37 ms·

No-one knows what they are doing

292 points by charly357 4y ago

hansword 4y ago
I agree with the sentiment that adults are much better at projecting confidence than actually knowing what the heck they are doing or even making smart decisions. The advice of just founding a company without a plan? Not so much....
- lbriner 4y ago
  I don't know who said it but "Failing to plan is planning to fail, however, no war was ever won by planning alone". In other words, most of business (as well as life) is both strategic and tactical. My strategic plans are needed because things take time and investment and we need a direction to give assurances. However, things change every day and the tactical side is working out how to deal with those. I certainly think adults are better at projecting confidence but I also think as you grow older, you are more likely to be realistic about how messy things are.
thom 4y ago
Blast from the past! I used PerfectTablePlan for our wedding, tweaked by the far superior ‘do what your better half tells you’ algorithm. We used the same approach later when naming our first child, I built a complicated machine learning system to learn what names and sounds we liked, then we settled on my wife’s first choice. The thing I’ve learned in life (and especially in sports analytics where variance can dominate) is that “knowing what you’re doing” isn’t any number of instances where you got something right first time. It’s having a process (or even a process-creating-process!) that you’re willing to stand by even when individual results don’t work out. The question isn’t “would you do it all again, knowing what you know now?” it’s “would you learn the same way in the future?” I think being open about this with kids is pretty helpful.
- thathndude 4y ago
  This second paragraph is consistent with advice from a piece on HN about a month ago, describing how playing poker can make us better at life. And one of the key principles was being process oriented.
ardit33 4y ago
Not true at all at things that need practice and that are recurrent. From sports, to many other activities that have repetition, people know what they are generally trying to do. That doesn't mean that there is not a large degree of randomness, and some improvisation. Eg: 1. A penalty kicker knows what he/she is trying to do. Power over placement, what corner they want to shoot it, etc. They have practiced many times. Same with the goalie. The goalie will try to guess, left, right, center, etc... They have practiced this many time as well. Both parties know what they are doing (at a professional level), yet there is always a degree of randomness, and improvisation. 2. A cop knows that in some corner it is much easier to catch people that are speeding, and they can give tickets easy. 3. A dentist has seen a root canal many times, and it is easy for him/her to just fill another one. All teeth are different, yet they are similar at the same time. Practice makes perfect. First time doing a root cannal, or an extraction must be tough/nerve racking. 10th time, a bit easier. 100th time, just another routine day. Anyways... but these type of articles are really good feel good articles.
- hermitcrab 4y ago
  I don't think running a business is anything like kicking penalties. So many more variables and unknowns.
- jstummbillig 4y ago
  If the goal is clear, and the rules are clear, the knowing-what-to-do-level can be relatively high. As an example, a typical game can be won with executing on the set rules with skill. You can measure the success of your actions by looking at the outcome. This seems so obvious that I don't think the author would argue against it. I think what the author is talking about is the space where things become so complex that it's hard to attribute any action to the outcome or, even worse, you can't even realistically measure the outcome. Applying this to your penalty kicker: Sure, you practice, you get better. But so does everyone else. The question then is: How and what to get better than the other guys? Why does one guy succeed and the other doesn't? Yeah sure, because they hit the ball in such a way that it enters the designated space – but how do they set themselves up to accomplish that? How many of the 24 hours you have in a day do you spend kicking the ball from the penalty point? How much of it is recovery? When do you get up? Planing and theory? Mental strength exercises? Food intake? Massages, strength or balance workouts? The failure is simply defined: You did not hit the ball in such a way that it entered the goal. Sure – but why? How do you adjust your routine in such a way that next time it's going to be better, relative to everyone else, who is also trying to improve? In reality it's obviously more complex even still, because there is no "penalty kicker" in football. So to become the best possible soccer player, how much of your time should be allocated to penalty kicking at all? And then how does your penaltykickability scale while working on the other stuff that you are also looking at? And then, when we are exiting game space, it gets really complicated, because all of a sudden it's not even clear what winning even means. In soccer a win is neatly defined. It's usually not the case in the real world. Is it a win to provide health care to all? Is Bitcoin a win for humanity? Is it a good goal to get people out of poverty or is the goal something else and we trust that this will be a side effect of that goal? You and I might agree on an answer, and then there is millions or billions of people who don't, in theory or at least in practice. It's messy stuff.
EnKopVand 4y ago
I’m going to let you in on a little secret. I spent almost a decade in public sector digitalisation in Denmark, and those politicians who look like they don’t know what they are doing in the media, well, they absolutely know what they are doing. Not only that, but they get advice from a bureaucracy full of well educated, really smart people, who also know what they are doing and have known so for decades. One of the things that struck me going in was just how much people know exactly what they are doing, and, to my own discredit, just how engaged and well meaning those people are. What eventually led me to leave the public sector is that there is a very big difference between knowing what you’re doing and doing the “smart/right” thing, especially when you’re held accountable by an entire country, if not the world. I’ve seen the same sort of thing in the private sector. Once you zoom out enough to understand decisions from the perspective they are being taken from, they very often make perfect sense. That doesn’t mean those very same decisions aren’t a load of bollocks from a lot of perspectives, but they are rarely just “fake it till you make it” sort of deals. I think this author suffers from childhood delusion in that the author still thinks adults are supposed to have the answers for everything, which isn’t true. There is a lot to be said about figuring things out a long the way, but it’s not like people don’t know what they are doing, because we learn, we adapt and we very often plan ahead. I mean, the author even sort of contradicts the title or the article in the discussion on whether to do more SEO, YouTube, and/or, networking because that is already knowing a lot, just not everything. A more accurate way to view the world would be that most people don’t know exactly how they are going to execute their long term plans, but almost every successful adult I have ever met did have both a plan and a genuinely good idea on how to execute it. From everything to their careers to raising their children, and I think it’s very easy to see when someone actually doesn’t know, because often they are either drowning, looking for help or both, or, alternatively never even beginning on the thing they want.
- roenxi 4y ago
  Here we run into the philosophical question of what it means to "know what you are doing". On the one hand people may have the best of advice and make decisions that are extremely clever in a specific context. And on the other the world is fundamentally too chaotic - the most important factors are generally unknowns or unanticipated.
yieldcrv 4y ago
