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There's a couple of things going on here. Schools in the US and perhaps elsewhere DO NOT TEACH STUDENTS about how to handle failure states and anxiety. It is

There's a couple of things going on here. Schools in the US and perhaps elsewhere DO NOT TEACH STUDENTS about how to handle failure states and anxiety. It is the biggest blind spot the US has and it is biting us in the butt. A big part of the culture is about perfectionism (perhaps rooted in religion - perhaps rooted in kids TV shows - sports culture) - and that needs to be replaced with "blameless continual improvement". The best performers are those that divorce failure states from emotions and anxiety. XYZ isn't finished yet - no you're not done.... that's TOTALLY ok. Every homework assignment starts off with a grade of F - you work on it to get to a C, B, or A. A startup's work is never done, there really is no success state, and that's OK too. You're helping to make the product better, you're delivering features to customers. Your making the task pipeline faster with your automation tools. Things suck - but you're making life easier for everyone tomorrow. The reason why things are so bad now, is because before, things were worse. Its a much more positive way of looking at things for me. Yeah, things can improve, but we've done a lot to make things better. Also https://www.businessinsider.com/astronaut-chris-hadfield-in-space-there-is-no-problem-so-bad-you-cant-make-it-worse-2014-3?op=1 https://www.businessinsider.com/astronaut-chris-hadfield-in-... - there is no problem so bad that you can't make it worse. The best thing you can do is separate your emotions from the situation because they degrade your executive functions. I disagree with the "quit your bellyaching" sort of conclusions. It gives off a very https://reddit.com/r/wowthanksimcured https://reddit.com/r/wowthanksimcured vibe.

