But you can. The catch phrase for this is "increasing your luck surface area"
There are all kinds of possibilities and opportunities in front of us every day. We're "lucky" when we can a) identify them and b) take advantage of them.
There are lots of strategies for this ranging from the simple (learn more) to the complex (networking, the people kind) and everything can give you additional perspective, opportunities, etc, etc to make you "lucky." As you're successful with a few, you can build momentum, reputation, etc to grow your "luck"
I just finished reading this biography of the physicist Enrico Fermi, "The Pope of Physics" and while he was obviously very talented from a young age, there were a lot of points in his career from Italy to the United States where luck played a critical role. He was lucky that he was taken under the wing of a senior academic early on, well before he became famous or did any really significant work. That figure ensured that he and several other young physicists got academic appointments (when others tried equally hard to block those appointments, and put their favored proteges in those slots). He was also lucky that he was able to escape fascist Italy with his Jewish wife, and emigrate to the United States.
However, it also kind of backs up the thesis here, as Fermi apparently worked very hard to lose his Italian accent once in America, as a means of more effectively communicating with the locals. He then became the leader of the Chicago reactor project, then an all-around consultant for the Los Alamos Manhattan Project.
This is such an impotent and sour-grapes refrain that someone always has to blurt out in any thread about “success”. Of course luck plays a huge role in success just as it does for all asymmetric outcomes in a chaotic environment. Just ask any formerly living thing over the last billion years about its fortunes. Shit happens, you can’t control it.
However focusing on what you can’t control is to nullify your competitive advantage as a human: your brain. There’s a reason they say “luck favors the prepared mind”. Stop feeling sorry for yourself and play the hand you were dealt.
But we can control societal factors that cause success to be inequitably distributed. Through worker organization, redistribution of wealth, etc.
It’s just that individuals that have benefited from this false meritocracy have a vested interest in the rest of us “hustling” at the individual level instead of banding together to change the system for everyone.
I don't think it follows that he feels sorry for himself. This bias in human thought could use correcting for several reasons. It runs a bit like the "just world" fallacy. On one side, you have things like the Republican party, where millions vote against their own interests on the basis of a delusion of control. Then you have the general lack of social safety nets in America, because of the just-world fallacy that people get what they deserve. Then, you have people like Jeff Bezos who credit themselves with deserving their wealth and lead companies with delivery drivers peeing in bottles not to get fired.
You're right that I'm projecting. This is based on personal experience many individuals I've known who have made this complaint while lacking self-awareness of how their own attitudes and victim mentality have caused them to miss opportunities, so then their "bad luck" becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
On your other points, you are wrong. I hyphenated "sour-grapes" due its use as an adjective.
"Chance favors the prepared mind" - one of my favorite quotes. The point being, chances come your way every day, and you need to be prepared to grab them.
The sentiment may lose its power if factors like inequality and racism make the chances available wildly different for disadvantaged subsets of society.
Hearing such quotes may be to them insult to injury if coming from well born or huge outliers (that got 1/million lucky).
Even the most disadvantaged should still prepare themselves. And ideally get extra help, without pretense, from those who never had to face their precarious circumstances.
I think in a corporate enviroment, most organisations are too large and all you really have to do is sound like you know what you are doing hence the ability to speak and ability to write.
A lot of the higher up, management types are so far removed from the ground work, that is all they see. You could be doing excellent work but they won’t see that if you can’t communicate your ideas to them or your busy doing the actual work, they will just see the end result and if a team was working on it, the people in the team that get the most credit are the louder, more visible ones.
So, ask yourself: How much does my audience already know about my topic? If you can tailor what you say specifically to your listeners, you'll maximize your impact.
Donald Trump proves at least some of this thesis. Understand your audience and just trigger them = translates directly into political power in representative democracy
Not trying to rubbish the article but I've seen all manner of fuckery perpetrated by sadistic individuals to climb their way up the corporate ladder. Those who have been most successful in such environments absolutely have the first, but the last two are orders of magnitude less important and can easily be stolen from others when in a bind. If you've nailed the speaking you can walk into a room and spout complete BS for an hour and be applauded for it.
I knew Patrick well and he was as far from a sadistic individual as one could imagine.
Yes, there are many dysfunctional organizations, but even if you work on a road crew, being able to speak clearly and have good ideas will help. You may not speak the same way a prof might speak at a faculty meeting, but people you’re speaking with should be able to understand what you’re talking about.
Success meaning being high up on the corporate ladder and making lots of money.
Success not meaning doing work that makes a difference, helping others, achieving contentment, or having a balanced meaningful life.
