> Do they think for themselves or parrot a standard position? Can they explain how they came to a conclusion? When they say "I think . . . ", did they? It doesn't matter they subject; either they think or they don't.
Obstinate people are ones who not only don't think, but aggressively don't think. They have their "dogma" (call it another term if you wish), and they Will. Not. Question. It. No matter what you say, no matter what evidence you present, they just won't.
This isn't just about obstinacy in pursuing goals. It also shows up in the confirmation bias that reinforces conspiracy theories in the minds of those who hold them.
You state this as fact without providing a dataset to back it. I think
this is not true at all.
> most of the most successful people on the planet write little or nothing
It depends on how you define "success".
I would consider people like Linus and Dwayne Richard Hipp and TBL to
be among the most successful people on the planet, and they write
quite a lot.
Do you call people who capture then give away a billion dollars the
most successful? I don't. To me the most successful are the ones who
create billions in wealth and capture just a tiny fraction--enough to
support their family and friends and live a good life.
> You state this as fact without providing a dataset to back it. I think this is not true at all.
Look at your own comments. My comment is effectively "people whose day job is to write, write the most". It's borderline self evident.
Your argument has devolved into: "people who write a lot are by definition successful. I wonder if there is a correlation between writing a lot and success."
lol - so your opinions are valid, everyone else must bring data.
Here the dumb thing about this - almost anything worth discussing is uncertain, else it wouldn't be discussed. If the only way you can change your mind is for someone to present an absolute, water tight, backed up by data argument, you'll never change your mind. You make several assertions in this thread with zero data.
It seems that "wants attention", "managing career", "promoting x" are 99% of written content these days... There was a very small window where writing really did signal someone who was thoughtful, and there are still some thoughtful writers, but it's so rare now you can almost rely on the rubric "oh they write, run".
Might be worth considering that in a specific example or context this may make sense, but zoom out further you will find that goals are solutions and solutions are goals.
It's a hierarchy, as Paul referred to as a "tree".
Each node in the acyclic graph is connected to a "why" node above it (goal) and a "how" node below it (solution).
OKRs reflect this in an organization.
People make decisions based on their values hierarchy, implicit or explicit.
If this isn't easy to follow maybe an example will help...
Let's say I have a goal of "provide reliable shelter for my family", the solution may be to "buy a house". Buying a house is also a goal, which maybe is slightly out of reach. So my solution is to "save a large portion of my income" and "secure a high paying job", these are also goals. The solution to saving may be a fintech app, discipline, good communication with my spouse, etc.. every solution is a goal with its own solutions and you can follow this tree down until you get into really specific motor tasks like taking a credit card out of a wallet or opening a door or turning the key to start a car.
I think there maybe more than the five qualities that comprise persistence. But those five make a lot of sense and I like how he shows their interplay. Good read!
Considering how many founders he's come into contact with, I'm curious why PG chose the Collison Brothers as the exemplary persistent entrepreneurs. Perhaps it's their inclination to tackle complex and unwieldy regulatory challenges that most tech founders shy away from?
I think the essay would benefit from adding examples for "obstinate". Surely there must be specific characters from fiction (or history) that he can reference to better support his argument (without offending anyone living).
> "The persistent are attached to the goal. The obstinate are attached to their ideas about how to reach it."
I didn't know what the word "obstinate" meant so here you go: "stubbornly adhering to an opinion, purpose, or course in spite of reason, arguments, or persuasion."
While PG's quote suggests a clear distinction, it's overly simplistic. Persistence and obstinacy often overlap in practice, sharing traits like energy, imagination, resilience, good judgment, focus on a goal, and listening intently. The issue is that "reason" can be subjective. For example, Copernicus and Galileo were considered obstinate for his heliocentric theory, but history proved him right. This shows that the line between persistence and obstinacy is often drawn in hindsight.
Referencing the Collison brothers highlights a bias towards successful YC alumni. It would be more telling to classify current batch founders as obstinate or persistent and revisit their success in a decade.
No it doesn't. The essay includes multiple parts talking about how the things are related, similar, sometimes indistinguishable, and also that it can be a spectrum.
In fact, arguably the entire thesis of the essay is how the two traits have both similarities and differences and that it is complicated.
> Persistence and obstinacy often overlap in practice, sharing traits like energy, imagination, resilience, good judgment, focus on a goal, and listening intently.
Obstinacy is defined by a lack of imagination, good judgement, and intent listening.
> For example, Copernicus and Galileo were considered obstinate for his heliocentric theory, but history proved him right. This shows that the line between persistence and obstinacy is often drawn in hindsight.
History didn't prove them right, science did. The fact that people considered them obstinate does not mean that they were. The only future where they would still be considered the obstinate ones is one run by obstinate people. They had the evidence, which was ignored by obstinate heliocentrists. Heliocentrists did not have convincing reasons for their belief that Copernicus/Galileo ignored.
> Obstinacy is defined by a lack of imagination, good judgement, and intent listening
I think that may be a mistake.
Any value strategy that is primarily conservative (e.g., protecting sunk or resource assets) will be obstinate. That doesn't make it slower or stupider.
So oil and timber companies and monopolists et al will keenly monitor opposition and respond immediately and deftly -- with reality-avoidance. As will individuals who are primarily guarding something they feel is at risk of being taken away.
They have the same or more intelligence, judgment, and active listening; it's just that their strategy is not creation or innovation.
Indeed, in a fair fight the innovator will lose to the conservative, because it's just plain harder to make things happen, particularly when it involves convincing others to change their patterns or minds.
He put it very nicely that stubborn people are like a boat under full throttle (will take a while to slow down), and obstinate people are like a boat that has no rudder (unwilling or unable to change direction).
It is a nice distinction coming from someone who is habitually stubborn and can border on obstinate if not checked.
My question is always, how do you get someone with a more fixed mindset attitude to adopt a growth mindset way of relating to the world? It's so hard, but it makes such a difference.
I became aware of this quite recently (on this site too IIRC), but it's worth noting that the "growth mindset" findings of the last several decades haven't quite panned out or been replicable upon further review: https://matheducators.stackexchange.com/questions/24418/are-...
I agree the Persistent / Obstinate paradigm seems quite similar, and if anything for those reasons I'm inclined to be (obstinately :P) skeptical.
Less relevant to engineering etc., but I personally find a lot of "successful people do X, unsuccessful people do Y" findings, especially when presented as "innate" or "personality" features, are pretty similar to IQ, the marshmallow test, and other things where it's a frequent victim of selection bias for how scarce resources were in one's upbringing or cognitive development.
Not sure if this is such a great goal after all. Investors like PG treat people like racehorses: they have thousands to pick from when placing their bets. But you and I have just the one "horse" to work with - ourselves - quirks, inefficiencies and all. And perhaps we should just play to our strength rather than contorting ourselves to fit a gambler's ideal. Peter Drucker seems to agree.
Growth mindset is hard because it's basically selling a lie. There is no amount of effort that'll turn the average HN reader into one of YC's star founders.