xoa 4y ago
I think you make some really strong points here and I completely agree that learning to deal with inevitable failure and working through it matters. I'd offer one small addition though: >XYZ isn't finished yet - no you're not done.... that's TOTALLY ok. Every homework assignment starts off with a grade of F - you work on it to get to a C, B, or A. A startup's work is never done, there really is no success state, and that's OK too. You're helping to make the product better, you're delivering features to customers. Your making the task pipeline faster with your automation tools. Things suck - but you're making life easier for everyone tomorrow. It's worth noting at the same time however that "effort" alone isn't enough. Some ideas really just don't work, either because it turns out it's not something the market actually values, is simply beyond any amount of effort with present technology, oneself/one's organization simply doesn't possess the capability to execute on it (often for perfectly good structural reasons), etc etc. If the homework assignment is "wacky acme item a grand total of 12 people in the world want that will cost hundreds of millions", "factor this 256-bit key" or some equivalent of "develop a working Unified Field Theory" it's unlikely most of us are getting an "A"! Obviously IRL it's not typically so clear, but non-domain expert stakeholders (be it management, users or clients) don't always have any great way to understand themselves that their "simple" requests may be a grabbag of "one of the interns can knock this off in an afternoon", "if the team focuses this can be done in a few months", "if this was Apple/Google/Microsoft devoting massive resources to a cutting edge unit they might pull it off in the next few years" and "ask our a strongly superhuman virtual intelligence descendants in another 50-100 years". It's a job for professionals to help inform what's possibly feasible and what isn't too, and an organization which just says yes isn't healthy. But of course not everyone has the luxury of just packing their bags even if an organization's sales side constantly writes checks development can't cash. It's also a classic startup trap to spend too many resources on tooling/infra that will make life easier for a tomorrow which will never come because they go under first. Getting the balance right between ugly hacks needed to hit targets cheaply and scaling if the startup works is often super hard. In all this implementation is more important than ideas, and a lot of solid hard work on something junk is still going to fail. So I think it's also important to emphasize that sometimes no amount of working on it will get from an F to a C, B, or A. There is a time to cut losses, and some initial effort should be expended on getting a feel for basic viability before too much time is sunk so it's possible to pivot away. All while not losing hope about trying again because you can definitely always get that C, B or A in a future effort. No perfect map for that either though. Is grand success just over that next hill, or just a slide down into quicksand? And sometimes a very valuable effort comes out of some side project or individual feature that customers love in an overall product which bombs.
chrisandchris 4y ago
> Every homework assignment starts off with a grade of F - you work on it to get to a C, B, or A. That's an interesting and very important take and something I learned doing semi-professional sports: As a runner (e.g.), you can't go faster, you can only go less slow. Beginning from the very first microsecond after the start, you're loosing time. This especially applies to sports that count points against a maximum. Same applies to homework: It's not a question about what you can miss and still get a B, the question is always _how much_ you need to do to go get a B. Different perspective.
- tough 4y ago
  I never did homework, was very boring for me. Some teachers where cool with it and would have me go in front of the class and solve it in the blackboard in real time instead, that was OK. Others hated me for it as it somewhat showed a lack of committment or interest for the classes they were teaching, who knows.
  - pastaguy1 4y ago
    In primary/secondary school? And that was ok? Most of us made an attempt at homework, but it certainly wasn't because it was richly entertaining.
    - tough 4y ago
      Yeah sure, Dropped out at 16 as soon as it became legal for me todo so without putting my guardians at peril
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    How do you "solve it in real time" when it's memorising foreign language vocabulary, researching a topic, or writing an essay on a theme in a book?
    - tough 4y ago
      For english irregular verbs that meant studying the 3-4 verbs we were being tested on in the free breakfast time. Researching is done best by mostly hearing what your teacher has to say on the topic, staying engaged (until it got repetitive and boring for me) was a way to just get by. Read the book, Write the thing. I don't know, Lot's of F's and be cool with that
UnpossibleJim 4y ago
>>A big part of the culture is about perfectionism (perhaps rooted in religion - perhaps rooted in kids TV shows - sports culture)<< Granted, it's been a long time since I was in school (in the US - as that's what we're talking about - just to be clear) but sports always helped me learn to take failure/loss better than anything else I was taught in school. As far as my son, he's a little young, but it doesn't seem hugely different.
mikkergp 4y ago
One interesting thing about school is the general idea that work is linear, you do every assignment given to you, , you try to complete your assignment to the best of your ability, what it means to complete the assignment is well defined, and that there is a third party who can evaluate your work. In the real especially high growth world, Theres often no sense of a beginning and an end, I’m always “assigned” more work than I can complete, and end up dropping things. Best is subjective and I may not have time to “complete” it (docs, etc.) not to mention, being taken off for something else halfway through and leaving a 3/4 finished pr behind.