People know what they're doing the second and third time that they launch the same product. Like when you see founders of large VC backed companies go off to launch the same thing. Or why business practices calcify and people aren’t open to a new theoretically efficient process, they have already failed at so many other things that they don't want to risk again. Its not arbitrary why people become this way, there is a lot of crap out there.
- hermitcrab 4y ago
  Even if you are launching a near identical product a second time, the market, staff and technology will be different. You can't stand in the same river twice (Heraclitus).
  - tylergetsay 4y ago
    Why can't I hire the same people, use the same technology, and sell to the same market? This is basically the story of a lot of small business owners; they learned from somebody and then applied that for their own. If I only make 50% of what the previous company made but own 5x as much, it might look like a failure to some but net I am better off.
TedShiller 4y ago
- ben_w 4y ago
  Did Biden face, and somehow win, a vote of no-confidence from his own party after photographic evidence emerged that forced the police to fine him for violating regulations that he had personally introduced, publicly supported, and denied violating? Because that’s the state of the British government at the moment.
  - KSteffensen 4y ago
    In democracies the populations get the politicians they deserve. It's not like it's a surprise to anyone that Boris Johnson's sole political project is Boris Johnson, but people still voted for him.
  - blibble 4y ago
    US presidential system doesn't have votes of no confidence
Hoasi 4y ago
That's when "you don't know what you are doing" that you can do your best work. If you know what you are doing all of the time, it means you are not learning new things.
freiherr 4y ago
What people know is just practical knowledge of their immediate surrounding and a bit of theoretical models of what is outside. If by "knowing what they are doing" you mean deep understanding of everything from the big picture then it's impossible. Doing your own local stuff as good as possible is the best we can get and it usually works reasonably well. Until we get a dictator in an information bubble, but well that's just life.
- lbriner 4y ago
  That's not quite true. There is a difference between e.g. making a really nice design "as good as possible" but producing something that is not best-practice, doesn't solve the problem well, isn't a standard look for whatever it is that you are designing. There are many people who at least think they are working hard and well but the piece that is missing is the context that the work needs to fit into and the ability to evaluate it. There are a gazillion different ways to do marketing (and to do it "well") but most of those will either have little or no effect in a certain context so the true person who knows what they are doing knows the landscape, knows the costs, knows the trade-offs and knows how to measure success.
marban 4y ago
The opinion of 10,000 men is of no value if none of them know anything about the subject. Marcus Aurelius
hkon 4y ago
Having worked many places and looked at various technical solutions developed and used, I can understand where the author is coming from. Many things work and get the job done, but it's clear that the creators had little knowledge about how to solve the problems they solved from a mere technical know-how perspective. I read him as don't think you need to know everything about something to start doing it.
- hermitcrab 4y ago
  "don't think you need to know everything about something to start doing it" is probably a more accurate title, but less snappy. Also it doesn't hurt for the title to be a bit polarizing. ;0)
- rockbruno 4y ago
  Agreed that this is a thing, but this is not what the article is about. Running a business and having software engineering prowess are two different problem areas.
  - hkon 4y ago
    I know, it was just an example of the same in another area.
ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
> When I was a child I assumed that all the adults running the world knew what they were doing. Now that I am an adult, I am under no such illusions. Just look at the current British government. They clearly don’t have a clue. A more mediocre bunch of individuals would be hard to find. I remember viewing an interview with John Cleese, and he said almost exactly the same thing. I feel as if I have a "heuristic" for life, as opposed to "rules." It helps that whole "making up as we go along" thing.
c03 4y ago
Why is this so far up on hacker news? It's 3 paragraphs of groundless whining and self-promotion with absolutely no substance.
- blibble 4y ago
  because it's attacking the tories
- vasco 4y ago
  Give me a second, let me check the "reason" field next to each upvote in the HN database real quick.
  - js8 4y ago
    To save you writing the DB query: I sometimes upvote based on the discussion itself.
shantnutiwari 4y ago
I dont know why this is getting so much hate, I agree with it. Engineer types want everything to be neat and tidy, well planned and thought out. But this doesn't work in the business world, which is messy and chaotic. If you can't live with th chaos, starting a business is a bad idea. (And I say as someone who had failed to start a profitable-compared-to-day-job business)
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  s/business/kids/ and it is also true!
- pier25 4y ago
  I agree. It's true for many things in life. I don't think surgeons are winging it, at least in the operating room, but in life the majority of things are chaotic and unpredictable. Specially running a business.
giantg2 4y ago
"No-one knows what they are doing" Thanks. I'll tell my boss and let you know how my performance review goes...
sylens 4y ago
I think realizing this was the biggest disappointment of my adult life. As a kid, you think that there are people looking after the world, looking out for the best interests of society, etc. When you get enough and can see behind the curtain, it's very depressing.
- vasco 4y ago
  I think it's not depressing but wonderful. All software sucks, nobody knows what they're doing, etc, yet the world keeps chugging along and there's all these incredible things to do, amazing foods to eat and marvels of technology to play with. Imagine if we actually knew what was going on! Rather than feeling depressed that there's nobody with an actual plan, why not be amazed that all these things can come out of such chaos?
jiggawatts 4y ago
Some people do, but they're the minority, and you might not even notice them in the crowd. I've seen well over a hundred organisations, small and large, in my careers as a consultant. They're all run by the 90% that have no idea what they're doing. They're chair warmers. Paper pushers. Project mismanagers. Then there are the 10% that keep the lights on, put the fires out, have the brilliant ideas, and keep science and society progressing. Generally they're under-appreciated and under-paid. Sometimes they're not noticed at all. That doesn't mean they don't exist! Someone figured out all of the amazing things that you take for granted in your life. The x-ray lasers use to make your iPhone. The 5G protocol that lets it get gigabits while you're standing at a bus stop. The encoding that lets you stream your own personal "TV channel". The chemistry that made up the OLED panel that is bright enough to see in sunlight. On and on... Companies... including startups... are like this. There are the 90% that just keep treading water, and then there's the 10% that push the boundaries.
- manmal 4y ago
  I guess if everybody were pushing the envelope, things would get unstable quickly. Humanity survives on a lot of dumb grunt work.
- niko001 4y ago
  I don't think that necessarily contradicts what the author is saying. Even you describe how these top 10% performers are often underpaid, so in some areas (getting noticed, managing office politics, switching companies to get pay rises) they seemingly "don't know what they're doing". A lot of people are brilliant in one particular area and at the same time fail basic life tasks, even though to someone from the outside it looks as if they've got everything figured out.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
GistNoesis 4y ago
