10 ms·

Stamina Is a Quiet Advantage

227 points by kolyder 2y ago

OutOfHere 2y ago
Stamina is often fueled by stimulant drugs which exert a toll on the user. I used five unique ones this morning, and I know it's going to be tough to get proper sleep. As long as one uses their time well, there is no substitute for work-life balance.
- uncharted9 2y ago
  An activity or thing that holds deep meaning to you personally will be the stimulant to one's stamina. Love for your child will allow you to take care of him/her despite being insanely sleep deprived. I think the concept is much more broader than just work.
  - OutOfHere 2y ago
    Yes, exactly. The chemicals are intended to make up for the lack of immense love for the organization of the work.
- mcdow 2y ago
  I would argue the original post is talking about stamina on a different scale. Stamina over years. Not over the course of a day or week, fueled by stimulants.
  - OutOfHere 2y ago
    A journey of a thousand days starts with a single day, recursed until one eventually arrives at the destination.
- pat_space 2y ago
  Five? Pray tell!
  - OutOfHere 2y ago
    Nothing crazy: #1 caffeine (4 coffee + 1 black tea + 1 green tea), #2 100% dark chocolate, #3 berberine, #4 noopept, #5 phenylpiracetam. Sufficient sleep plus exercise could substitute for all of them, but then I wouldn't have more than two hours left for work.
- dghlsakjg 2y ago
  That sounds an awful lot like a complete lack of stamina, made up for by pharmaceutical intervention. An analogous comparison: someone that has to wear a knee brace to exercise would not be said to have strong knees.
- lo_zamoyski 2y ago
  That isn't stamina, but perhaps a corrective for the lack of stamina. The stimulation is meant to increase pleasure, hence making it easier to stick with something. Stamina means the ability to endure the lack of pleasure in pursuit of the good.
  - OutOfHere 2y ago
    That sounds like a false dichotomy as it's suggesting that pleasure may not coexist with the good. Typically they do coexist. Typically it is pursuit of the good that brings innate pleasure. If there is insufficient pleasure from work, it's typically because it's insufficiently good. The chemicals are an attempt to fill the gap.
    - lo_zamoyski 2y ago
      > That sounds like a false dichotomy as it's suggesting that pleasure may not coexist with the good. I didn't say they couldn't. But they don't always, for one reason or another. We're flawed, we have bad habits, we have vices, we have disordered tastes, etc. These can steer us away from the good toward destructive ends, even though they may provide us with a cheap and empty source of fleeting pleasure. > If there is insufficient pleasure from work, it's typically because it's insufficiently good. Continuing the thought above, there are plenty of things we know that are good for us that we nonetheless don't want to do. We struggle to do them, but this does not mean they are insufficiently good, not in the least! It means we are not sufficiently good. Perseverance (or stamina, to use the author's terminology) means enduring unpleasantness, even suffering, for the sake of the good. The more perfect a human being is, however, the more pleasure is aligned with the good, because a more perfect human being is better aligned with the good. Indeed, in a perfect human being, if the situation demanded it, suffering and dying for a worthy good would be a pleasure. What is experienced as pleasure is not fixed and determined only by the object, but also conditioned by the subject. The reason is similar to the difference between good and bad taste. Good taste is an alignment with and receptivity to the objective good, while bad taste is rooted in dullness, or a disorder of receptivity, or whatever.
magicmicah85 2y ago
Reminds me of what Steve Jobs said: "Focus is about saying no". That resonates with me in that very often when I'm doing a task I was passionate on and now I'm not so passionate on it because there are 100 other things Id rather be doing. To have the stamina to persist by saying no to the other things is what gives people a huge advantage. "No, I won't stop running" or "No, I won't switch projects cause this shiny object is more interesting". I think having the stamina to keep persisting is a huge advantage, but it often comes at you saying no to all the other things you'd also like to do.
- karmakaze 2y ago
  I'm pretty good at filtering out distractions that come to me as they're assumed to be a distraction unless I see otherwise. I have more trouble filtering out ideas that I have myself as I often feel they could be relevant even though they haven't passed similar vetting. What resonated with me was Warren Buffet's "Two List Strategy" aka 5/25 rule.
uuwee 2y ago