I often wonder into which of these two categories I fall with my epaper calendars.
On the one hand, I’ve been working on this product for four years, put every free minute into it, and it still doesn’t make enough money for me to quit my job.
On the other hand, the product keeps getting better as I work on it, and I have now sold 500 of them.
But sometimes I feel like I can’t keep going like this. Two jobs and a family is just too much.
I think I should either quit my job and properly focus on it, relying on savings until the sales can support me. Or put the project into maintenance mode (I will keep the lights on for at least 10 years, no matter what).
Sounds like a marketing problem. It wouldn't be weird at all to see that at every bookstore in the country. So why isn't it there? Are you focusing on making the product better forever, instead of getting it in front of people, or tuning it to what they are most eager to pay for, or tuning the website to get more sales? What beliefs are causing you to make that mistake? Are you scared of those parts, and therefore avoiding them and convincing yourself they're not important?
It sounds like you wish to be able to live off this work, yet you're not modeling the gap between where you are and where you want to be correctly (clearly, or you wouldn't be asking for help). So yes, you are being stubborn, but that doesn't mean the project is doomed. Just that you need to step back and look at the problems holistically.
I am not sure if marketing is the bottleneck or the product itself - I have been getting inconsistent feedback on that.
On the marketing side, I’ve been trying to make the website better and i have been playing with Google and instagram ads.
I don’t even dislike marketing - but I don’t think I’m very good at it.
I could try to pay for this competency, but I’m scared of losing bunch of money.
Well, I'm no expert, but I can say what I think. First, your product looks awesome.
But I do think the landing page is a _little_ less good than it probably could be, but I'm not sure I can say exactly why. I bet there is some company out there that could take this thing from an obscure product to a Christmas staple, if they got their hands on it. Maybe there is a way that you could do it in a profit-sharing way so you're not taking a financial risk yourself. After all that is the point of venture capital also: they fund the endeavor and then own part of it.
My one suggestion would be de-emphasizing "you can do whatever you want with it" and emphasizing "here are the things that you can easily do with it". Because most people aren't gonna do any customization, or at least, will be intimidated by that. The ideal impression is that I might impulse-buy it because it's a cool desktop calendar, but then use it in other ways afterwards, and power users might get it for the customization features.
(couple other small things: that _particular_ NYT article makes kind of a weird impression. Maybe make something that doesn't involve a picture of Trump? People hate Trump and they hate seeing pictures of him also. Also, the phrase "an acquired taste" is not worth including. Black and white is stylish! someone who wants that is going to already know they like it.)
hey, thank you for the comments. I think these are all good points.
I will try to get some help with marketing, maybe also find a distributor etc.
As you pointed out, I am especially struggling around the question of how to market the different features, and how much to market the customisation options.
And I will try to choose a more neutral article for the website photo. I didn't think about the impression it could leave.
Exactly, the market he is trying to serve has the customer as his own competitor. That is a bad position to be in. I wouldn't want to be my own customer, would you?
Two recommendations.
1) Go wireless with enough power for like 500 screen updates for 6 weeks between recharges.
2) Find a market where your customers can't make the product
That's cool. The news front-page screenshot & calendar use-cases appeal to me. (Although, it seems like I could just do the news FP thing myself, with "Any image URL", rather than your $3/mo service.)
Is it touch interactive? Like, can I tap on a cell in the calendar to see "... and 2 more" details?
Can I easily create my own replacement frame?
Can I hang it on the wall in a manner where I can rotate between portrait & landscape orientations, and have it react in an appropriate way for the running app?
Are you using something like an ESP32 to run the thing? I ask because a lot of them have a surprising amount of random sensors tacked on, like accelerometers. (capacitive, and hall-effect sensors too) Auto-orientation is probably a thing you'd need to design for though.
1.) I don't like your name. Your computers are not invisible. They are definitely visible. If you were making an Alexa/Siri smart speaker computer that you hid in the walls, that would make sense to call it Invisible Computers.
But your computer is a screen. The definition of a screen is something you look at.
2.) Simplify your workflows: combine with your github profile. This is clearly your passion. Own it. Move all the invisible computer repos to your own GitHub repo.
3) Tell us _why_ this product keeps you going. What do you hate about tech that keeps you working on this for four years?
I love eInk. Have been following it since I read about eInk in Hiawatha Bray's Boston Globe column when I was a kid. I think I may have been one of the very first (if not the first) to buy the new Daylight computer (though I completely forgot about it until they emailed me recently). I had a couple of Remarkable 2s. I think there's many great things there, and your bet is directionally correct, just need to pivot a few things slightly.
First, change the image at the top of that link to show the different apps. Right it's calendars until below the fold (on a desktop), and I didn't scroll down because "eh, physical calendar, not interested". Also, apparently I did not read the text very carefully (maybe because clearly it's a calendar, it says so in the link) and didn't notice the "other apps" bit for several minutes.
However, I don't think the market for this is very large, especially at the current price. How many people have enough events per day that they need a calendar? Plus, my phone already has a calendar, and it has reminders so I don't even need to look at it. If I were married maybe syncing up calendars could be useful, so if that's the use case then put that in the picture. I don't get the whole show-a-website thing. I know HN likes putting the NYT on their wall, but I just don't get it, especially at 125 dpi. A photo, okay, but B&W and 600x480 is not what I'm looking to spend $150 + $3/month for. Also, anything with a subscription is right out. Reliance on external servers is right out, sooner or later that server is going to go away.
The problem as I see it is that the things you put on your desk/wall are either art, 300 dpi color photos, whiteboard for todos, clocks, and calendars. This only really fits the last two--except that there is no option for clocks (say, clock and clock+picture)--and $150 seems kind of expensive for that. Expensive compared to what $150 could buy me, given that a synced up calendar is just a click away on my browser and integrated into my phone.
Since you asked for advice, I'd say you have a cool hobby/craft/maker project, but not a saleable product. Pivot or quit. For instance, if you want to try the hobby route, you could make it to fit standard picture frames of a given size and offer one yourself for extra, and make it assemble-yourself. Saves time on your part, reduces costs, so you can sell it cheaper. Provide a download to setup a local server, and an option to display a PNG (= inexpensive way for users to write pixels directly) via USB or something. I don't know if that's a good idea, but it seems like a wider market.
1. Talk to some decent designers. The wooden frame feels a bit dull. Make the frame customizable.
2. This isn't just a calendar, but a todo list where you and your wife can add things to buy or to do, from your phones. This screen on the wall makes the list real.
3. This screen can show home stats: energy and water usage, weather, etc.
4. Add an option with touch screen. Removing a todo item by touching the screen is better than finding your phone and connecting it to the eink screen.
It’s been on my todo list to do something like this to help my four year old get some insight into “why we do things when we do them”, but she’s still at the age where a calendar/clock/general sense of time are a little difficult to understand sometimes.
My plan was to set up a display that was more “kid friendly images annotated around the outside of a clock” and maybe some bars that fill/empty as we get close to certain things (like bedtime) so she has more opportunity to understand how much time she has left and decide how she wants to use it.