glitchc 4y ago
It’s not the school’s job job to teach anything beyond the academic material. It’s not a daycare and it is definitely not a parent surrogate. When it comes to building character, teaching resilience, that falls on the parents, extended family and community. Stop blaming the teachers and start parenting your damn kids. Single parent families broken homes are the leading causes of poor outcomes for children in education and lifelong success. If the parents in America got their shit together, children would do a lot better in life.
- epicureanideal 4y ago
  > Single parent families broken homes are the leading causes of poor outcomes for children in education and lifelong success. It’s hard to blame specific parents when the laws and the participants in family courts (including but not limited to the parents) encourage broken families. > If the parents in America got their shit together, children would do a lot better in life. First we need to fix the laws to encourage families to be stable rather than require families to constantly struggle in opposition to the incentives created by the law.
  - malux85 4y ago
    Can you elaborate on how laws encourage broken families in the US (or anywhere) (Not disagreeing I’ve just never heard this perspective before and I’m curious)
    - coryrc 4y ago
      Almost no welfare for married couples, homeless shelters only accept women and children.
    - epicureanideal 4y ago
      I'll mention a little bit, although I could list more... For general context, I think it's the case that most relationships will have some disagreements and dissatisfactions from time to time, that are usually temporary and could be resolved in most cases assuming both partners are psychologically healthy and have reasonable conflict resolution skills. I also think that both partners will from time to time notice what appears to be a more desirable partner than their current partner, sometimes that's an accurate impression and sometimes it is only a temporary impression. In the past, social and legal incentives discouraged married people from breaking up their families at low points in their marriage, and ideally they'd stay together long enough to find out how to work out their problems. That's not to say that anyone should be stuck in a marriage. Divorce should obviously be possible for lots of reasons, and possibly for no reason, but it shouldn't be *incentivized* in my opinion. If a couple merely wants an unstable, temporary relationship, that's perfectly fine. No one is demanding that they give up that lifestyle if they prefer it, but for those who prefer the idea of marriage as a way of encouraging each other to commit to the relationship in the long term, current laws have removed absolutely every disincentive to break up the family and actually made married relationships more unstable than unmarried ones by creating financial and other incentives for breaking up the married relationship. 1) Spousal support awards to a lesser earning partner encourage that partner to break up the family rather than put effort into resolving disagreements or dissatisfactions in the relationship. 2) No-fault divorce means that anyone can end a marriage at any time for any reason, which no longer seems like what "marriage" was in the past or the vows that are made. If it's just a temporary relationship that can be ended at any time, why call it "marriage" rather than "girlfriend/boyfriend/etc."? Importantly, if there is no fault, but both parties walk away with 50% of the assets (and in practice much more usually goes to one of the sides) then the lesser earning partner in particular, and/or the partner that started with less assets, is at least "not disincentivized" from breaking up the family. 3) Child support awards in excess of the amount needed to raise children encourages the lesser earning parent to break up the family rather than resolve disagreements cooperatively. Note that I wouldn't want to encourage anyone to stay in a truly bad relationship, but specifically the award amounts should not be in excess of the needed amount. To the extent they're in excess, it's effectively a financial reward for breaking up the family. 4) Child custody awards are something like 80-85% of the time to the mother, so if a mother disagrees with the father on how to raise the kids or is having some other reasonable disagreement with him, she can break up the family and know that it's highly likely she'll get the vast majority of time with the kids, and in almost no cases would she get less than 50/50. So rather than both partners needing to learn to cooperate, one has a nuclear option they can use at any time, which imbalances any negotiation around personal boundaries or child raising. If the government wanted to encourage stable families they would do things like: a) Let divorce remain an option, but the party breaking up the family should be disincentivized rather than incentivized. b) Make pre-nuptial agreements ta default that people need to opt out of, so everyone negotiates the terms on the way in instead of expensively on the way out. c) Promote education about healthy conflict resolution strategies for all couples considering marriage, and possibly in all levels of education throughout life, as it would be beneficial to society as a whole.
fullshark 4y ago
Well for the vast majority of students, they eventually are just plugged into some machine/business post graduation and their job is "do not fail at task X." Task X usually well defined and not really requiring much outside the box creativity. Basically education was designed for creating industrial labor and then it's been morphed recently to create knowledge workers with mixed results.