So how can I gain my stamina...
blueyes 2y ago
This is true. Focus = Energy - Distraction and Success = Focus x Time The way you gain stamina is by doing things to increase your energy and decrease distraction. I wrote and talked about this here, fwiw. https://vonnik.substack.com/p/state-changes-work-and-presence https://vonnik.substack.com/p/state-changes-work-and-presenc... https://www.linkedin.com/posts/stokedlive_focus-is-power-learn-to-harness-yours-with-activity-7305316183975608320-bzhb https://www.linkedin.com/posts/stokedlive_focus-is-power-lea...
- akoboldfrying 2y ago
  > Success = Focus x Time You're forgetting a term on the RHS: Luck. Most people are either certain that it dominates, or certain that it's negligible.
  - blueyes 2y ago
    very true. this is just about controllable inputs tho.
- tomlue 2y ago
  I wish I had realized this when I was younger. People overestimate raw intelligence and underestimate sheer persistence. Just staying with a problem longer—pushing past the point where most would quit—feels almost like magic. Time + focus can take you incredibly far. Stubbornness might just be the most valuable trait a scientist can have.
  - tonyedgecombe 2y ago
    It can work both ways though, I've had projects that I kept going far beyond what was sensible.
  - mandevil 2y ago
    No, stubbornness plus being right are the most valuable trait a scientist can have. A whole lot of scientists were stubbornly wrong and are justifiably forgotten. Stephen J. Gould wrote many of his Natural History magazine essays on these sorts of scientists. The most notable example would probably be Louis Agassiz, who was enormously famous in their own time, but held out stubbornly against evolution, and most of these stubborn scientists today are mere footnotes if they are remembered at all. (Agassiz also was a huge player in scientific racism- his special flavor of the idea was that Black and White people- as Americans defined them- were separate species created separately by God. Again he held onto this idea long after it had gone out of vogue with the rest of the scientific community.) He was the head of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, was hugely prominent in his time, and his stubbornness in defense of wrong ideas is why he had his name removed from the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology and elsewhere.
JohnMakin 2y ago
A former mentor gave me some valuable advice once about this that didn't make sense til years later. Basically, I got a computer science degree while working full time minimum wage - in a very competitive program and high cost of living area. It was extraordinarily hard, orders of magnitude harder than anything else I've ever done, just trying to survive and not starve and somehow find the time to do well in my studies. He said something like "if you keep burning the candle at 110% like you have been for long, you'll find that you often can find something deep within you to keep going, but eventually, this can run dry, and it doesn't really regenerate. It takes something from you that you aren't going to get back." I don't mean minor stuff like, "oh I'm really tired today and I don't want to go to school." I'm talking like, very difficult coursework + stressful job + major life calamities and personal loss all compiling at the same time in a way that you just want to crawl into a pit and die, yet, you keep going - that kind of willpower/stamina whatever you want to call it. He was right. I think he was alluding somewhat to burnout, which I think is related but somehow different - I am not the same person I was before that endeavor, and don't feel I really ever "healed" from it. It's very difficult to describe. feels a little like anhedonia, like a part of me has been missing since then. When I get in similar circumstances now, I find it harder to summon whatever it was inside of me that "kept going." I expect I'm still healing because I'm only ~10 years removed from this, but, sometimes I'm not sure.
- the-grump 2y ago
  Have you tried something like an extended sabbatical? I went through a similar period near the end of my studies and can relate to your current disposition.
- nh23423fefe 2y ago
  I mean, if it was worth it, you would do it again right, because the alternative is worse?
  - JohnMakin 2y ago