If it refreshes frequently enough, this definitely looks workable for that for the time being and still serves a purpose in the future as a family calendar.
Which I guess also raises the question—how much of this is dependent on cloud services? Obviously the website display, but could it fetch and render an image or ICS file without an internet connection?
(None of this is probably helpful as far as evolving the product, just asking because you’re here and clicking a buy button would take a thing off my todo list.)
Funnily enough, 'obstinate' was one of the first words I picked up in ESL, fresh off the boat. I loved throwing it into conversations just to practice and feel smart... And here I am, years later, reflecting on that word.
Within the context of persistent people at the top of the decision tree, how often are persistent people labeled obstinate because they disagree with another persistent person (likely their boss) on a decision that will likely lead to 2 separate but nearly successful outcomes?
None of this matters, not even PGs post, but it's the comment section, so here we are...
The definition PG gives for an obstinate person is someone who doesn't listen, with the implication that they are "wrong". I'm just presenting a scenario that is very common in my world, where people may not be right or wrong, but differing and strong opinions lead to people being mislabeled as obstinate.
IMO, "Alignment" is a bullshit word used by people to basically say "my way or the highway". I might even say it's mostly used by obstinate people. :)
Alignment in the context of a firm (industrial organization) is important.. you can be as "right" as you want but misaligned with your boss and you will have all power removed from you..
Imo, PG's latest essays have been meandering, overly political, and far outside of his core competency. This feels like an oldschool 2009-era startup-focused chicken soup for the soul with some actionable takeaways.
This is a great article on the difference between an obstinate person and a persistent person, but I'm not sure the general public perceives them the same way that Paul does.
What I've found is that many times, people like the perceived confidence that obstinacy can bring. For example, let's say that someone points out a flaw in a plan. Person A responds by saying "That's not a real problem. It doesn't matter." Person B says "Ok, that's interesting. Let's dig into it." Person A (the obstinate person who doesn't listen) usually comes across as more confident in this encounter, even though Person B (the persistent person who is engaging) may actually end up learning something new and getting a better result.
This is especially true in public forums. If you go up on a stage and do a debate, the obstinate person comes across as more confident to more people. This doesn't mean that their plan is any good. But people will vote for them, give them money, etc.
For the record, I agree with Paul's assessment that persistence is a great quality and obstinacy is not. However, it's hard to actually get this across to the public.
There's an old anecdote where I think Pascal, but I'm not sure, argued the existence or non-existence of God in front of the king with another philosopher. Maybe-Pascal exclaimed loudly and with great confidence "A plus C equal B squared! Therefore God exists! COUNTER!" The other philosopher didn't know much about mathematics, had no idea to reply, got flustered, and "lost" the argument.[1]
And honestly, I'm not sure I would have done better in the moment. On reflection? Sure. But in front of the king, presented with a completely unfamiliar argument stated with great confidence and demanding a reply? Yeah, maybe not. Even on topics where I have reasonable in-depth knowledge I sometimes really doubt myself when someone says something very wrong with great confidence, and sometimes I really double and triple-check things to make sure I'm not making a right fool of myself.
Few years back I ordered a sandwich at a deli. Still looking at the menu, the lady asked what I wanted. "Ehhh, well, ehmm, I don't eat meat, so, ehhh, something without that". "Oh, I have chicken!" And she said this so quickly and with such confidence that for a few seconds I was genuinely doubting whether "chicken" was meat or not and wasn't really sure what to answer.
I guess she had a bit of "a moment" and we had a laugh about it afterwards, but I thought that was a pretty interesting and harmless example of how you can really start doubting yourself.
NFTs are another example. When I first heard of it, I thought I had not understood it correctly because "surely it can't be this dumb". And for months when all the NFT hype was raging I thought it must be some very complex crypto bonanza I wasn't really understanding. All the obscure jargon and lingo the NFT people confidently use aided that notion. I'm not really interested in crypto in general, but finally gave in and did some more in-depth reading on it. I found that no, it really is that dumb, and I had understood it correctly months ago, and all the jargon was just meaningless bollocks word salad.
[1]: I read about this years and years ago, I can't find anything about it right now and this anecdote may be false, but it seemed trust-worthy enough at the time to remember.
>I found that no, it really is that dumb, and I had understood it correctly months ago, and all the jargon was just meaningless bollocks word salad.
My brother is an artist and absolutely refused to believe that the hype around NFTs was just bullshit. I'm sure if I called and asked right now, he'd still give me some word salad about how it's going to start paying off any day now. Now if anyone talks to me about NFTs, I send that me that Folding Ideas youtube video, 'Line goes up' and refuse to engage with them.
Well, it gets them out of your hair for 2.5 hours...
Unless they don't bother to watch it. Then it gets them out of your hair permanently, because they know they're supposed to watch it before hassling you about it again.
The thing with GameStop being a meme stock is crazy. If they were smart they would have used their increased value to restructure the business and make it viable so that it would actually be worth what the stock is worth.
> Now if anyone talks to me about NFTs, I send that me that Folding Ideas youtube video, 'Line goes up' and refuse to engage with them.
this sounds like a certain kind of stubbornness. but i wonder if the collison brothers listen with predatory intensity to critiques or their business from random strangers in the same way they listen to pg. perhaps some discrimination is useful
Fine artists who are known in the international art market do not take commissions. They also do not give buyers of a piece copyright (obviously both of these things are even more true if they are dead).
You also wouldn't be able to distinguish a fake painted for a few thousand dollars, much less so with a print or digital art, so the physical artifact is somewhat meaningless as well, at least as far as value goes. Collectors buy pieces and keep them in storage. They might buy a piece without ever laying eyes on the physical artifact.
The art market has always run on provenance and certificates of authenticity. You could argue that fine art is bullshit, and you can also that a blockchain is not necessary to keep track of certificates of authenticity, but arguing that the entire concept of art ownership without copyright is bullshit is to ignore what the reality of the art market has always been.
NFTs are not a good solution to buying artwork. They are a novel concept, but translating that to conventional problems around ownership is difficult and probably not the best solution.
Digital tickets for anything that uses tickets, deeds for transfer of real property, execution of contracts, etc.
Any use case in which some blob of data corresponds to an individually specifiable concrete thing is a suitable use case for NFTs.
The problem with the speculative frenzy a few years ago was that the NFTs in question did not convey ownership over anything -- people were trading the NFTs themselves rather than using them as deeds/contracts/tickets corresponding to some other external asset. If the NFTs were used to convey copyright ownership or exclusive usage rights to the underlying artwork, they'd have made a lot more sense, but as it played out, people were paying huge sums of money for what amounted to tickets to nowhere.
NFTs are a great solution for demonstrating provenance. They can function as digital certificates of authenticity for an asset. Treating them as assets themselves, though, is pretty ridiculous.
However you want, but you can’t prevent it being copied or made “ununique” in any “real” way. Or somehow have control over the means by which it is consumed or produced.
Many places make money off of digital assets, but there’s no pretext of it somehow being scarce.