Not that the stated qualities don't help you with accomplishing the seocnd as being able to communicate appropriately is a powerful tool, but I've found the person on my engineering team that does the most actual work right now is the quiet guy who isn't trying to lead the team, doesn't spend a lot of time talking in meetings, and just diligently chips away at whatever he has been assigned. His quality of work is high, his output consistent and his stress and complaining seem lower.
Meanwhile as a loud "senior engineer" I have to spend all day trapped in meetings and arguing with people and get to spend very little time doing what I enjoy, spending more of my time fighting the "process".
I have to spend all day trapped in meetings and arguing with people and get to spend very little time doing what I enjoy
The only "have to" in life is death. I've been in situations like you describe as a lead, choose another role or choose a better story for yourself. Lead positions are hard for the very reasons you describe, they don't offer the immediate dopamine hit of typing code into your IDE or lining up commits throughout the day. It does take an extra degree of learned faith to understand your impact on the team. As the saying goes "manage it or it will manage you." Do you block off 1hr on your calendar every day to do things you want/enjoy like coding or skill improvement?
Lead positions don't have to be that way. As a lead, it's important to find org structure and management personalities that not only enable leaders but also give them direct domains of authority. A lot of the time when I've read about people disattisfied in leadership positions and the general toxicity around them, it's because the structure and culture remove authority from engineers, proxy it through non-engineers, and create an environment of "leadership through influence", which is absolute junk.
Have worked with this for a while - multiple positions where "hey, just lead by example" which... never works. I was referred to as a "lead developer" on a small team, but everyone would still defer to (or explicitly seek out) input from the company owner. He went through a period of "do whatever jacob says" but that wasn't followed. I would give input, then it would be tabled until someone could 'confirm' with owner.
Do you get satisfaction reading code and imagining yourself typing it? I don't think what defines a lead is politicking at meetings, but rather having an outward focus. One way to do that is to just read what everyone else is doing and engage with them. Even if you're just fixing bugs with automatic analysis tools. I think that's one way folks like your diligent colleague can advance..
I feel like life is a lot better if people prioritize these things in the reverse order of what Winston prescribes. Look at our bureaucracies and you'll see that the people leading it have taken Winston's advice to heart -- excellent speakers, decent writers, and low quality ideas / creativity.
Although personally, I have no desire to become like the people who currently lead our society -- the most 'successful' -- so I guess I'm disagreeing more with his definition of success than his means of achieving it within the bounds he has set.
I believe that a crucial component of rigorous college education today is the acculturation into an ability to sell, spin, etc. absolutely anything into a persuasive, confident, narrative delivery --- putting the BS in bachelor's degree, one might say.
Literature classes felt this way sometimes. Having to find and present in writing some interesting meaning to be discovered from the blandest of passages. Alfred E Prufrock comes to mind.
I'd generally look at bureaucracies as being extremely process driven, with the goals of the process to create reproducible results no matter who is involved.
Ideas and creativity don't fit that reproducible mould
Meanwhile as a loud "senior engineer" I have to spend all day trapped in meetings and arguing with people and get to spend very little time doing what I enjoy, spending more of my time fighting the "process".
Don't you think that if it weren't for you arguing with the rest of the organization, that quiet guy might not be nearly as productive as he is now? So from his perspective, I think your work does make a difference.
I’ve been that quiet guy, and can attest: my productivity pretty much had a 1:1 correlation with my PM or lead’s ability to shelter me from BS interruptions.
The quiet engineer is happy to work on things for which the result is meaningless, digging and refilling the same hole to perfection
It's fun being heads down on things, but also it's disconnected from some of those same things you describe as success - doing work that makes a difference and helping others
You are very right. However, our society makes someone lacking 2-3 of OP's mentioned abilities extremely difficult to pursue their dreams, especially if their significant other/supporting family are not 100% supporting. It takes ones' perseverance dialed up to 1000. Even with that, there are still too many factors to overcome. For every success story of someone lacking OP's mentioned abilities, there are thousands of unheard failed stories. The story of Yitang [1] mentioned here 1-2 days ago is the perfect example. It touched me so much due to a few resemblance (not the genius part) of our lives. Had he worked on a harder problem, such as the one he's working on now, or if his friend didn't introduce him to his lecturer job, he may have been known as a failure by people who knows him.
For those who has the perseverance and can ignore haters, there's still the money problem. UBI may help. But I feel like to support a decent standard of living in today's world, it's not possible unless mega crops buy-in or budget cuts happen elsewhere like defense. Both of which has close to zero chance of happening.
I'm happy to believe that the article captures part of success.