    I have asked myself this question a lot over the last few years - I don't know. I always want to say no, I wouldn't have done it. But, likely, the stress/instability of living with such a low wage would have caused irrecoverable circumstances at some point, so I guess whatever state I exist in now is probably better than the version of me that would exist had I not pursued my degree. I am the first generation from my dad's side, who descended from slaves, to get a college degree (or really HS degree if we only include my paternal lineage). So it was a big deal. For me though, my career hasn't been the blazing success I'd expected it to have been, and I didn't end up doing remotely what I thought I would do. I 10x'd my income from college within 5 years, which felt like a big deal, til inflation blew the crap out of that, my meager savings were all but obliterated due to a series of bad financial moves/timing, and I am starting to hit a ceiling where 2xing my salary in a few years is no longer a reasonable expectation. So, I feel stagnant and unsatisfied, and I guess in my worst moments I'd prefer to have never gone through it. My life's materially better, I'm not at risk of starving anymore, and I got some health problems fixed. yet, some of the best people I met while in college I tossed aside because there simply was no time for them + what I was trying to do, very honestly - so I am very alone now, and tossed aside things like settling down in favor of getting ahead, which was another thing I had to kind of give up for a while. But, I suspect, deep down, I would have done it anyway, or I wouldn't have ended up here. I didn't want to do it then either but I did, for whatever reason.
lo_zamoyski 2y ago
In other words, the virtue of perseverance. Aquinas addresses the virtue of perseverance and the vices opposed to perseverance in Q.137[0] and Q.138[1] of the Summa, respectively. A virtue here is "a habit that directs us to do something well, or to omit something". Perseverance allows us to avoid forsaking "a good on account of long endurance of difficulties and toils". As a virtue, it holds the mean between the errors that flank it on either side, avoiding effeminacy and delicacy on the one hand, and pertinacity on the other. Effeminacy "withdraws from good on account of sorrow caused by lack of pleasure, yielding as it were to a weak motion", while delicacy "is a kind of effeminacy", but while effeminacy "regards lack of pleasures [...] delicacy regards the cause that hinders pleasure, for instance toil". In other words, effeminacy shrinks from things, because of the lack of pleasure, while delicacy shrinks on account of the discomfort caused. Pertinacity holds on "impudently, as being utterly tenacious". It resists course correction. [0] https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~ST.II-II.Q137 https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~ST.II-II.Q137 [1] https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~ST.II-II.Q138 https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~ST.II-II.Q138
- card_zero 2y ago
  Right, so persevere correctly, but don't persevere incorrectly. That would indeed be correct, top tip there Aquinas. I'm reminded of the sunk cost fallacy.
  - gman2093 2y ago
    Also, don't shrink away from toil or lack of pleasure- to an extent.
    - OutOfHere 2y ago
      There is a different way to think about it which is that the work could in principle be better structured to automatically be associated with more pleasure.
  - mvieira38 2y ago
    Modern readers seem to misinterpret writings by virtue ethicists as self help, perhaps because much of modern "philosophical" discourse is just disguised therapy books. These are descriptive, not prescriptive, when Aquinas says what perseverence means he doesn't tell you what to do to be virtuous, but what the virtue in itself is. Although there are some prescriptions in the Summa (see Ia IIae Q38 as a prime example), Aquinas mostly left the study of the building of virtue to other writers, as it is a secondary matter.
Ancalagon 2y ago
> It’s contributing as part of a team that, let’s say, has posed a challenging experience for all involved. It’s returning for another go at a problem that has repeatedly turned your mind into oatmeal ... It’s the ability to chip away at goals despite a lack of visible progress. To bring in some LinkedIn-level grandstanding here: I deeply agree, especially with this part of the quote, when it comes to leveling up my career in software. The problems get more and more abstract and muddied and the difference between engineer levels sometimes comes down to who gives up and who doesn't.
unoti 2y ago
Regarding stamina defined broadly as it is in this article: One of my favorite quotes comes from an unlikely source: Mike Tyson. "I don't care how good you are at anything. You don't have discipline you ain’t nothin. Discipline is doing what you hate but doing it like you love it" [1] Mike Tyson Fighter's Coldest Quotes Of All Time https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fz9JUENem78&t=100s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fz9JUENem78&t=100s
flakiness 2y ago