What digital assets are you referring to? During the NFT frenzy, the NFTs in question did not convey any assets that I'm aware of -- they transferred no unique physical artifacts, nor ownership of any copyrights or trademarks.
The NFTs just included public URLs pointing to files, so pepole were effectively buying and selling certificates of authenticity for artwork without owning the actual artwork itself!
I had a similar issue recently. Someone suggested a technical solution that based on my experience has zero chance of being correct. It was said with great confidence that makes me doubt my experience. Great confidence but zero supporting details or experience. For someone observing from the side there's no way to tell who is right and my double-take doubting my own experiences can appear to make the extremely confident but likely wrong person be the right one. For someone that really knows stuff, being 100% confident on nuanced/complex issues is very hard, you're used to moving forward with 90% or 80% or 95% confidence. I.e. you're very likely right, but there are can be surprises or something you didn't anticipate. For someone confident but wrong they have like 100% confidence for something that's 0% chance of success. As you say, this is a lot more difficult when you're put on the spot, e.g. the CEO might question what's the right decision in a meeting (the king in your example.). Often there's not enough time for a deep study and even after studying a problem it might still not be 100%.
Yes, and there is an incentive problem too that people are rewarded for being decisive but rarely punished for being wrong. In many contexts the odds are really stacked against you if you have a strong opinion that deviates from the consensus which is perhaps why persistence is a trait that we valorize given that it does require real courage.
Euler, not Pascal, but the story is most likely apocryphal anyway. See http://www.fen.bilkent.edu.tr/~franz/M300/bell2.pdf , which contains a link to a PDF discussing (and dismissing) the original story, and is a nice read on its own.
What I've found is that many times, people like the perceived confidence that obstinacy can bring.
The problem with that method of evaluation, is that it's not First Principles. Basically, pg's essay in this case just reduces down to, "Is that person steered by First Principles thinking?"
Most people ain't steered by first-principles thinking, though, and that's the problem. To most people, first-principles-driven thinking lacks sufficient actionability; they just want definite answers, and first-principles-driven thinking tends to produce answers that are anything but definite.
First principles are great in principle, but what really makes for greater thinking is focusing on the reality and details of a problem, then picking applicable first principles. Often when I hear principled stances they’re entirely devoid of links between the real world and the utopia in the person’s head.
Could we say that biologically/culturally receptive to performed dominance and being dominant has nothing to do with rationally understand the world. I think this is the whole point of the jock/geek binary opposition in culture even though, as all oppositionnal pairs in culture, they are often porquenolosdossed : Some people can perform dominance and do master rationality quite well and some can do neither. Maybe we don't notice it either because they don't fit the cultural mental map or because they are not part of our social milieus (too high or too low status) ?
Yeah, "performed dominance" as you call it definitely is orthogonal to rationally understanding the world.
The problem is exacerbated by content and replies trending shorter over time. It's hard to have a nuanced and thoughtful take in 10 seconds. It's much easier to have a simple, easy to understand, "dominant" take in the same amount of time.
I wonder if there's a social solution to this, somehow.
There are certain areas where the popular opinion is irrelevant. Warren Buffet said this in a more folksy way,
“It’s very important to live your life by an internal yardstick,” he told us, noting that one way to gauge whether or not you do so is to ask the following question: “Would you rather be considered the best lover in the world and know privately that you’re the worst — or would you prefer to know privately that you’re the best lover in the world, but be considered the worst?”
> “Would you rather be considered the best lover in the world and know privately that you’re the worst — or would you prefer to know privately that you’re the best lover in the world, but be considered the worst?”
Both of those options sound terrible. It's a curse either way. I'd rather be known as publicly as "better than average" and privately know that I'm doing pretty well/my best.
If forced to pick between the two though, being publicly known as 'the best lover in the world' would seem most likely to present more opportunities to improve my skill/confidence. It's still a lot of pressure nobody needs.
The options aren't meant to be realistic. They're only meant to tease out which side you personally have a preference for, by making you think about how these two extreme options make you feel. One probably feels worse than the other.
I mean, considered by whom? I'd like my partner's assessment of my ability as a lover to be more positive than my self-assessment. The reverse just sounds sociopathic.
This has been pretty much my experience as well, and honestly I think it's because most of the audience in any public forum hasn't ever needed to push through a complex project.
I was talking to a friend about this, and I've come to see this as the opposite of real-recognize-real, something like bullshit-interfaces-with-bullshit. That is, often people that haven't executed complex projects have a skewed view of the factors of success, something that they try to imitate and at the same time is more easily misled by people emulating the same signals.
I suspect that obstinance this is rooted in strong black/white thinking. I don't really know how this works for these people and can't experience it myself because I have just one brain. While I am flawed in many ways, I am not flawed in that particular way. I don't really understand how this works.
I find that inability to understand qualified language is a decent marker. Note I said "I suspect that often", and not "I know this is always". Black/white thinkers will reply with something like "no, that's not true, here's an example where that's not the case: [..]" Well, okay ... that's what "often" means, further weakened by the "I suspect". But for black/white thinkers it's Highlander time: there can only be one (explanation).
---
Bit of a related aside:
For the last year or so I've been using an extension to completely block people from Hacker News. The way this works is that I have two buttons: "bozo" to merely mark a post, and a list of marked posts in shown on the profile. And "block" to completely block them. Everyone has bad days, myself included, and I don't want to write people off for the occasional bad day.
But some people have a lot of bad days. And by "marking" people's posts some interesting patterns emerge. I mark a post for extreme black/white views on something like Israel and being pretty obstinate about it, and then 2 months later I see the same person with extreme black/white views on databases and being pretty obstinate about that. Are these two topics related? Not at all. But the same type of thinking is used: extremely simplistic black/white thinking with almost no room for nuance or "it depends".
Another person posted that thieves should be executed, "but if that is too extreme the chopping off of hands is also acceptable" (true story), and also rants about programming languages like they're 13, and rants about "wokeness".
The same person where a substantial number of their posts are rants about what inferior languages Go and Ruby are, also literally wishes death on politicians they disagree with, and claims "McCarthy was absolutely right" (which is a complete bollocks historical revisionism pushed by some people who are unable to understand "yes, turned out there were real Soviet spies in US gov't during the 50s, but there was zero overlap with the people McCarthy accused and he was just an unhinged nutjob who operated without any evidence against random people").
etc. etc.
What I learned from this is that by and large this kind of obstinance is not a "strong feelings about issue X"-problem, but rather a "brain just works in that way"-problem, whether that's due to black/white thinking, or something else.
There's an old joke: "A 9/11 truther, anti-vaxxer, sovereign citizen, and homeopath walk in to a bar. He orders a beer." Sometimes people are just misinformed on these issues and believe maybe one or two of them, but especially when they're knee-deep in nuttery it's just a thinking error.
I am still undecided if these people really are incapable of thinking in another way, or are just unwilling to do so. Or maybe there isn't actually any difference.
