going to get it. But his boss tells him that he's still not doing enough and won't get the role. If he was hopeless, he would simply give up, believing that there's no chance that he's going to get it this time. But if he was desperate, he would take additional uncouth or unexpected actions, like begging and pleading, or sabotaging the coworkers who also have a chance at the promotion. If those desperate attempts failed, then it would be hopeless.

Invictus0 5y ago

> But now they are different. Most big companies aren’t focused on creating things out of nothing. Someone else made the magic money-making machine, and they assume that it will just keep working. With the one thing that actually matters taken care of, they care about luxuries like making sure as high a percentage of the company as possible feels included in the planning process. Or creating performance review frameworks with an ever-increasing number of boxes and categories. Or something else that matters even less than that. This lack of focus is a luxury and a disease. Absolutely brilliant paragraph, couldn't have said it better. I wonder if this is some function of "idle hands do the devil's work": that is, people with not enough work to do find some moderately useless thing to do that feels like work and seems like work but is actually wasting time or even counterproductive. Perhaps a properly lean company always has a bit more work to do than it has the capacity to do it.

kelseyfrog 5y ago

This echos "Desperate Ground"[1] or "Death Ground" in Sun Tzu's Art of War. I've put myself deliberately in this position many times in order to succeed. The day-to-day uses of this idea tend to be far less dramatic than the name implies. I've even applied it to process where I would phrase it as, "Create processes when you must, not when you can." 1. https://suntzusaid.com/book/11 https://suntzusaid.com/book/11

mavelikara 5y ago

The post seems to have two separate topics - one I agree with, one I don't. One is about keeping things simple and having focus. Could not agree with it more. On every proposal, ask, "What problem does this solve?", "Is the cure worse than the disease?", "If this is added, what else can be removed so that the overall weight stays the same?". All good points; I don't think that is controversial. But then, the post goes into what I can only describe as a rant. Something about going to the whiteboard. About desperation. Some random tangent on bottle deposits. I don't agree with this. A "small company" is not synonymous with a "poorly-run company". Sure, Mario Andretti's quote "If everything seems under control, you're not going fast enough" applies to almost every startup. There always will be some portion of the company that needs urgent attention. But valorizing constant struggles, throwing your hands up saying "Duh, startup" is poor leadership, IME. The big tell for me is that Ravi does not explain what is a good process. There never is a "no process" world. The choice is between a stated, well-understood process OR a poorly-specified, poorly-understood, inefficient process. A few years ago, startups used to say, "Oh, we have a flat organization - no hierarchies," and wear that as a bad of honor. Not really; there always is a hierarchy - except now it is based on who hangs out with who. I notice that most startup leaders understand this now, and the "no hierarchy" line is not trotted out these days. The "no process" bit is also like that, IMO.