xoa 4y ago

I think you make some really strong points here and I completely agree that learning to deal with inevitable failure and working through it matters. I'd offer one small addition though: >XYZ isn't finished yet - no you're not done.... that's TOTALLY ok. Every homework assignment starts off with a grade of F - you work on it to get to a C, B, or A. A startup's work is never done, there really is no success state, and that's OK too. You're helping to make the product better, you're delivering features to customers. Your making the task pipeline faster with your automation tools. Things suck - but you're making life easier for everyone tomorrow. It's worth noting at the same time however that "effort" alone isn't enough. Some ideas really just don't work, either because it turns out it's not something the market actually values, is simply beyond any amount of effort with present technology, oneself/one's organization simply doesn't possess the capability to execute on it (often for perfectly good structural reasons), etc etc. If the homework assignment is "wacky acme item a grand total of 12 people in the world want that will cost hundreds of millions", "factor this 256-bit key" or some equivalent of "develop a working Unified Field Theory" it's unlikely most of us are getting an "A"! Obviously IRL it's not typically so clear, but non-domain expert stakeholders (be it management, users or clients) don't always have any great way to understand themselves that their "simple" requests may be a grabbag of "one of the interns can knock this off in an afternoon", "if the team focuses this can be done in a few months", "if this was Apple/Google/Microsoft devoting massive resources to a cutting edge unit they might pull it off in the next few years" and "ask our a strongly superhuman virtual intelligence descendants in another 50-100 years". It's a job for professionals to help inform what's possibly feasible and what isn't too, and an organization which just says yes isn't healthy. But of course not everyone has the luxury of just packing their bags even if an organization's sales side constantly writes checks development can't cash. It's also a classic startup trap to spend too many resources on tooling/infra that will make life easier for a tomorrow which will never come because they go under first. Getting the balance right between ugly hacks needed to hit targets cheaply and scaling if the startup works is often super hard. In all this implementation is more important than ideas, and a lot of solid hard work on something junk is still going to fail. So I think it's also important to emphasize that sometimes no amount of working on it will get from an F to a C, B, or A. There is a time to cut losses, and some initial effort should be expended on getting a feel for basic viability before too much time is sunk so it's possible to pivot away. All while not losing hope about trying again because you can definitely always get that C, B or A in a future effort. No perfect map for that either though. Is grand success just over that next hill, or just a slide down into quicksand? And sometimes a very valuable effort comes out of some side project or individual feature that customers love in an overall product which bombs.

chrisandchris 4y ago

> Every homework assignment starts off with a grade of F - you work on it to get to a C, B, or A. That's an interesting and very important take and something I learned doing semi-professional sports: As a runner (e.g.), you can't go faster, you can only go less slow. Beginning from the very first microsecond after the start, you're loosing time. This especially applies to sports that count points against a maximum. Same applies to homework: It's not a question about what you can miss and still get a B, the question is always _how much_ you need to do to go get a B. Different perspective.

tough 4y ago
I never did homework, was very boring for me. Some teachers where cool with it and would have me go in front of the class and solve it in the blackboard in real time instead, that was OK. Others hated me for it as it somewhat showed a lack of committment or interest for the classes they were teaching, who knows.
- pastaguy1 4y ago
  In primary/secondary school? And that was ok? Most of us made an attempt at homework, but it certainly wasn't because it was richly entertaining.
  - tough 4y ago
    Yeah sure, Dropped out at 16 as soon as it became legal for me todo so without putting my guardians at peril
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  How do you "solve it in real time" when it's memorising foreign language vocabulary, researching a topic, or writing an essay on a theme in a book?
  - tough 4y ago
    For english irregular verbs that meant studying the 3-4 verbs we were being tested on in the free breakfast time. Researching is done best by mostly hearing what your teacher has to say on the topic, staying engaged (until it got repetitive and boring for me) was a way to just get by. Read the book, Write the thing. I don't know, Lot's of F's and be cool with that

UnpossibleJim 4y ago

>>A big part of the culture is about perfectionism (perhaps rooted in religion - perhaps rooted in kids TV shows - sports culture)<< Granted, it's been a long time since I was in school (in the US - as that's what we're talking about - just to be clear) but sports always helped me learn to take failure/loss better than anything else I was taught in school. As far as my son, he's a little young, but it doesn't seem hugely different.

mikkergp 4y ago

One interesting thing about school is the general idea that work is linear, you do every assignment given to you, , you try to complete your assignment to the best of your ability, what it means to complete the assignment is well defined, and that there is a third party who can evaluate your work. In the real especially high growth world, Theres often no sense of a beginning and an end, I’m always “assigned” more work than I can complete, and end up dropping things. Best is subjective and I may not have time to “complete” it (docs, etc.) not to mention, being taken off for something else halfway through and leaving a 3/4 finished pr behind.

glitchc 4y ago

It’s not the school’s job job to teach anything beyond the academic material. It’s not a daycare and it is definitely not a parent surrogate. When it comes to building character, teaching resilience, that falls on the parents, extended family and community. Stop blaming the teachers and start parenting your damn kids. Single parent families broken homes are the leading causes of poor outcomes for children in education and lifelong success. If the parents in America got their shit together, children would do a lot better in life.