I used to work at a big-tech branch in an Asian country where the academic talent was more concentrated relative to here in the bay area (due to the lack of local competition). What I noticed was that all of these academic elites from wealthy family had the stamina. They worked longer, they focused better, etc. I'm not sure they were aware of that but it was definitely noticeable. Since then I have become skeptical about grit or hard work as an equalization factor: You sure need it but they have a lot of it.
- em-bee 2y ago
  in china this is called "eating bitterness", the idea of enduring hardship, overcoming difficulties, and forging ahead. it is not just academics, but everyone. it's chinese culture essentially.
- wcfrobert 2y ago
  I remember I used to complain in graduate school about the insane amount of work I had taking four engineering courses every quarter. Then I learned that my cousin in Asia studies more than 12 hours a day. Goes to sleep at 11PM and wakes up at 6AM to study. She is in high school and her life is literally study, eat, sleep, repeat until the college entrance exams. High schoolers in the US are incredibly stressed about SAT and college application prep too, but its much worse in Asia where your entire life trajectory depends on a single set of exams that optimizes for maximal studiousness and pure g factor. But I think stamina is something you can build over time. I also think it is a function of how interested one is in the work. I can work forever on some tasks, but some others are like chewing glass and I tap out in less than an hour.
keithxm23 2y ago
This reminds me of one of my favorite quotes I try to live by.. "Tenacity is a most underrated quality in life. We all speak about talent, intelligence, glamour. But tenacity is the common thing for every successful person in life. Maintain that motivation to go from A to B and to keep your focus on that target without any weakening. That is called tenacity; stamina in your motivation." - Arsene Wenger (Legendary Arsenal FC Coach)
- ip26 2y ago
  Of course, you also need to have chosen a good target. Especially when the trait under discussion is about doggedly sticking with the target!
  - borroka 2y ago
    I think the “of course” (involuntarily) assumes that you have to choose a good goal, which, looking at the world, is by no means a given. Many people show tenacity, persistence, and even obsession, but they choose wrong or mediocre goals, at least if we consider traditional “success” as a "good target". And I'm not referring to people who spend hours and hours scrolling through social media, showing tenacity, persistence, and unusual resistance to boredom, but to those who spend enormous energy, effort, and time trying to get a minor job promotion that would earn them an extra 10K a year, along with the satisfaction of having given their work arch-nemesis a hard time, instead of using the same energy, effort, and time to earn 100K more a year elsewhere. I see tenacity and stamina in people who every day look for the best, the most “optimal” diet that will allow them to finally reach the best shape of their lives, instead of using the same stamina to resist a little hunger when they choose and follow the most effective way to lose weight, which is to eat less. If I look back on my life, one of my biggest regrets is not having chosen better and bigger goals for my efforts: I spent a lot of time and energy trying to make relationships work, instead of using the same time and energy to find someone more compatible with me; I spent energy, time and willpower to get excellent grades in school, without thinking too much about whether those excellent grades would lead me to the professional career I aspired to; I spent years working tirelessly toward the dream of an academic career, before realizing that I did not want to work with students that much, my research was not that groundbreaking, and I wanted to earn much more money than what an academic career could offer. Choosing the right goal is by no means a given.
6stringmerc 2y ago
Stamina without Persistence is rather useless. Applying persistence constructively is the major differentiator in my view. The notion that a majority of humans reach a level of effort, in daily life or their pursuits, where stamina becomes a factor is likely single digit percentage of the population, say in the US. Stamina maintaining an addiction or survival as a homeless person is not the same as multi-hour Twitch streaming, so to speak.
naveed125 2y ago
Habits beat stamina any day of the week
sage76 2y ago
Sometimes, no matter how much work you put in, you will NOT get better at something. All these advice pieces are garbage. Easy to say, but then you put in thousands of hours of practice and dont seem to get any better.