However, communication is a two-way process, and the following have been important to me in my career journey:
* Understanding when to listen instead of talking,
* Asking open-ended questions that provide opportunity for other viewpoints,
* Empathizing with others', including understanding their expectations.
I guess the older I've gotten, the more value i've gained from just listening.
It makes you wonder how "held" back people that suffer from suttering, autism spectrum and dyslexia (to name a few) are held back in day to day life. Where most of life really falls under communication.
“…in that order” is the full quote, and omitting that from the title really changes the point.
Ultimately if you don’t work on the first two, it isn’t enough to have the third. Persuasion is really important because you’re usually not working in a vacuum.
I was all prepared to dismiss this as yet another bunch of Toastmasters BS ("use hand gestures!"). I consider myself a decent public speaker (whether anyone else does is another matter :) But you can find me on YouTube.)
But his points for speaking well...
1. Ask: How much does my audience know?
2. Get excited.
3. Slow down.
... are not terrible, unless you're going to pretend to be excited by the latest team outing to the Laser Tag place.
Mine are things that I think Winston would have approved of, and they're not particularly designed to help you climb the corporate ladder. They're for technical people like us, and definitely not about spewing BS.
Learn your topic inside and out, including all audience questions you can think of. Don't worry about your FORM at all; just the content.
I see developers ignore this guidance all the time.
They can’t write or articulate their concerns clearly. They are willing to argue their concerns during meetings but it feels like time wasting posturing for self-serving grand standing. Don’t waste peoples time with your stumbling bullshit. Be great then be done. The end.
Strong communication is a pillar of an effective organization, a competent work culture. Other pillars include strong leadership, a clear vision, and quality controls.
Sure, maybe...but at the end of the day I watch Biden and I think to myself:
That's just a job like any other, and it was a boring journey to get there as well.
The lost art of amateur craftmanship of every skill is the way to go. It's when you are an amateur that you make the most progress on a time unit basis.
And then you switch craft often once you reach a plateu ranging from social, engineering, music, poetry, leadership etc.
At our company we're bringing in a professor of non-fiction to teach a workshop on personal narrative ahead of annual reviews this year.
Not everyone grew up with the same education or language, and this is a good way to even out those imbalances.
insert Steve Jobs reference works "all the time" to convince readers about these phoney corporate laced narratives.
Success depends on a combination of hard work, circumstances, choices and random probabilities. Perceptible success, on the other hand, is completely different ("fake it till you make it" syndrome). As for the fancy "ivy leagues" - those professors are mandated to make it sound good to address the marketable skills. I am sure there are many others who don't get featured here (or get the PR they want).
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[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 111 ms ] threadThere are all kinds of possibilities and opportunities in front of us every day. We're "lucky" when we can a) identify them and b) take advantage of them.
There are lots of strategies for this ranging from the simple (learn more) to the complex (networking, the people kind) and everything can give you additional perspective, opportunities, etc, etc to make you "lucky." As you're successful with a few, you can build momentum, reputation, etc to grow your "luck"
However, it also kind of backs up the thesis here, as Fermi apparently worked very hard to lose his Italian accent once in America, as a means of more effectively communicating with the locals. He then became the leader of the Chicago reactor project, then an all-around consultant for the Los Alamos Manhattan Project.
However focusing on what you can’t control is to nullify your competitive advantage as a human: your brain. There’s a reason they say “luck favors the prepared mind”. Stop feeling sorry for yourself and play the hand you were dealt.
It’s just that individuals that have benefited from this false meritocracy have a vested interest in the rest of us “hustling” at the individual level instead of banding together to change the system for everyone.
As a species, focusing on our competitive advantage has brought us to 100 seconds to midnight on the Doomsday clock: https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/current-time/ .
2. You're misusing "sour grapes" -- you don't know what it means.
3. You're hyphenating "sour grapes" -- you don't know how it's spelled.
On your other points, you are wrong. I hyphenated "sour-grapes" due its use as an adjective.
The most influential aspects of being successful is an ancestral history of wealth and success along with luck.
The comment comes up because it's akin to focussing on some micro-optimizations in bubble sort instead of using quick sort
Hearing such quotes may be to them insult to injury if coming from well born or huge outliers (that got 1/million lucky).
Even the most disadvantaged should still prepare themselves. And ideally get extra help, without pretense, from those who never had to face their precarious circumstances.
Sometimes you don't realize the rest of the equation (or other side of the argument) until later.
A lot of the higher up, management types are so far removed from the ground work, that is all they see. You could be doing excellent work but they won’t see that if you can’t communicate your ideas to them or your busy doing the actual work, they will just see the end result and if a team was working on it, the people in the team that get the most credit are the louder, more visible ones.