epicureanideal 4y ago
> Single parent families broken homes are the leading causes of poor outcomes for children in education and lifelong success. It’s hard to blame specific parents when the laws and the participants in family courts (including but not limited to the parents) encourage broken families. > If the parents in America got their shit together, children would do a lot better in life. First we need to fix the laws to encourage families to be stable rather than require families to constantly struggle in opposition to the incentives created by the law.
- malux85 4y ago
  Can you elaborate on how laws encourage broken families in the US (or anywhere) (Not disagreeing I’ve just never heard this perspective before and I’m curious)
  - coryrc 4y ago
    Almost no welfare for married couples, homeless shelters only accept women and children.
  - epicureanideal 4y ago
    I'll mention a little bit, although I could list more... For general context, I think it's the case that most relationships will have some disagreements and dissatisfactions from time to time, that are usually temporary and could be resolved in most cases assuming both partners are psychologically healthy and have reasonable conflict resolution skills. I also think that both partners will from time to time notice what appears to be a more desirable partner than their current partner, sometimes that's an accurate impression and sometimes it is only a temporary impression. In the past, social and legal incentives discouraged married people from breaking up their families at low points in their marriage, and ideally they'd stay together long enough to find out how to work out their problems. That's not to say that anyone should be stuck in a marriage. Divorce should obviously be possible for lots of reasons, and possibly for no reason, but it shouldn't be *incentivized* in my opinion. If a couple merely wants an unstable, temporary relationship, that's perfectly fine. No one is demanding that they give up that lifestyle if they prefer it, but for those who prefer the idea of marriage as a way of encouraging each other to commit to the relationship in the long term, current laws have removed absolutely every disincentive to break up the family and actually made married relationships more unstable than unmarried ones by creating financial and other incentives for breaking up the married relationship. 1) Spousal support awards to a lesser earning partner encourage that partner to break up the family rather than put effort into resolving disagreements or dissatisfactions in the relationship. 2) No-fault divorce means that anyone can end a marriage at any time for any reason, which no longer seems like what "marriage" was in the past or the vows that are made. If it's just a temporary relationship that can be ended at any time, why call it "marriage" rather than "girlfriend/boyfriend/etc."? Importantly, if there is no fault, but both parties walk away with 50% of the assets (and in practice much more usually goes to one of the sides) then the lesser earning partner in particular, and/or the partner that started with less assets, is at least "not disincentivized" from breaking up the family. 3) Child support awards in excess of the amount needed to raise children encourages the lesser earning parent to break up the family rather than resolve disagreements cooperatively. Note that I wouldn't want to encourage anyone to stay in a truly bad relationship, but specifically the award amounts should not be in excess of the needed amount. To the extent they're in excess, it's effectively a financial reward for breaking up the family. 4) Child custody awards are something like 80-85% of the time to the mother, so if a mother disagrees with the father on how to raise the kids or is having some other reasonable disagreement with him, she can break up the family and know that it's highly likely she'll get the vast majority of time with the kids, and in almost no cases would she get less than 50/50. So rather than both partners needing to learn to cooperate, one has a nuclear option they can use at any time, which imbalances any negotiation around personal boundaries or child raising. If the government wanted to encourage stable families they would do things like: a) Let divorce remain an option, but the party breaking up the family should be disincentivized rather than incentivized. b) Make pre-nuptial agreements ta default that people need to opt out of, so everyone negotiates the terms on the way in instead of expensively on the way out. c) Promote education about healthy conflict resolution strategies for all couples considering marriage, and possibly in all levels of education throughout life, as it would be beneficial to society as a whole.

fullshark 4y ago

Well for the vast majority of students, they eventually are just plugged into some machine/business post graduation and their job is "do not fail at task X." Task X usually well defined and not really requiring much outside the box creativity. Basically education was designed for creating industrial labor and then it's been morphed recently to create knowledge workers with mixed results.