I think the classic scene from Armageddon can sum-up this feeling pretty well. https://youtu.be/qk9MK5smzVE?t=397 https://youtu.be/qk9MK5smzVE?t=397 "Couldn't read the plans right and did a piss-poor job of putting it together."
LeonM 4y ago
I stopped reading the original article when the OP started including politics. Invoking anger by reminding your audience that some 'current' government of $random_country that they are not 'having a clue' is a really cheap trick to grab attention of lesser informed people. Of course it only applies to the 'current' government, because everything was obviously better in the past. It makes me sad, and angry at the same time to see that even on forums like HN, people fall for it. This thread is mostly hijacked by a 'discussion' about politics, completely ignoring the subject of the OP. What's even more sad, is that if you look at the 'social proof' section of perfecttableplan (the company the author is promoting, and where he is CEO), you'll see that they serve loads of government organizations. So here is the 'CEO' of a company, making cheap shots at their own customers, just to get some eyeballs on his content marketing.
- 0xRusty 4y ago
  It is a pointless piece of writing. It says nothing. It's a thinly veiled advert for OP's software, clickbaited by a unprovable political opinion. This type of thing should be removed from HN.
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  There is a kind of subtle clickbait title style well suited for the HN audience and this article had it. Appealing to intellectual curiosity to read more, promising something like a PG essay but not delivering anything like that. It is the one weird trick of the HN world.
nahuel0x 4y ago
Can you remember when you first started to read? Doubtless you thought that some day you would find in books the truth, the answer to the very puzzling life you were discovering around you. But you never did. If you were alert, you discovered that books were conventions, as unlike life as a game of chess. The written word is a sieve. Only so much of reality gets through as fits the size and shape of the screen, and in some ways that is never enough. . . . Most of the real difficulty of communication comes from social convention, from a vast conspiracy to agree to accept the world as something it really isn’t at all. Literature is a social defense mechanism. Remember again when you were a child. You thought that some day you would grow up and find a world of real adults — the people who really made things run — and understand how and why things ran. . . . Then, as the years went on, you learned, through more or less bitter experience, that there aren’t, and never have been, any such people, anywhere. Life is just a mess, full of tall children, grown stupider, less alert and resilient, and nobody knows what makes it go — as a whole, or any part of it. But nobody ever tells. Henry Miller tells. Andersen told about the little boy and the Emperor’s new clothes. Miller is the little boy himself. He tells about the Emperor, about the pimples on his behind, and the warts on his private parts, and the dirt between his toes. Other writers in the past have done this, of course, and they are the great ones, the real classics. But they have done it within the conventions of literature. They have used the forms of the Great Lie to expose the truth. / Kenneth Rexroth.
- sickcodebruh 4y ago
  See, that will all make sense when I am older So there’s no need to be terrified or tense I’ll just dream about a time When I’m in my age of prime ‘Cause when you’re older Absolutely everything makes sense - Olaf the Snowman, Frozen 2
throwaway14356 4y ago
i too as a child thought the grownups knew what they were doing. I decided that my ignorance about all things would make for a great opportunity to imagine how i would organize all things. Unbothered by previous art i could have original ideas all the way! big mistake, the grownups didn't know, they didn't want to know.... wtf
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
This is a very comforting fiction to tell yourself when you’re faced with new and unfamiliar challenges. However, it’s not really true. Plenty of people within an industry or field know enough of what they’re doing because they’ve gone through it before and/or done all of the heavy research to prepare for these situations. I see the “nobody knows what they’re doing” fiction brought out as an easy antidote for impostor syndrome or as comforting words to people struggling to learn. While intentions might be good, it had an unintended side effect of creating an illusion that expertise doesn’t exist or that everyone’s knowledge is equal regardless of their level of experience. The dark side of this mentality is that it creates the same situations whereby people believe their own intuitions are equal to professional scientific research. If you believe no one knows what they’re doing and all adults are just making it up as they go, why would you listen to experts instead of inserting your own opinions based on your Facebook research or some quip you saw online? The real key is to identify who really knows what they’re doing and to what degree, then leverage those people for advice as much as possible. Going through life assuming everybody is equally incompetent will leave you blind to these huge opportunities to learn from other people’s expertise and experience.
- Swizec 4y ago
  > no one knows what they’re doing and all adults are just making it up as they go IMO the most interesting software engineering happens at the edge of the adjacent possible. Where nobody knows what they’re doing. Because it hasn’t been done before. You’re adding net new knowledge to the universe. Doesn’t even have to be a ground breaking new idea or a completely new technique. It’s already net new if you’re adapting an otherwise well-know solution to a new situation. Or dealing with a unique set of constraints that haven’t been seen before. That’s fun. But that’s not the same as walking into a thing blind and hoping for the best. You can only do that by relying on a wealth of experience and expert intuition that’s been honed over a long series of smaller challenges. The optimal situation is to always aim to work at the very edge of your understanding. Not so easy that it’s boring, not so hard that you don’t know where to even begin.
- lettergram 4y ago
  “Expertise” is often less and more valuable than perceived, depending on the situation. Give me a programming related question and I could have solved it a two decades ago on paper. The expertise allows me to solve it with more efficiency today. Similarly, there are things that lack of expertise help you with. You can see different perspectives. Have to research the topics fresh (find latest frameworks, etc). I also think expertise is far more transferable than ever. I hadn’t driving a tractor in 18 years. But I was able to watch a few YouTube videos for an hour, go out and immediately attach equipment, start one up and get to work. The internet is still amazing. To your point though, there are things I could miss that would get me killed (using a tractor), so a neighbor helped me with some tips after watching; expertise is still very necessary.
seaerkin 4y ago
I like this post a lot, and I can certainly relate to this working in the business technology sector as a developer and as a generalist technology consultant for a large firm. Contracts get signed, and half the time, the seller doesn't understand what they're selling, and the buyer is buying an idea and truly doesn't get it either, then it's up to the technical consultants to take their best stab at it while being billed out as an "expert." Then you have professions that are much more black and white, mainly the trades and non-technology engineering. Their survival is contingent on knowing what they're doing, most of the time and they gain more profit by being efficient with tasks they've seen time and time again. Think of a plumber or garage door repairman whose seen your specific problem hundreds of times before. A good tradesperson will know precisely what they are doing. I'm not sure where I'm going with these rambles, but the encouraging view of what the author is writing about here can almost be described as embracing uncertainty in the business world where the rules aren't clearly defined. Much different than the trades or non-tech engineering, where the end deliverable is something that is more concrete (no pun intended) and easily understood by the average person.