227 points by kolyder 2y ago

Stamina is often fueled by stimulant drugs which exert a toll on the user. I used five unique ones this morning, and I know it's going to be tough to get proper sleep. As long as one uses their time well, there is no substitute for work-life balance.

uncharted9 2y ago
An activity or thing that holds deep meaning to you personally will be the stimulant to one's stamina. Love for your child will allow you to take care of him/her despite being insanely sleep deprived. I think the concept is much more broader than just work.
- OutOfHere 2y ago
  Yes, exactly. The chemicals are intended to make up for the lack of immense love for the organization of the work.
mcdow 2y ago
I would argue the original post is talking about stamina on a different scale. Stamina over years. Not over the course of a day or week, fueled by stimulants.
- OutOfHere 2y ago
  A journey of a thousand days starts with a single day, recursed until one eventually arrives at the destination.
pat_space 2y ago
Five? Pray tell!
- OutOfHere 2y ago
  Nothing crazy: #1 caffeine (4 coffee + 1 black tea + 1 green tea), #2 100% dark chocolate, #3 berberine, #4 noopept, #5 phenylpiracetam. Sufficient sleep plus exercise could substitute for all of them, but then I wouldn't have more than two hours left for work.
dghlsakjg 2y ago
That sounds an awful lot like a complete lack of stamina, made up for by pharmaceutical intervention. An analogous comparison: someone that has to wear a knee brace to exercise would not be said to have strong knees.
lo_zamoyski 2y ago
That isn't stamina, but perhaps a corrective for the lack of stamina. The stimulation is meant to increase pleasure, hence making it easier to stick with something. Stamina means the ability to endure the lack of pleasure in pursuit of the good.
- OutOfHere 2y ago
  That sounds like a false dichotomy as it's suggesting that pleasure may not coexist with the good. Typically they do coexist. Typically it is pursuit of the good that brings innate pleasure. If there is insufficient pleasure from work, it's typically because it's insufficiently good. The chemicals are an attempt to fill the gap.
  - lo_zamoyski 2y ago
    > That sounds like a false dichotomy as it's suggesting that pleasure may not coexist with the good. I didn't say they couldn't. But they don't always, for one reason or another. We're flawed, we have bad habits, we have vices, we have disordered tastes, etc. These can steer us away from the good toward destructive ends, even though they may provide us with a cheap and empty source of fleeting pleasure. > If there is insufficient pleasure from work, it's typically because it's insufficiently good. Continuing the thought above, there are plenty of things we know that are good for us that we nonetheless don't want to do. We struggle to do them, but this does not mean they are insufficiently good, not in the least! It means we are not sufficiently good. Perseverance (or stamina, to use the author's terminology) means enduring unpleasantness, even suffering, for the sake of the good. The more perfect a human being is, however, the more pleasure is aligned with the good, because a more perfect human being is better aligned with the good. Indeed, in a perfect human being, if the situation demanded it, suffering and dying for a worthy good would be a pleasure. What is experienced as pleasure is not fixed and determined only by the object, but also conditioned by the subject. The reason is similar to the difference between good and bad taste. Good taste is an alignment with and receptivity to the objective good, while bad taste is rooted in dullness, or a disorder of receptivity, or whatever.

magicmicah85 2y ago

Reminds me of what Steve Jobs said: "Focus is about saying no". That resonates with me in that very often when I'm doing a task I was passionate on and now I'm not so passionate on it because there are 100 other things Id rather be doing. To have the stamina to persist by saying no to the other things is what gives people a huge advantage. "No, I won't stop running" or "No, I won't switch projects cause this shiny object is more interesting". I think having the stamina to keep persisting is a huge advantage, but it often comes at you saying no to all the other things you'd also like to do.