Donald Trump proves at least some of this thesis. Understand your audience and just trigger them = translates directly into political power in representative democracy
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_...
Yes, there are many dysfunctional organizations, but even if you work on a road crew, being able to speak clearly and have good ideas will help. You may not speak the same way a prof might speak at a faculty meeting, but people you’re speaking with should be able to understand what you’re talking about.
Success not meaning doing work that makes a difference, helping others, achieving contentment, or having a balanced meaningful life.
Not that the stated qualities don't help you with accomplishing the seocnd as being able to communicate appropriately is a powerful tool, but I've found the person on my engineering team that does the most actual work right now is the quiet guy who isn't trying to lead the team, doesn't spend a lot of time talking in meetings, and just diligently chips away at whatever he has been assigned. His quality of work is high, his output consistent and his stress and complaining seem lower.
Meanwhile as a loud "senior engineer" I have to spend all day trapped in meetings and arguing with people and get to spend very little time doing what I enjoy, spending more of my time fighting the "process".
I am more "successful" but I wish I was him.
The only "have to" in life is death. I've been in situations like you describe as a lead, choose another role or choose a better story for yourself. Lead positions are hard for the very reasons you describe, they don't offer the immediate dopamine hit of typing code into your IDE or lining up commits throughout the day. It does take an extra degree of learned faith to understand your impact on the team. As the saying goes "manage it or it will manage you." Do you block off 1hr on your calendar every day to do things you want/enjoy like coding or skill improvement?
The point is both you and them would be far more effective if that wasn’t the case.
Although personally, I have no desire to become like the people who currently lead our society -- the most 'successful' -- so I guess I'm disagreeing more with his definition of success than his means of achieving it within the bounds he has set.
Ideas and creativity don't fit that reproducible mould
Don't you think that if it weren't for you arguing with the rest of the organization, that quiet guy might not be nearly as productive as he is now? So from his perspective, I think your work does make a difference.
It's fun being heads down on things, but also it's disconnected from some of those same things you describe as success - doing work that makes a difference and helping others
For those who has the perseverance and can ignore haters, there's still the money problem. UBI may help. But I feel like to support a decent standard of living in today's world, it's not possible unless mega crops buy-in or budget cuts happen elsewhere like defense. Both of which has close to zero chance of happening.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31524518
>Success not meaning doing work that makes a difference, helping others, achieving contentment, or having a balanced meaningful life.
>For those who has the perseverance and can ignore haters, there's still the money problem.
I don't think success should be spelled money to begin with.
More like
The ability to speak.
The ability to write.
The quality of your ideas.
Is the type of success in itself that is even more elusive.
That can be enough to make a difference, help others, achieve contentment, and have a meaningful life.
No guarantee of balance whether there is money or not.
I think it's good to be more or less fuzzy ourselves from time to time.
However, communication is a two-way process, and the following have been important to me in my career journey:
I guess the older I've gotten, the more value i've gained from just listening.Ultimately if you don’t work on the first two, it isn’t enough to have the third. Persuasion is really important because you’re usually not working in a vacuum.
But his points for speaking well...
1. Ask: How much does my audience know?
2. Get excited.
3. Slow down.
... are not terrible, unless you're going to pretend to be excited by the latest team outing to the Laser Tag place.
Mine are things that I think Winston would have approved of, and they're not particularly designed to help you climb the corporate ladder. They're for technical people like us, and definitely not about spewing BS.
Learn your topic inside and out, including all audience questions you can think of. Don't worry about your FORM at all; just the content.
Remember when you're up there:
1. You know the stuff.
2. They don't.
3. You want them to know it.
New book about the 80s coming very soon.
They can’t write or articulate their concerns clearly. They are willing to argue their concerns during meetings but it feels like time wasting posturing for self-serving grand standing. Don’t waste peoples time with your stumbling bullshit. Be great then be done. The end.
Strong communication is a pillar of an effective organization, a competent work culture. Other pillars include strong leadership, a clear vision, and quality controls.
That's just a job like any other, and it was a boring journey to get there as well.
The lost art of amateur craftmanship of every skill is the way to go. It's when you are an amateur that you make the most progress on a time unit basis.
And then you switch craft often once you reach a plateu ranging from social, engineering, music, poetry, leadership etc.
(1) Empathy
(2) Having a great world-view by (a) reading a lot of industry news, and (b) traveling
(3) Ability to write/communicate well (this is mentioned in the article)
(4) Resourcefulness / Creativity