mhb 4y ago
Competent Elites: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CKpByWmsZ8WmpHtYa/competent-elites https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CKpByWmsZ8WmpHtYa/competent-...
websitescenes 4y ago
Sounds like a complete lack of recognition for expertise, specialization and experience. Same attitude that leads people to distrust science.
twawaaay 4y ago
I think the problem needs to be thought through separately for individuals and for organisations. For individuals -- yes, no-one knows what they are doing. Most people, including successful ones, are too embarrassed or insecure to admit this. The world is divided into ones that understand this and ones that do not. For organisations -- no, that is not true. Some organisations accept the above limitation and rather than ignore it, try to build systems that take it into account. My company does this -- CEO knows this, senior leadership knows this, we are working together accepting our individual limitations and trying to find ways to work around them. We hate internal politics and put premium on being honest about problems or capabilities. Unfortunately this does not seem to work for governments. Governments is all about politics, all about image. It is not fundamentally incompatible with being honest about ones limitations but in practice very close to being so.
travisgriggs 4y ago
If you accept the adage “the greater my sphere of knowledge, the greater my contact with the unknown” (I do), you can see how the author’s sentiment exists even as we age and even grow in wisdom and knowledge. One of my realizations is that it’s harder to telegraph what you don’t know than what you do know. It’s easy to see that older people have journeyed the paths were on, and seem to “know what they’re doing.” In reality, what they know (to some degree) is what we (the less traveled) are experiencing. But they, having thought they were coming to the end of their journey, have found their is yet more to learn and sometimes pop up in moments like this to exclaim “guys, this journey just keep going! I still don’t know! Acquisition of knowledge and experience has no end game!” It’s humbling.
- polynomial 4y ago
  Great adage. It's from David Christian in Origin Story: A Big History of Everything, but really it's just a paraphrasing of Einstein, who compared knowledge to a circle, and referred to the circumference of darkness, rather than the unknown.
j7ake 4y ago
The pilot flying your airplane would disagree. The chefs cooking your meals at restaurants would disagree. Your surgeon would definitely disagree. I could go on.
rpmisms 4y ago
I know what I'm doing, I just don't always know how to do it. But I know how to find out, and I have the mental framework to pick it up quickly. That's what juniors should understand about how this works. You'll never know everything, but you should know how to know.
ball02488 4y ago
only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.” -socrates
ball02488 4y ago
only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing. .. -socates
minimilian 4y ago
> Most of us who are running businesses had no real idea what they were doing when they started Who are they?
sebastianconcpt 4y ago
This is what Jordan Peterson refers to when stating that Postmodernist claim about reality having an infinite number of objects that can be interpreted in an infinite number of ways is a fair valid claim. And nature, somehow, made us evolve with the machinery optimized to adapt to a finite number of interpretations. Hence, our cognitive machinery is made up of "Maps of Meaning" that with a finite number of meanings, make feasible for us to navigate the infinite sea of ignorance of what we can't make a sensical meaning of.
taylodl 4y ago
Actually people do know what they're doing. They're simply making decisions with incomplete and/or probabilistic data. They want to make decisions maximizing the most likely scenarios while minimizing the most negative outcomes. That's why it's called a balancing act and there's various techniques one can utilize for making decisions in such an environment. This is a reason why many businesses fail. Sure, just about everybody can make good decisions if you have accurate and complete data with which to make those decisions. That just doesn't typically happen too often when running a business. It's a far cry though from saying "nobody knows what they are doing." That's just simply not true.
mr_gibbins 4y ago
Of course, it depends on the context. As a casual chess player, it's fine that I don't really know what I'm doing, and that I'm apt to be roundly beaten 7 times out of 10. There are no consequences to being bad at chess, except for feeling a bit sad if I lose too many games in a row. As a senior DBA, it is absolutely unacceptable if I do not know what I am doing. I look after software which runs a fairly important part of the machinery of government. There is not much tolerance for incompetence in my little niche, although granted that no-one dies if I get it wrong, the consequences for the end-consumers of my little bit of the world can be life-changing. Same applies (in a more important sense than just DBA work) for e.g. paediatric heart surgeons, rail drivers, airline pilots, people whose incompetence can kill. Skill and professionalism are very much key, and cannot be hand-waved away with platitudes to make people feel better about their own inabilities.
- BarryMilo 4y ago
  A valid point, I think the sentiment is more common in the development world because things change so fast you can't really master the entirety of even a very specific domain for very long. However, it seems IT over time has grown to be (or aim to be) "incompetence proof". That is, even if you mess up, there should be mechanisms in place to prevent a catastrophe, so that at least two people must be majorly incompetent to create a disaster. I guess we call it redundancy. Compare with medecine, if your doctor is bad you can die. And people frequently do. I tend to prefer our base assumption that everyone is incompetent, that way we're prepared when someone makes a mistake.
darepublic 4y ago
Good advice. A moral oft repeated in stories. They said it well in Kung-Fu Panda: there is no secret ingredient. I remember as a junior developer caring a ton about programming but constantly feeling like my skills weren't up to par. I read some quote from Ray Bradbury about how he wrote for 10 years before he created anything he himself liked. I mulled over that idea and it gave me hope. Years later I am now writing code that I think is good. Hopefully more than the senility kicking in.
iamdamian 4y ago
The Gervais Principle shows up every once in a while on Hacker News and seems relevant: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/
karaterobot 4y ago
I call this the hyper-competence fallacy: the mistaken idea that some group of people (usually the ones in charge) are consistently and significantly more likely to have their shit together than the median person. I've met extremely smart people, and extremely competent people, but they were only smart at certain things, and only sometimes. They still made lots of mistakes, even basic ones. Some people are certainly better at their jobs than others, but that you shouldn't just assume that the people in charge are right without thinking things through and raising your hand to ask questions. Much more common are the people who are typically incompetent, but who manage to make people think they know what they're doing. People want to believe somebody knows the way. It can be hard to spot incompetent leaders until it's too late, which is all the more reason to be politely skeptical of anybody who acts like they aren't playing catch up most of the time.
onetokeoverthe 4y ago
whateveracct 4y ago
I know what I'm doing - and oftentimes what I'm doing is figuring out something I don't know.
conanxin 4y ago
小孩子可能会以为成年人都知道要干什么，但成年之后才知道这个世界其实是草台班子，绝大多数人对正在做的事情没有任何头绪的。经营企业同样如此，人们所总结的成功企业经营之道都是后见之明，成功企业其实并不清楚每个阶段需要干什么。如果你想创业，不要为不知道要干什么而放弃。因为没有人真正知道。