karmakaze 2y ago
I'm pretty good at filtering out distractions that come to me as they're assumed to be a distraction unless I see otherwise. I have more trouble filtering out ideas that I have myself as I often feel they could be relevant even though they haven't passed similar vetting. What resonated with me was Warren Buffet's "Two List Strategy" aka 5/25 rule.

uuwee 2y ago

So how can I gain my stamina...

blueyes 2y ago

This is true. Focus = Energy - Distraction and Success = Focus x Time The way you gain stamina is by doing things to increase your energy and decrease distraction. I wrote and talked about this here, fwiw. https://vonnik.substack.com/p/state-changes-work-and-presence https://vonnik.substack.com/p/state-changes-work-and-presenc... https://www.linkedin.com/posts/stokedlive_focus-is-power-learn-to-harness-yours-with-activity-7305316183975608320-bzhb https://www.linkedin.com/posts/stokedlive_focus-is-power-lea...

akoboldfrying 2y ago
> Success = Focus x Time You're forgetting a term on the RHS: Luck. Most people are either certain that it dominates, or certain that it's negligible.
- blueyes 2y ago
  very true. this is just about controllable inputs tho.
tomlue 2y ago
I wish I had realized this when I was younger. People overestimate raw intelligence and underestimate sheer persistence. Just staying with a problem longer—pushing past the point where most would quit—feels almost like magic. Time + focus can take you incredibly far. Stubbornness might just be the most valuable trait a scientist can have.
- tonyedgecombe 2y ago
  It can work both ways though, I've had projects that I kept going far beyond what was sensible.
- mandevil 2y ago
  No, stubbornness plus being right are the most valuable trait a scientist can have. A whole lot of scientists were stubbornly wrong and are justifiably forgotten. Stephen J. Gould wrote many of his Natural History magazine essays on these sorts of scientists. The most notable example would probably be Louis Agassiz, who was enormously famous in their own time, but held out stubbornly against evolution, and most of these stubborn scientists today are mere footnotes if they are remembered at all. (Agassiz also was a huge player in scientific racism- his special flavor of the idea was that Black and White people- as Americans defined them- were separate species created separately by God. Again he held onto this idea long after it had gone out of vogue with the rest of the scientific community.) He was the head of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, was hugely prominent in his time, and his stubbornness in defense of wrong ideas is why he had his name removed from the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology and elsewhere.

JohnMakin 2y ago

A former mentor gave me some valuable advice once about this that didn't make sense til years later. Basically, I got a computer science degree while working full time minimum wage - in a very competitive program and high cost of living area. It was extraordinarily hard, orders of magnitude harder than anything else I've ever done, just trying to survive and not starve and somehow find the time to do well in my studies. He said something like "if you keep burning the candle at 110% like you have been for long, you'll find that you often can find something deep within you to keep going, but eventually, this can run dry, and it doesn't really regenerate. It takes something from you that you aren't going to get back." I don't mean minor stuff like, "oh I'm really tired today and I don't want to go to school." I'm talking like, very difficult coursework + stressful job + major life calamities and personal loss all compiling at the same time in a way that you just want to crawl into a pit and die, yet, you keep going - that kind of willpower/stamina whatever you want to call it. He was right. I think he was alluding somewhat to burnout, which I think is related but somehow different - I am not the same person I was before that endeavor, and don't feel I really ever "healed" from it. It's very difficult to describe. feels a little like anhedonia, like a part of me has been missing since then. When I get in similar circumstances now, I find it harder to summon whatever it was inside of me that "kept going." I expect I'm still healing because I'm only ~10 years removed from this, but, sometimes I'm not sure.