Thinking there's a way to distinguish the two in the moment without you yourself being the more competent one is to believe in crystal balls. You only know for sure who was right in hindsight when everything else that could have been decided is also known.
It's a categorical error to attribute success to personality and behavioral traits. There are just as many benevolent geniuses as there are assholes at every level.
There's pretty clear, stat sig relationships between personality traits like OCEAN/Big 5 and lifetime income. Even less scientific categorization like Myers-Briggs have the most successful types earning double the least successive types in massive surveys.
"Confidence is belief in yourself. Certainty is belief in your beliefs. Confidence is a bridge. Certainty is a barricade." - Kevin Ashton, "How To Fly A Horse"
As I recall that book used the example of Franz Reichelt, who "is remembered for jumping to his death from the Eiffel Tower while testing a wearable parachute of his own design" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Reichelt
I like his articles, but the artificial constructs sometimes drive me up the wall. After reading through a fairly rudimentary strawman about outcomes defining the difference between obstinacy and persistence, we reach the last paragraph that trades a poorly defined word (persistence) for five poorly defined words (imagination, focus, energy, judgement, resilience)
persistence is also defined by flexibility in thinking, appetite for risk/comfort with uncertainty, low ego. equally useless
I too like these Just So Stories of the Startup Underground, but damn, they come off like Malcolm Gladwell forming a taxonomy of the kids that got it vs the kids that don't.
These are all properties of people, that ebb and flow and change from each problem they are working on. It is more productive to talk about contextualized behaviors over the properties of people.
The marshmellow test was debunked. Turns out like many if these bad experiments when you factor socioeconomic status the test cannot be reproduced. Turns out poor hungry kids just tend to eat free food when its available.
HN downvoting scientific studies... I'm worried that this site has reached its eternal September. A huge loss since reddit went public and killed all real discussion, this was one of the last places with intelligent discourse.
I've found that properties and other traits in people can be malleable and change over time.
I have tons of personal experiences where a new developer seems very obstinate because they've never had anybody really challenge the way they do things. They get onto a project and suddenly get put in their place by a more senior developer. It might have to happen once, or several times before they start to change how they approach things and become more humble over time.
But I agree, properties of people can change, behaviors you can change for a short time, but you inevitably will regress back to how you normally behave. As such, behaviors tend to be easier to observe and predict.
I think a lot of the distinction between persistence and obstinance comes down to identity, attachment, and self esteem.
Almost everyone who is persistent or obstinant has something to prove. They have some deep-seated feeling that they need to demonstrate something to their community, a sense that maybe their value is in some ways conditional on what they provide. Content people who feel almost everyone already loves them rarely change the world. (That's no indictment of contentment, maybe changing the world is overrrated.)
The difference between persistence and obstinance is that obstinant people feel that every step on the path to solving the problem is a moment where they may be judged and found wanting. They are rigid because any misstep or dead end is perceived as a sign that they are a failure. It's not enough for them to solve the problem, they have to have been completely right at every step along the path.
Persistent people still have that need to prove themselves, but they hold it at a different granularity. They give themselves enough grace to make mistakes along the way, take in advice from others, and explore dead ends. As long as they are making progress overall and feel that they will eventually solve the problem, they are OK with themselves.
In other words, persistent people want to garner respect by giving the world a solution to the problem. Obstinant people want that respect by showing the world how flawlessly smart they are at every step, sometimes even if they never actually solve the problem.
Or put another way, persistent people have the patience to get esteem only after the problem is solved. Obstinant people need it every step of the way, which is another sign that obstinance has a connection to insecurity.
It's a delicate art to balance the drive to prove yourself with the self love to allow yourself to make mistakes, admit being wrong, and listen to others.
That’s a fantastic crystallizing idea. In my experience, I’ve tried to temper that dance between self drive and flexibility by reflecting on what overarching goals to commit to… the resulting sense of understanding and control at an overarching level like that is what has helped me.
Of course, the hard part is in knowing what goals to commit to, and what to back off from!
Obstinant can just be a nay-sayer though? Someone who isn't even trying to solve the problem their way but someone getting in the way of problems being solved at all.
I have a lot of respect for people that are confident in something who are willing to actually go and do that something, even if they're wrong. Persistence in this context is persevering through being wrong and not giving up until you figure out a way to solve the problem.
Nay-sayers exist too, but I think they are out of scope for what PG is talking about. He's talking about the people actually working on solving a problem, not someone on the sidelines.
That confusion does make this exact obstinate/persistent terminology tricky for conversations outside this particular HN thread, though. Which is a shame, because the underlying distinction as you've laid it out is very important.
Right. It confused me but re-reading PG's post he's certainly making that distinction. Yeah- I have seen the bash your head against a wall and not take any input kind of stubborn.
Since you’re the GPP author - as someone who recently published a Steam title and has glowing community reviews, I wish your comment was the article.
pg just doesn’t do it for me. It’s a nonsensical word salad of half-baked conjectures and aphorisms. There’s nothing to discuss because there’s nothing thought provoking in there.
I am however glad it spurred you to write something worth reading (again).
> as someone who recently published a Steam title and has glowing community reviews
Congratulations!
> pg just doesn’t do it for me.
For me, he's hit or miss. He has a writing style that tries very hard to boil things down into very simple terms while also approaching subjects that are deep and complex. Often the result is so oversimplified that it misses the mark.
But I do believe pg is thinking deeply about this stuff and there's often insight in his writing even if the narrative ends up too simple and self-satisfied for my taste.
> It’s a nonsensical word salad of half-baked conjectures and aphorisms.
I found this article excellent and definitely thought provoking, and I am just wondering how can someone read that and come out with a bad impression like that?!
I think articles like TFA are a big reason why so called "obstinate" people exist to begin with. Look at the incredibly harsh judgement it passes out on them. At one point it stops just short of directly calling them stupid.
The simple fact is people want to be good. People are afraid of being wrong. They are afraid of failure. They look for the one deep truth that will guide them and protect them from wrong. Once they believe they have found that truth, is anyone surprised that they cling to it?
TFA would have you believe these fears are irrational. Just keep at it, right? Just power through the judgement of your fellow humans. But it is not irrational. Nor is it stupid as TFA seems to imply. The simple fact is if you put yourself out there, there will be consequences. You will be judged.
I sent some code for an idea I had to a mailing list. At some point someone called it "schizophrenic". Maybe to you this is literally nothing, just an innocuous comment that promptly slides off. However, for a long time I actually thought I was insane for thinking and imagining the things that I did. I have to make an effort to suppress thoughts like that to even so much as write this comment on this website. So for me that was a particularly harsh judgement. I don't think I'll forget the moment I read that word until the day that I die. I will certainly never show my face there again.
It takes a certain audacity to put yourself out there. It takes a certain sociopathy, a certain arrogance. Succeed, and it actually leads to the judgement of your naysayers instead of you. They are quite literally judged by history as wrong. Such judgement is even observed in TFA, look at how the so called "obstinate" are singled out for being stupid failures. Such is the nature of humanity.
> It takes a certain audacity to put yourself out there. It takes a certain sociopathy, a certain arrogance.