292 points by charly357 4y ago

I agree with the sentiment that adults are much better at projecting confidence than actually knowing what the heck they are doing or even making smart decisions. The advice of just founding a company without a plan? Not so much....

lbriner 4y ago
I don't know who said it but "Failing to plan is planning to fail, however, no war was ever won by planning alone". In other words, most of business (as well as life) is both strategic and tactical. My strategic plans are needed because things take time and investment and we need a direction to give assurances. However, things change every day and the tactical side is working out how to deal with those. I certainly think adults are better at projecting confidence but I also think as you grow older, you are more likely to be realistic about how messy things are.

thom 4y ago

Blast from the past! I used PerfectTablePlan for our wedding, tweaked by the far superior ‘do what your better half tells you’ algorithm. We used the same approach later when naming our first child, I built a complicated machine learning system to learn what names and sounds we liked, then we settled on my wife’s first choice. The thing I’ve learned in life (and especially in sports analytics where variance can dominate) is that “knowing what you’re doing” isn’t any number of instances where you got something right first time. It’s having a process (or even a process-creating-process!) that you’re willing to stand by even when individual results don’t work out. The question isn’t “would you do it all again, knowing what you know now?” it’s “would you learn the same way in the future?” I think being open about this with kids is pretty helpful.

thathndude 4y ago
This second paragraph is consistent with advice from a piece on HN about a month ago, describing how playing poker can make us better at life. And one of the key principles was being process oriented.

ardit33 4y ago

Not true at all at things that need practice and that are recurrent. From sports, to many other activities that have repetition, people know what they are generally trying to do. That doesn't mean that there is not a large degree of randomness, and some improvisation. Eg: 1. A penalty kicker knows what he/she is trying to do. Power over placement, what corner they want to shoot it, etc. They have practiced many times. Same with the goalie. The goalie will try to guess, left, right, center, etc... They have practiced this many time as well. Both parties know what they are doing (at a professional level), yet there is always a degree of randomness, and improvisation. 2. A cop knows that in some corner it is much easier to catch people that are speeding, and they can give tickets easy. 3. A dentist has seen a root canal many times, and it is easy for him/her to just fill another one. All teeth are different, yet they are similar at the same time. Practice makes perfect. First time doing a root cannal, or an extraction must be tough/nerve racking. 10th time, a bit easier. 100th time, just another routine day. Anyways... but these type of articles are really good feel good articles.

hermitcrab 4y ago
I don't think running a business is anything like kicking penalties. So many more variables and unknowns.
jstummbillig 4y ago
If the goal is clear, and the rules are clear, the knowing-what-to-do-level can be relatively high. As an example, a typical game can be won with executing on the set rules with skill. You can measure the success of your actions by looking at the outcome. This seems so obvious that I don't think the author would argue against it. I think what the author is talking about is the space where things become so complex that it's hard to attribute any action to the outcome or, even worse, you can't even realistically measure the outcome. Applying this to your penalty kicker: Sure, you practice, you get better. But so does everyone else. The question then is: How and what to get better than the other guys? Why does one guy succeed and the other doesn't? Yeah sure, because they hit the ball in such a way that it enters the designated space – but how do they set themselves up to accomplish that? How many of the 24 hours you have in a day do you spend kicking the ball from the penalty point? How much of it is recovery? When do you get up? Planing and theory? Mental strength exercises? Food intake? Massages, strength or balance workouts? The failure is simply defined: You did not hit the ball in such a way that it entered the goal. Sure – but why? How do you adjust your routine in such a way that next time it's going to be better, relative to everyone else, who is also trying to improve? In reality it's obviously more complex even still, because there is no "penalty kicker" in football. So to become the best possible soccer player, how much of your time should be allocated to penalty kicking at all? And then how does your penaltykickability scale while working on the other stuff that you are also looking at? And then, when we are exiting game space, it gets really complicated, because all of a sudden it's not even clear what winning even means. In soccer a win is neatly defined. It's usually not the case in the real world. Is it a win to provide health care to all? Is Bitcoin a win for humanity? Is it a good goal to get people out of poverty or is the goal something else and we trust that this will be a side effect of that goal? You and I might agree on an answer, and then there is millions or billions of people who don't, in theory or at least in practice. It's messy stuff.

EnKopVand 4y ago

I’m going to let you in on a little secret. I spent almost a decade in public sector digitalisation in Denmark, and those politicians who look like they don’t know what they are doing in the media, well, they absolutely know what they are doing. Not only that, but they get advice from a bureaucracy full of well educated, really smart people, who also know what they are doing and have known so for decades. One of the things that struck me going in was just how much people know exactly what they are doing, and, to my own discredit, just how engaged and well meaning those people are. What eventually led me to leave the public sector is that there is a very big difference between knowing what you’re doing and doing the “smart/right” thing, especially when you’re held accountable by an entire country, if not the world. I’ve seen the same sort of thing in the private sector. Once you zoom out enough to understand decisions from the perspective they are being taken from, they very often make perfect sense. That doesn’t mean those very same decisions aren’t a load of bollocks from a lot of perspectives, but they are rarely just “fake it till you make it” sort of deals. I think this author suffers from childhood delusion in that the author still thinks adults are supposed to have the answers for everything, which isn’t true. There is a lot to be said about figuring things out a long the way, but it’s not like people don’t know what they are doing, because we learn, we adapt and we very often plan ahead. I mean, the author even sort of contradicts the title or the article in the discussion on whether to do more SEO, YouTube, and/or, networking because that is already knowing a lot, just not everything. A more accurate way to view the world would be that most people don’t know exactly how they are going to execute their long term plans, but almost every successful adult I have ever met did have both a plan and a genuinely good idea on how to execute it. From everything to their careers to raising their children, and I think it’s very easy to see when someone actually doesn’t know, because often they are either drowning, looking for help or both, or, alternatively never even beginning on the thing they want.

roenxi 4y ago
Here we run into the philosophical question of what it means to "know what you are doing". On the one hand people may have the best of advice and make decisions that are extremely clever in a specific context. And on the other the world is fundamentally too chaotic - the most important factors are generally unknowns or unanticipated.

yieldcrv 4y ago

People know what they're doing the second and third time that they launch the same product. Like when you see founders of large VC backed companies go off to launch the same thing. Or why business practices calcify and people aren’t open to a new theoretically efficient process, they have already failed at so many other things that they don't want to risk again. Its not arbitrary why people become this way, there is a lot of crap out there.

hermitcrab 4y ago
Even if you are launching a near identical product a second time, the market, staff and technology will be different. You can't stand in the same river twice (Heraclitus).
- tylergetsay 4y ago
  Why can't I hire the same people, use the same technology, and sell to the same market? This is basically the story of a lot of small business owners; they learned from somebody and then applied that for their own. If I only make 50% of what the previous company made but own 5x as much, it might look like a failure to some but net I am better off.