the-grump 2y ago
Have you tried something like an extended sabbatical? I went through a similar period near the end of my studies and can relate to your current disposition.
nh23423fefe 2y ago
I mean, if it was worth it, you would do it again right, because the alternative is worse?
- JohnMakin 2y ago
  I have asked myself this question a lot over the last few years - I don't know. I always want to say no, I wouldn't have done it. But, likely, the stress/instability of living with such a low wage would have caused irrecoverable circumstances at some point, so I guess whatever state I exist in now is probably better than the version of me that would exist had I not pursued my degree. I am the first generation from my dad's side, who descended from slaves, to get a college degree (or really HS degree if we only include my paternal lineage). So it was a big deal. For me though, my career hasn't been the blazing success I'd expected it to have been, and I didn't end up doing remotely what I thought I would do. I 10x'd my income from college within 5 years, which felt like a big deal, til inflation blew the crap out of that, my meager savings were all but obliterated due to a series of bad financial moves/timing, and I am starting to hit a ceiling where 2xing my salary in a few years is no longer a reasonable expectation. So, I feel stagnant and unsatisfied, and I guess in my worst moments I'd prefer to have never gone through it. My life's materially better, I'm not at risk of starving anymore, and I got some health problems fixed. yet, some of the best people I met while in college I tossed aside because there simply was no time for them + what I was trying to do, very honestly - so I am very alone now, and tossed aside things like settling down in favor of getting ahead, which was another thing I had to kind of give up for a while. But, I suspect, deep down, I would have done it anyway, or I wouldn't have ended up here. I didn't want to do it then either but I did, for whatever reason.

lo_zamoyski 2y ago

In other words, the virtue of perseverance. Aquinas addresses the virtue of perseverance and the vices opposed to perseverance in Q.137[0] and Q.138[1] of the Summa, respectively. A virtue here is "a habit that directs us to do something well, or to omit something". Perseverance allows us to avoid forsaking "a good on account of long endurance of difficulties and toils". As a virtue, it holds the mean between the errors that flank it on either side, avoiding effeminacy and delicacy on the one hand, and pertinacity on the other. Effeminacy "withdraws from good on account of sorrow caused by lack of pleasure, yielding as it were to a weak motion", while delicacy "is a kind of effeminacy", but while effeminacy "regards lack of pleasures [...] delicacy regards the cause that hinders pleasure, for instance toil". In other words, effeminacy shrinks from things, because of the lack of pleasure, while delicacy shrinks on account of the discomfort caused. Pertinacity holds on "impudently, as being utterly tenacious". It resists course correction. [0] https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~ST.II-II.Q137 https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~ST.II-II.Q137 [1] https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~ST.II-II.Q138 https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~ST.II-II.Q138

card_zero 2y ago
Right, so persevere correctly, but don't persevere incorrectly. That would indeed be correct, top tip there Aquinas. I'm reminded of the sunk cost fallacy.
- gman2093 2y ago
  Also, don't shrink away from toil or lack of pleasure- to an extent.
  - OutOfHere 2y ago
    There is a different way to think about it which is that the work could in principle be better structured to automatically be associated with more pleasure.
- mvieira38 2y ago
  Modern readers seem to misinterpret writings by virtue ethicists as self help, perhaps because much of modern "philosophical" discourse is just disguised therapy books. These are descriptive, not prescriptive, when Aquinas says what perseverence means he doesn't tell you what to do to be virtuous, but what the virtue in itself is. Although there are some prescriptions in the Summa (see Ia IIae Q38 as a prime example), Aquinas mostly left the study of the building of virtue to other writers, as it is a secondary matter.

Ancalagon 2y ago

> It’s contributing as part of a team that, let’s say, has posed a challenging experience for all involved. It’s returning for another go at a problem that has repeatedly turned your mind into oatmeal ... It’s the ability to chip away at goals despite a lack of visible progress. To bring in some LinkedIn-level grandstanding here: I deeply agree, especially with this part of the quote, when it comes to leveling up my career in software. The problems get more and more abstract and muddied and the difference between engineer levels sometimes comes down to who gives up and who doesn't.