I am sorry but you are taking things far too seriously. People have always had to "put themselves out there", it's part of living in a society rather than as a hermit. If you don't pull your weight in a tribe, others, not just you, may literally die, every hand counts. Others expect you do that, justifiably. Being judged is always going to be part of living in a society. But that's a good thing, not a bad thing! Learn to take criticism well. Some word someone said shouldn't affect you so strongly. Perhaps that was said by a 13 year old that doesn't know any better. Or by someone suffering from serious mental illness who finds some solace in trying to get other people on the internet disturbed.
Being judged as stupid is of course very harsh, but it's also not wrong sometimes. Do some people behave stupidly sometimes?? Of course they do, we all do. That doesn't make us bad people, and we shouldn't despair because we believe we have been categorized as stupid: we should definitely consider whether it's a fair assessment given the circumstances, and try to do better next time. Very smart people can, and do, behave stupidly, specially when talking about religion or politics. Even smart people can say the most stupid things. I think no one is very smart or very stupid in every context, there's always a context where you'd look totally stupid even if you're Albert Einstein. Imagine Mr. Einstein trying to hunt in a jungle in Africa. Even with practice, he'd probably never get good at it. His very way of thinking, very scientific and evidence driven, what we consider intelligent, would get him eaten in no time over there. What count there is being fast thinking, acting on instinct... that's how you survive there, and that's what you would count as "smart" if you lived there.
Anyway, hope some of what I say here helps someone :).
Having someone close who is obstinate makes the article very relatable (my father, talking him into something is like to talking to a stone, no matter how convincing you are and even if he seems to budge, it will take just a single moment to spring back).
For me this line "The persistent are attached to the goal. The obstinate are attached to their ideas about how to reach it." explained what's going on but the article doesn't seem to provide a solution (I know that's not the point). Now you say it's related to insecurity and it makes sense in my case and looks like a probable root cause. Something that can be worked on. But that's one sample, now I want to know if all stubborn / obstinate people like that are insecure.
I think one solution is to help them have your idea and take credit for it. If it’s their idea then they are already convinced it’s a good one. Persistent people can get a lot done when they don’t care about who gets the credit.
Your analysis seems to assume that the only form of motivation is external. By this logic, persistent/obstinant people do things because they hope for some external reward (e.g., praise, recognition, fame, possibly financial compensation). The difference is merely at the granularity of the goal this is attached to.
My experience is that the persistent people I know have at least some degree (and often a large degree) of internal motivation. They do things because the process of problem solving is rewarding in and of itself, and/or they have some intrinsic motivation about solving the problem. They are not out to please anyone else except themselves.
Maybe no one is purely 100% internally motivated. But my experience is that the more persistent people I know generally have a higher percentage of internal motivation. In contrast the people who give up more easily generally have a lower percentage of internal motivation; if they really only care about the external reward, it often turns out there are lots of ways to do that, and many are shorter than solving "hard" problems.
Thanks, I thought the same but as you mentioned, there is no 100% intrinsic/extrinsic motivation. On the other hand there could be some self esteem problem within oneself which triggers motivation intrinsically but has external sources (i.e. childhood, always not enough, no unconditional love) so in the end there might not be a difference between internal and external.
I think the line between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation is very blurry.
If you're doing something because you want some recognition or fame, that's arguably extrinsic: you're doing the thing because you want other people out in the world to pat you on the back. But while you're doing the work, you're mostly thinking about how good it will feel to get that pat on the back. At that point, is it really that different from other instrinsic motivations?
"Giving the world a solution" vs. "showing the world how flawlessly smart they are" reminds me of being "visited" by a genius (muse, inspiration). You now have the gift to share, but it doesn't show you're a genius.
I remember someone I knew, saying “I can’t tell if it’s an asset or a defect! If I’m stubborn, it’s a defect, but if I’m tenacious, it’s an asset.”
> That's no indictment of contentment, maybe changing the world is overrrated.
I think a significant number of “world-changers” have not had personal happy endings. They may have done a lot of good, but it didn’t do much for their own personal happiness.
I tend to be “tenacious,” but I also like to do really high-Quality work, so it may look like “stubbornness,” to a lot of folks.
For example, I have spent the entire day, today, tweaking haptics and voiceover text in the app I’m developing. I became aware of a very small, rare, cosmetic bug, that most folks would shrug off, but it really bothers me, and I’m going to make sure it gets fixed, tomorrow.
> I remember someone I knew, saying “I can’t tell if it’s an asset or a defect! If I’m stubborn, it’s a defect, but if I’m tenacious, it’s an asset.”
I've had very similar conversations with my therapist many times. The conclusion I've come to is that almost every personality trait has both adaptive and maladaptive aspects. You can try to maximize the former and avoid the latter, but ultimately any personality superpower you have is going to bring some consequences along with it.
I try to be more accepting of the fact that most of the psychological stuff is comes from one side coins where the other sides are often my most valuable attributes.
> ultimately any personality superpower you have is going to bring some consequences along with it.
This has been my experience. Some of the most talented, kindest, people that I've ever known, have "rough" exteriors. Many times, it's due to being treated like crap, for their assets.
Feels like you have hit a nail, but! Seems to be more to that introspective vs extraspective difference there! Obstinants are somehow more introspective! Which could be odd!
PG comes across as obstinate, by the way.. (in this essay, but maybe not in real life)
Counterpoint: contentment is a prerequisite for healthy sustained effort. It’s easy to get up every day and chisel away at something inch by inch - sometimes with little to no perceptible progress - when you are fulfilled elsewhere in your life.
But the obstinates are mostly failing. So it can't be important to them to be right. It's more important to them to be consistent. Changing your mind about something to them is backpedaling. They are letting down everyone else who believes the same stuff.
Probably some obstinates fell for the all-American "believe in yourself" nonsense. If you just have confidence and believe in yourself, you will succeed in spite of setbacks.
The obstinate interprets that as never changing one's mind; if you change your mind, then that means you didn't believe in yourself and are letting down everyone who believed in the same program.
I believe there is a "trying too hard". Solving a worthwhile problem itself might be difficult enough to begin with, but trying to map out a solution plan and stubbornly make every checkpoint a success along the way statistically leads to failure.
Every single step has a chance of ("perfect") success that is not 100%. The more steps, the lower the overall chance of hitting the original problem/solution with the exact path of steps. And if the original plan contains a dead end one could not foresee, people give up at some point alltogether.
But persistence simply means more like "lets take multiple shots at solving the problem", discovering stuff along the way, pivot the strategy or change direction, but ultimately just trying to solve the problem X times, which over time increases the chance of solving it.
I don't think this is true. For the majority of tasks which are small and relatively easy, both obstinate and persistent people will hit the winning solution on the first try and can't be distinguished.
It's only when you hit a really large or hard problem that these psychological differences start being more apparent.