TedShiller 4y ago

ben_w 4y ago
Did Biden face, and somehow win, a vote of no-confidence from his own party after photographic evidence emerged that forced the police to fine him for violating regulations that he had personally introduced, publicly supported, and denied violating? Because that’s the state of the British government at the moment.
- KSteffensen 4y ago
  In democracies the populations get the politicians they deserve. It's not like it's a surprise to anyone that Boris Johnson's sole political project is Boris Johnson, but people still voted for him.
- blibble 4y ago
  US presidential system doesn't have votes of no confidence

Hoasi 4y ago

That's when "you don't know what you are doing" that you can do your best work. If you know what you are doing all of the time, it means you are not learning new things.

freiherr 4y ago

What people know is just practical knowledge of their immediate surrounding and a bit of theoretical models of what is outside. If by "knowing what they are doing" you mean deep understanding of everything from the big picture then it's impossible. Doing your own local stuff as good as possible is the best we can get and it usually works reasonably well. Until we get a dictator in an information bubble, but well that's just life.

lbriner 4y ago
That's not quite true. There is a difference between e.g. making a really nice design "as good as possible" but producing something that is not best-practice, doesn't solve the problem well, isn't a standard look for whatever it is that you are designing. There are many people who at least think they are working hard and well but the piece that is missing is the context that the work needs to fit into and the ability to evaluate it. There are a gazillion different ways to do marketing (and to do it "well") but most of those will either have little or no effect in a certain context so the true person who knows what they are doing knows the landscape, knows the costs, knows the trade-offs and knows how to measure success.

marban 4y ago

The opinion of 10,000 men is of no value if none of them know anything about the subject. Marcus Aurelius

hkon 4y ago

Having worked many places and looked at various technical solutions developed and used, I can understand where the author is coming from. Many things work and get the job done, but it's clear that the creators had little knowledge about how to solve the problems they solved from a mere technical know-how perspective. I read him as don't think you need to know everything about something to start doing it.

hermitcrab 4y ago
"don't think you need to know everything about something to start doing it" is probably a more accurate title, but less snappy. Also it doesn't hurt for the title to be a bit polarizing. ;0)
rockbruno 4y ago
Agreed that this is a thing, but this is not what the article is about. Running a business and having software engineering prowess are two different problem areas.
- hkon 4y ago
  I know, it was just an example of the same in another area.

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago

> When I was a child I assumed that all the adults running the world knew what they were doing. Now that I am an adult, I am under no such illusions. Just look at the current British government. They clearly don’t have a clue. A more mediocre bunch of individuals would be hard to find. I remember viewing an interview with John Cleese, and he said almost exactly the same thing. I feel as if I have a "heuristic" for life, as opposed to "rules." It helps that whole "making up as we go along" thing.

c03 4y ago

Why is this so far up on hacker news? It's 3 paragraphs of groundless whining and self-promotion with absolutely no substance.

blibble 4y ago
because it's attacking the tories
vasco 4y ago
Give me a second, let me check the "reason" field next to each upvote in the HN database real quick.
- js8 4y ago
  To save you writing the DB query: I sometimes upvote based on the discussion itself.

shantnutiwari 4y ago

I dont know why this is getting so much hate, I agree with it. Engineer types want everything to be neat and tidy, well planned and thought out. But this doesn't work in the business world, which is messy and chaotic. If you can't live with th chaos, starting a business is a bad idea. (And I say as someone who had failed to start a profitable-compared-to-day-job business)

quickthrower2 4y ago
s/business/kids/ and it is also true!
pier25 4y ago
I agree. It's true for many things in life. I don't think surgeons are winging it, at least in the operating room, but in life the majority of things are chaotic and unpredictable. Specially running a business.

giantg2 4y ago

"No-one knows what they are doing" Thanks. I'll tell my boss and let you know how my performance review goes...

sylens 4y ago

I think realizing this was the biggest disappointment of my adult life. As a kid, you think that there are people looking after the world, looking out for the best interests of society, etc. When you get enough and can see behind the curtain, it's very depressing.

vasco 4y ago
I think it's not depressing but wonderful. All software sucks, nobody knows what they're doing, etc, yet the world keeps chugging along and there's all these incredible things to do, amazing foods to eat and marvels of technology to play with. Imagine if we actually knew what was going on! Rather than feeling depressed that there's nobody with an actual plan, why not be amazed that all these things can come out of such chaos?

jiggawatts 4y ago

Some people do, but they're the minority, and you might not even notice them in the crowd. I've seen well over a hundred organisations, small and large, in my careers as a consultant. They're all run by the 90% that have no idea what they're doing. They're chair warmers. Paper pushers. Project mismanagers. Then there are the 10% that keep the lights on, put the fires out, have the brilliant ideas, and keep science and society progressing. Generally they're under-appreciated and under-paid. Sometimes they're not noticed at all. That doesn't mean they don't exist! Someone figured out all of the amazing things that you take for granted in your life. The x-ray lasers use to make your iPhone. The 5G protocol that lets it get gigabits while you're standing at a bus stop. The encoding that lets you stream your own personal "TV channel". The chemistry that made up the OLED panel that is bright enough to see in sunlight. On and on... Companies... including startups... are like this. There are the 90% that just keep treading water, and then there's the 10% that push the boundaries.

manmal 4y ago
I guess if everybody were pushing the envelope, things would get unstable quickly. Humanity survives on a lot of dumb grunt work.
niko001 4y ago
I don't think that necessarily contradicts what the author is saying. Even you describe how these top 10% performers are often underpaid, so in some areas (getting noticed, managing office politics, switching companies to get pay rises) they seemingly "don't know what they're doing". A lot of people are brilliant in one particular area and at the same time fail basic life tasks, even though to someone from the outside it looks as if they've got everything figured out.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

GistNoesis 4y ago

I think the classic scene from Armageddon can sum-up this feeling pretty well. https://youtu.be/qk9MK5smzVE?t=397 https://youtu.be/qk9MK5smzVE?t=397 "Couldn't read the plans right and did a piss-poor job of putting it together."