unoti 2y ago

Regarding stamina defined broadly as it is in this article: One of my favorite quotes comes from an unlikely source: Mike Tyson. "I don't care how good you are at anything. You don't have discipline you ain’t nothin. Discipline is doing what you hate but doing it like you love it" [1] Mike Tyson Fighter's Coldest Quotes Of All Time https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fz9JUENem78&t=100s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fz9JUENem78&t=100s

flakiness 2y ago

I used to work at a big-tech branch in an Asian country where the academic talent was more concentrated relative to here in the bay area (due to the lack of local competition). What I noticed was that all of these academic elites from wealthy family had the stamina. They worked longer, they focused better, etc. I'm not sure they were aware of that but it was definitely noticeable. Since then I have become skeptical about grit or hard work as an equalization factor: You sure need it but they have a lot of it.

em-bee 2y ago
in china this is called "eating bitterness", the idea of enduring hardship, overcoming difficulties, and forging ahead. it is not just academics, but everyone. it's chinese culture essentially.
wcfrobert 2y ago
I remember I used to complain in graduate school about the insane amount of work I had taking four engineering courses every quarter. Then I learned that my cousin in Asia studies more than 12 hours a day. Goes to sleep at 11PM and wakes up at 6AM to study. She is in high school and her life is literally study, eat, sleep, repeat until the college entrance exams. High schoolers in the US are incredibly stressed about SAT and college application prep too, but its much worse in Asia where your entire life trajectory depends on a single set of exams that optimizes for maximal studiousness and pure g factor. But I think stamina is something you can build over time. I also think it is a function of how interested one is in the work. I can work forever on some tasks, but some others are like chewing glass and I tap out in less than an hour.

keithxm23 2y ago

This reminds me of one of my favorite quotes I try to live by.. "Tenacity is a most underrated quality in life. We all speak about talent, intelligence, glamour. But tenacity is the common thing for every successful person in life. Maintain that motivation to go from A to B and to keep your focus on that target without any weakening. That is called tenacity; stamina in your motivation." - Arsene Wenger (Legendary Arsenal FC Coach)

ip26 2y ago
Of course, you also need to have chosen a good target. Especially when the trait under discussion is about doggedly sticking with the target!
- borroka 2y ago
  I think the “of course” (involuntarily) assumes that you have to choose a good goal, which, looking at the world, is by no means a given. Many people show tenacity, persistence, and even obsession, but they choose wrong or mediocre goals, at least if we consider traditional “success” as a "good target". And I'm not referring to people who spend hours and hours scrolling through social media, showing tenacity, persistence, and unusual resistance to boredom, but to those who spend enormous energy, effort, and time trying to get a minor job promotion that would earn them an extra 10K a year, along with the satisfaction of having given their work arch-nemesis a hard time, instead of using the same energy, effort, and time to earn 100K more a year elsewhere. I see tenacity and stamina in people who every day look for the best, the most “optimal” diet that will allow them to finally reach the best shape of their lives, instead of using the same stamina to resist a little hunger when they choose and follow the most effective way to lose weight, which is to eat less. If I look back on my life, one of my biggest regrets is not having chosen better and bigger goals for my efforts: I spent a lot of time and energy trying to make relationships work, instead of using the same time and energy to find someone more compatible with me; I spent energy, time and willpower to get excellent grades in school, without thinking too much about whether those excellent grades would lead me to the professional career I aspired to; I spent years working tirelessly toward the dream of an academic career, before realizing that I did not want to work with students that much, my research was not that groundbreaking, and I wanted to earn much more money than what an academic career could offer. Choosing the right goal is by no means a given.

6stringmerc 2y ago

Stamina without Persistence is rather useless. Applying persistence constructively is the major differentiator in my view. The notion that a majority of humans reach a level of effort, in daily life or their pursuits, where stamina becomes a factor is likely single digit percentage of the population, say in the US. Stamina maintaining an addiction or survival as a homeless person is not the same as multi-hour Twitch streaming, so to speak.

naveed125 2y ago

Habits beat stamina any day of the week

sage76 2y ago

Sometimes, no matter how much work you put in, you will NOT get better at something. All these advice pieces are garbage. Easy to say, but then you put in thousands of hours of practice and dont seem to get any better.