The distinction you outline reminds me of Carol Dweck's "Growth Mindset" research. She suggests (based on studies) that children praised for being "smart" become afraid to take risks which might show them less than perfectly smart. They become consumed with "image maintenance" to the point of even tearing down peers so as to look "smarter" than them. By contrast, she suggests children praised for effort, learning, progress, and related things learn to be persistent even when things are difficult, uncertain, or have a learning curve. If the distinction you draw is correct, perhaps "obstinate" people were praised as smart and "persistent" people were praised for hard work and stick-to-it-iveness and related things?
"What Having a “Growth Mindset” Actually Means" by Carol Dweck https://hbr.org/2016/01/what-having-a-growth-mindset-actuall...
"[It is a common misconception that] growth mindset is just about praising and rewarding effort. This isn’t true for students in schools, and it’s not true for employees in organizations. In both settings, outcomes matter. Unproductive effort is never a good thing. It’s critical to reward not just effort but learning and progress, and to emphasize the processes that yield these things, such as seeking help from others, trying new strategies, and capitalizing on setbacks to move forward effectively. In all our research, the outcome — the bottom line — follows from deeply engaging in these processes."
> Content people who feel almost everyone already loves them rarely change the world.
What's wrong with that ?
I've grown tired of listening to people's tales and rants on their constant need to disrupt something, change some industry , empower someone and put a dent somewhere.
Stop, Look around, why is it so hard to find something meaningful ? Because it isn't profitable (without being exploitative).
More people ought to learn to be content. When the need arises, it will find its heroes.
248 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 307 ms ] threadI'm a big fan of his insights -- the same way I am of Marx -- but that doesn't excuse all of their shittiness.
> Do they think for themselves or parrot a standard position? Can they explain how they came to a conclusion? When they say "I think . . . ", did they? It doesn't matter they subject; either they think or they don't.
Obstinate people are ones who not only don't think, but aggressively don't think. They have their "dogma" (call it another term if you wish), and they Will. Not. Question. It. No matter what you say, no matter what evidence you present, they just won't.
This isn't just about obstinacy in pursuing goals. It also shows up in the confirmation bias that reinforces conspiracy theories in the minds of those who hold them.
On top of that, most of the most successful people on the planet write little or nothing. They are too busy doing.
You state this as fact without providing a dataset to back it. I think this is not true at all.
> most of the most successful people on the planet write little or nothing
It depends on how you define "success".
I would consider people like Linus and Dwayne Richard Hipp and TBL to be among the most successful people on the planet, and they write quite a lot.
Do you call people who capture then give away a billion dollars the most successful? I don't. To me the most successful are the ones who create billions in wealth and capture just a tiny fraction--enough to support their family and friends and live a good life.
Look at your own comments. My comment is effectively "people whose day job is to write, write the most". It's borderline self evident.
Your argument has devolved into: "people who write a lot are by definition successful. I wonder if there is a correlation between writing a lot and success."
You seem to have changed your position from journalists to "people whose day job is to write", which is good, as that includes scientists.
https://breckyunits.com/dataset-needed.html
Here the dumb thing about this - almost anything worth discussing is uncertain, else it wouldn't be discussed. If the only way you can change your mind is for someone to present an absolute, water tight, backed up by data argument, you'll never change your mind. You make several assertions in this thread with zero data.
I never said that. Your new response asking for data to my comment is perfectly valid.
But this topic is not interesting to me enough at the moment to go dig up a dataset on it. Maybe someday.
Obstinate = stubborn about executing a solution = bad
It's a hierarchy, as Paul referred to as a "tree".
Each node in the acyclic graph is connected to a "why" node above it (goal) and a "how" node below it (solution).
OKRs reflect this in an organization.
People make decisions based on their values hierarchy, implicit or explicit.
If this isn't easy to follow maybe an example will help...
Let's say I have a goal of "provide reliable shelter for my family", the solution may be to "buy a house". Buying a house is also a goal, which maybe is slightly out of reach. So my solution is to "save a large portion of my income" and "secure a high paying job", these are also goals. The solution to saving may be a fintech app, discipline, good communication with my spouse, etc.. every solution is a goal with its own solutions and you can follow this tree down until you get into really specific motor tasks like taking a credit card out of a wallet or opening a door or turning the key to start a car.
I didn't know what the word "obstinate" meant so here you go: "stubbornly adhering to an opinion, purpose, or course in spite of reason, arguments, or persuasion."
While PG's quote suggests a clear distinction, it's overly simplistic. Persistence and obstinacy often overlap in practice, sharing traits like energy, imagination, resilience, good judgment, focus on a goal, and listening intently. The issue is that "reason" can be subjective. For example, Copernicus and Galileo were considered obstinate for his heliocentric theory, but history proved him right. This shows that the line between persistence and obstinacy is often drawn in hindsight.
Referencing the Collison brothers highlights a bias towards successful YC alumni. It would be more telling to classify current batch founders as obstinate or persistent and revisit their success in a decade.
No it doesn't. The essay includes multiple parts talking about how the things are related, similar, sometimes indistinguishable, and also that it can be a spectrum.
In fact, arguably the entire thesis of the essay is how the two traits have both similarities and differences and that it is complicated.
Obstinacy is defined by a lack of imagination, good judgement, and intent listening.
> For example, Copernicus and Galileo were considered obstinate for his heliocentric theory, but history proved him right. This shows that the line between persistence and obstinacy is often drawn in hindsight.
History didn't prove them right, science did. The fact that people considered them obstinate does not mean that they were. The only future where they would still be considered the obstinate ones is one run by obstinate people. They had the evidence, which was ignored by obstinate heliocentrists. Heliocentrists did not have convincing reasons for their belief that Copernicus/Galileo ignored.
I think that may be a mistake.
Any value strategy that is primarily conservative (e.g., protecting sunk or resource assets) will be obstinate. That doesn't make it slower or stupider.
So oil and timber companies and monopolists et al will keenly monitor opposition and respond immediately and deftly -- with reality-avoidance. As will individuals who are primarily guarding something they feel is at risk of being taken away.
They have the same or more intelligence, judgment, and active listening; it's just that their strategy is not creation or innovation.
Indeed, in a fair fight the innovator will lose to the conservative, because it's just plain harder to make things happen, particularly when it involves convincing others to change their patterns or minds.
It is a nice distinction coming from someone who is habitually stubborn and can border on obstinate if not checked.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/growth-mindset
My question is always, how do you get someone with a more fixed mindset attitude to adopt a growth mindset way of relating to the world? It's so hard, but it makes such a difference.
I agree the Persistent / Obstinate paradigm seems quite similar, and if anything for those reasons I'm inclined to be (obstinately :P) skeptical.
Less relevant to engineering etc., but I personally find a lot of "successful people do X, unsuccessful people do Y" findings, especially when presented as "innate" or "personality" features, are pretty similar to IQ, the marshmallow test, and other things where it's a frequent victim of selection bias for how scarce resources were in one's upbringing or cognitive development.
Growth mindset is hard because it's basically selling a lie. There is no amount of effort that'll turn the average HN reader into one of YC's star founders.
Both don't give up solving the problem. The latter solves them better because of they learn, adjust, and adapt.