LeonM 4y ago

I stopped reading the original article when the OP started including politics. Invoking anger by reminding your audience that some 'current' government of $random_country that they are not 'having a clue' is a really cheap trick to grab attention of lesser informed people. Of course it only applies to the 'current' government, because everything was obviously better in the past. It makes me sad, and angry at the same time to see that even on forums like HN, people fall for it. This thread is mostly hijacked by a 'discussion' about politics, completely ignoring the subject of the OP. What's even more sad, is that if you look at the 'social proof' section of perfecttableplan (the company the author is promoting, and where he is CEO), you'll see that they serve loads of government organizations. So here is the 'CEO' of a company, making cheap shots at their own customers, just to get some eyeballs on his content marketing.

0xRusty 4y ago
It is a pointless piece of writing. It says nothing. It's a thinly veiled advert for OP's software, clickbaited by a unprovable political opinion. This type of thing should be removed from HN.
quickthrower2 4y ago
There is a kind of subtle clickbait title style well suited for the HN audience and this article had it. Appealing to intellectual curiosity to read more, promising something like a PG essay but not delivering anything like that. It is the one weird trick of the HN world.

nahuel0x 4y ago

Can you remember when you first started to read? Doubtless you thought that some day you would find in books the truth, the answer to the very puzzling life you were discovering around you. But you never did. If you were alert, you discovered that books were conventions, as unlike life as a game of chess. The written word is a sieve. Only so much of reality gets through as fits the size and shape of the screen, and in some ways that is never enough. . . . Most of the real difficulty of communication comes from social convention, from a vast conspiracy to agree to accept the world as something it really isn’t at all. Literature is a social defense mechanism. Remember again when you were a child. You thought that some day you would grow up and find a world of real adults — the people who really made things run — and understand how and why things ran. . . . Then, as the years went on, you learned, through more or less bitter experience, that there aren’t, and never have been, any such people, anywhere. Life is just a mess, full of tall children, grown stupider, less alert and resilient, and nobody knows what makes it go — as a whole, or any part of it. But nobody ever tells. Henry Miller tells. Andersen told about the little boy and the Emperor’s new clothes. Miller is the little boy himself. He tells about the Emperor, about the pimples on his behind, and the warts on his private parts, and the dirt between his toes. Other writers in the past have done this, of course, and they are the great ones, the real classics. But they have done it within the conventions of literature. They have used the forms of the Great Lie to expose the truth. / Kenneth Rexroth.

sickcodebruh 4y ago
See, that will all make sense when I am older So there’s no need to be terrified or tense I’ll just dream about a time When I’m in my age of prime ‘Cause when you’re older Absolutely everything makes sense - Olaf the Snowman, Frozen 2

throwaway14356 4y ago

i too as a child thought the grownups knew what they were doing. I decided that my ignorance about all things would make for a great opportunity to imagine how i would organize all things. Unbothered by previous art i could have original ideas all the way! big mistake, the grownups didn't know, they didn't want to know.... wtf

PragmaticPulp 4y ago

This is a very comforting fiction to tell yourself when you’re faced with new and unfamiliar challenges. However, it’s not really true. Plenty of people within an industry or field know enough of what they’re doing because they’ve gone through it before and/or done all of the heavy research to prepare for these situations. I see the “nobody knows what they’re doing” fiction brought out as an easy antidote for impostor syndrome or as comforting words to people struggling to learn. While intentions might be good, it had an unintended side effect of creating an illusion that expertise doesn’t exist or that everyone’s knowledge is equal regardless of their level of experience. The dark side of this mentality is that it creates the same situations whereby people believe their own intuitions are equal to professional scientific research. If you believe no one knows what they’re doing and all adults are just making it up as they go, why would you listen to experts instead of inserting your own opinions based on your Facebook research or some quip you saw online? The real key is to identify who really knows what they’re doing and to what degree, then leverage those people for advice as much as possible. Going through life assuming everybody is equally incompetent will leave you blind to these huge opportunities to learn from other people’s expertise and experience.

Swizec 4y ago
> no one knows what they’re doing and all adults are just making it up as they go IMO the most interesting software engineering happens at the edge of the adjacent possible. Where nobody knows what they’re doing. Because it hasn’t been done before. You’re adding net new knowledge to the universe. Doesn’t even have to be a ground breaking new idea or a completely new technique. It’s already net new if you’re adapting an otherwise well-know solution to a new situation. Or dealing with a unique set of constraints that haven’t been seen before. That’s fun. But that’s not the same as walking into a thing blind and hoping for the best. You can only do that by relying on a wealth of experience and expert intuition that’s been honed over a long series of smaller challenges. The optimal situation is to always aim to work at the very edge of your understanding. Not so easy that it’s boring, not so hard that you don’t know where to even begin.
lettergram 4y ago
“Expertise” is often less and more valuable than perceived, depending on the situation. Give me a programming related question and I could have solved it a two decades ago on paper. The expertise allows me to solve it with more efficiency today. Similarly, there are things that lack of expertise help you with. You can see different perspectives. Have to research the topics fresh (find latest frameworks, etc). I also think expertise is far more transferable than ever. I hadn’t driving a tractor in 18 years. But I was able to watch a few YouTube videos for an hour, go out and immediately attach equipment, start one up and get to work. The internet is still amazing. To your point though, there are things I could miss that would get me killed (using a tractor), so a neighbor helped me with some tips after watching; expertise is still very necessary.

seaerkin 4y ago

I like this post a lot, and I can certainly relate to this working in the business technology sector as a developer and as a generalist technology consultant for a large firm. Contracts get signed, and half the time, the seller doesn't understand what they're selling, and the buyer is buying an idea and truly doesn't get it either, then it's up to the technical consultants to take their best stab at it while being billed out as an "expert." Then you have professions that are much more black and white, mainly the trades and non-technology engineering. Their survival is contingent on knowing what they're doing, most of the time and they gain more profit by being efficient with tasks they've seen time and time again. Think of a plumber or garage door repairman whose seen your specific problem hundreds of times before. A good tradesperson will know precisely what they are doing. I'm not sure where I'm going with these rambles, but the encouraging view of what the author is writing about here can almost be described as embracing uncertainty in the business world where the rules aren't clearly defined. Much different than the trades or non-tech engineering, where the end deliverable is something that is more concrete (no pun intended) and easily understood by the average person.

mhb 4y ago

Competent Elites: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CKpByWmsZ8WmpHtYa/competent-elites https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CKpByWmsZ8WmpHtYa/competent-...

websitescenes 4y ago

Sounds like a complete lack of recognition for expertise, specialization and experience. Same attitude that leads people to distrust science.

twawaaay 4y ago

I think the problem needs to be thought through separately for individuals and for organisations. For individuals -- yes, no-one knows what they are doing. Most people, including successful ones, are too embarrassed or insecure to admit this. The world is divided into ones that understand this and ones that do not. For organisations -- no, that is not true. Some organisations accept the above limitation and rather than ignore it, try to build systems that take it into account. My company does this -- CEO knows this, senior leadership knows this, we are working together accepting our individual limitations and trying to find ways to work around them. We hate internal politics and put premium on being honest about problems or capabilities. Unfortunately this does not seem to work for governments. Governments is all about politics, all about image. It is not fundamentally incompatible with being honest about ones limitations but in practice very close to being so.

travisgriggs 4y ago

If you accept the adage “the greater my sphere of knowledge, the greater my contact with the unknown” (I do), you can see how the author’s sentiment exists even as we age and even grow in wisdom and knowledge. One of my realizations is that it’s harder to telegraph what you don’t know than what you do know. It’s easy to see that older people have journeyed the paths were on, and seem to “know what they’re doing.” In reality, what they know (to some degree) is what we (the less traveled) are experiencing. But they, having thought they were coming to the end of their journey, have found their is yet more to learn and sometimes pop up in moments like this to exclaim “guys, this journey just keep going! I still don’t know! Acquisition of knowledge and experience has no end game!” It’s humbling.

polynomial 4y ago
Great adage. It's from David Christian in Origin Story: A Big History of Everything, but really it's just a paraphrasing of Einstein, who compared knowledge to a circle, and referred to the circumference of darkness, rather than the unknown.

j7ake 4y ago

The pilot flying your airplane would disagree. The chefs cooking your meals at restaurants would disagree. Your surgeon would definitely disagree. I could go on.

rpmisms 4y ago

I know what I'm doing, I just don't always know how to do it. But I know how to find out, and I have the mental framework to pick it up quickly. That's what juniors should understand about how this works. You'll never know everything, but you should know how to know.

ball02488 4y ago

only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.” -socrates

ball02488 4y ago

only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing. .. -socates

minimilian 4y ago

> Most of us who are running businesses had no real idea what they were doing when they started Who are they?

sebastianconcpt 4y ago

This is what Jordan Peterson refers to when stating that Postmodernist claim about reality having an infinite number of objects that can be interpreted in an infinite number of ways is a fair valid claim. And nature, somehow, made us evolve with the machinery optimized to adapt to a finite number of interpretations. Hence, our cognitive machinery is made up of "Maps of Meaning" that with a finite number of meanings, make feasible for us to navigate the infinite sea of ignorance of what we can't make a sensical meaning of.

taylodl 4y ago

Actually people do know what they're doing. They're simply making decisions with incomplete and/or probabilistic data. They want to make decisions maximizing the most likely scenarios while minimizing the most negative outcomes. That's why it's called a balancing act and there's various techniques one can utilize for making decisions in such an environment. This is a reason why many businesses fail. Sure, just about everybody can make good decisions if you have accurate and complete data with which to make those decisions. That just doesn't typically happen too often when running a business. It's a far cry though from saying "nobody knows what they are doing." That's just simply not true.

mr_gibbins 4y ago

Of course, it depends on the context. As a casual chess player, it's fine that I don't really know what I'm doing, and that I'm apt to be roundly beaten 7 times out of 10. There are no consequences to being bad at chess, except for feeling a bit sad if I lose too many games in a row. As a senior DBA, it is absolutely unacceptable if I do not know what I am doing. I look after software which runs a fairly important part of the machinery of government. There is not much tolerance for incompetence in my little niche, although granted that no-one dies if I get it wrong, the consequences for the end-consumers of my little bit of the world can be life-changing. Same applies (in a more important sense than just DBA work) for e.g. paediatric heart surgeons, rail drivers, airline pilots, people whose incompetence can kill. Skill and professionalism are very much key, and cannot be hand-waved away with platitudes to make people feel better about their own inabilities.

BarryMilo 4y ago
A valid point, I think the sentiment is more common in the development world because things change so fast you can't really master the entirety of even a very specific domain for very long. However, it seems IT over time has grown to be (or aim to be) "incompetence proof". That is, even if you mess up, there should be mechanisms in place to prevent a catastrophe, so that at least two people must be majorly incompetent to create a disaster. I guess we call it redundancy. Compare with medecine, if your doctor is bad you can die. And people frequently do. I tend to prefer our base assumption that everyone is incompetent, that way we're prepared when someone makes a mistake.

darepublic 4y ago

Good advice. A moral oft repeated in stories. They said it well in Kung-Fu Panda: there is no secret ingredient. I remember as a junior developer caring a ton about programming but constantly feeling like my skills weren't up to par. I read some quote from Ray Bradbury about how he wrote for 10 years before he created anything he himself liked. I mulled over that idea and it gave me hope. Years later I am now writing code that I think is good. Hopefully more than the senility kicking in.

iamdamian 4y ago

The Gervais Principle shows up every once in a while on Hacker News and seems relevant: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/

karaterobot 4y ago

I call this the hyper-competence fallacy: the mistaken idea that some group of people (usually the ones in charge) are consistently and significantly more likely to have their shit together than the median person. I've met extremely smart people, and extremely competent people, but they were only smart at certain things, and only sometimes. They still made lots of mistakes, even basic ones. Some people are certainly better at their jobs than others, but that you shouldn't just assume that the people in charge are right without thinking things through and raising your hand to ask questions. Much more common are the people who are typically incompetent, but who manage to make people think they know what they're doing. People want to believe somebody knows the way. It can be hard to spot incompetent leaders until it's too late, which is all the more reason to be politely skeptical of anybody who acts like they aren't playing catch up most of the time.

onetokeoverthe 4y ago

whateveracct 4y ago

I know what I'm doing - and oftentimes what I'm doing is figuring out something I don't know.

conanxin 4y ago

小孩子可能会以为成年人都知道要干什么，但成年之后才知道这个世界其实是草台班子，绝大多数人对正在做的事情没有任何头绪的。经营企业同样如此，人们所总结的成功企业经营之道都是后见之明，成功企业其实并不清楚每个阶段需要干什么。如果你想创业，不要为不知道要干什么而放弃。因为没有人真正知道。