There, now you don't have to read the article.
On the one hand, I’ve been working on this product for four years, put every free minute into it, and it still doesn’t make enough money for me to quit my job.
On the other hand, the product keeps getting better as I work on it, and I have now sold 500 of them.
But sometimes I feel like I can’t keep going like this. Two jobs and a family is just too much.
I think I should either quit my job and properly focus on it, relying on savings until the sales can support me. Or put the project into maintenance mode (I will keep the lights on for at least 10 years, no matter what).
What would you advise me to do?
This is the product: https://shop.invisible-computers.com/products/invisible-cale...
It sounds like you wish to be able to live off this work, yet you're not modeling the gap between where you are and where you want to be correctly (clearly, or you wouldn't be asking for help). So yes, you are being stubborn, but that doesn't mean the project is doomed. Just that you need to step back and look at the problems holistically.
I am not sure if marketing is the bottleneck or the product itself - I have been getting inconsistent feedback on that.
On the marketing side, I’ve been trying to make the website better and i have been playing with Google and instagram ads. I don’t even dislike marketing - but I don’t think I’m very good at it. I could try to pay for this competency, but I’m scared of losing bunch of money.
But I do think the landing page is a _little_ less good than it probably could be, but I'm not sure I can say exactly why. I bet there is some company out there that could take this thing from an obscure product to a Christmas staple, if they got their hands on it. Maybe there is a way that you could do it in a profit-sharing way so you're not taking a financial risk yourself. After all that is the point of venture capital also: they fund the endeavor and then own part of it.
My one suggestion would be de-emphasizing "you can do whatever you want with it" and emphasizing "here are the things that you can easily do with it". Because most people aren't gonna do any customization, or at least, will be intimidated by that. The ideal impression is that I might impulse-buy it because it's a cool desktop calendar, but then use it in other ways afterwards, and power users might get it for the customization features.
(couple other small things: that _particular_ NYT article makes kind of a weird impression. Maybe make something that doesn't involve a picture of Trump? People hate Trump and they hate seeing pictures of him also. Also, the phrase "an acquired taste" is not worth including. Black and white is stylish! someone who wants that is going to already know they like it.)
I will try to get some help with marketing, maybe also find a distributor etc.
As you pointed out, I am especially struggling around the question of how to market the different features, and how much to market the customisation options.
And I will try to choose a more neutral article for the website photo. I didn't think about the impression it could leave.
Based on it being a semi-impulse buy, since I don't see many people explicitly searching for "framed programmable e-ink calendar."
https://us.kobobooks.com/collections/ereaders/products/certi...
Kobos are fairly hackable, and I suspect one could program a Kobo to do the same as what he is doing.
Two recommendations.
1) Go wireless with enough power for like 500 screen updates for 6 weeks between recharges.
2) Find a market where your customers can't make the product
Is it touch interactive? Like, can I tap on a cell in the calendar to see "... and 2 more" details?
Can I easily create my own replacement frame?
Can I hang it on the wall in a manner where I can rotate between portrait & landscape orientations, and have it react in an appropriate way for the running app?
Is there an SDK for app development?
It has no touch. If you change its orientation on the wall, you have to change the orientation in the phone app.
There is no sdk but there is an api one can use for connecting third party apps.
But your computer is a screen. The definition of a screen is something you look at.
2.) Simplify your workflows: combine with your github profile. This is clearly your passion. Own it. Move all the invisible computer repos to your own GitHub repo.
3) Tell us _why_ this product keeps you going. What do you hate about tech that keeps you working on this for four years?
I love eInk. Have been following it since I read about eInk in Hiawatha Bray's Boston Globe column when I was a kid. I think I may have been one of the very first (if not the first) to buy the new Daylight computer (though I completely forgot about it until they emailed me recently). I had a couple of Remarkable 2s. I think there's many great things there, and your bet is directionally correct, just need to pivot a few things slightly.
Out of the blue, what would you call it?
It depends what your long term vision is?
What is the essence of your product? What won't change in the next 5 years? 10 years?
Is it the wood bevel? If so, maybe something like the "Core Display" or "Tree Screen" or "Forest Frame".
Do you not care about the bevel at all and it's the zen of the eInk? Then maybe call it the Zen Screen or Air Display.
However, I don't think the market for this is very large, especially at the current price. How many people have enough events per day that they need a calendar? Plus, my phone already has a calendar, and it has reminders so I don't even need to look at it. If I were married maybe syncing up calendars could be useful, so if that's the use case then put that in the picture. I don't get the whole show-a-website thing. I know HN likes putting the NYT on their wall, but I just don't get it, especially at 125 dpi. A photo, okay, but B&W and 600x480 is not what I'm looking to spend $150 + $3/month for. Also, anything with a subscription is right out. Reliance on external servers is right out, sooner or later that server is going to go away.
The problem as I see it is that the things you put on your desk/wall are either art, 300 dpi color photos, whiteboard for todos, clocks, and calendars. This only really fits the last two--except that there is no option for clocks (say, clock and clock+picture)--and $150 seems kind of expensive for that. Expensive compared to what $150 could buy me, given that a synced up calendar is just a click away on my browser and integrated into my phone.
Since you asked for advice, I'd say you have a cool hobby/craft/maker project, but not a saleable product. Pivot or quit. For instance, if you want to try the hobby route, you could make it to fit standard picture frames of a given size and offer one yourself for extra, and make it assemble-yourself. Saves time on your part, reduces costs, so you can sell it cheaper. Provide a download to setup a local server, and an option to display a PNG (= inexpensive way for users to write pixels directly) via USB or something. I don't know if that's a good idea, but it seems like a wider market.
1. Talk to some decent designers. The wooden frame feels a bit dull. Make the frame customizable.
2. This isn't just a calendar, but a todo list where you and your wife can add things to buy or to do, from your phones. This screen on the wall makes the list real.
3. This screen can show home stats: energy and water usage, weather, etc.
4. Add an option with touch screen. Removing a todo item by touching the screen is better than finding your phone and connecting it to the eink screen.
It’s been on my todo list to do something like this to help my four year old get some insight into “why we do things when we do them”, but she’s still at the age where a calendar/clock/general sense of time are a little difficult to understand sometimes.
My plan was to set up a display that was more “kid friendly images annotated around the outside of a clock” and maybe some bars that fill/empty as we get close to certain things (like bedtime) so she has more opportunity to understand how much time she has left and decide how she wants to use it.
If it refreshes frequently enough, this definitely looks workable for that for the time being and still serves a purpose in the future as a family calendar.
Which I guess also raises the question—how much of this is dependent on cloud services? Obviously the website display, but could it fetch and render an image or ICS file without an internet connection?
(None of this is probably helpful as far as evolving the product, just asking because you’re here and clicking a buy button would take a thing off my todo list.)
The definition PG gives for an obstinate person is someone who doesn't listen, with the implication that they are "wrong". I'm just presenting a scenario that is very common in my world, where people may not be right or wrong, but differing and strong opinions lead to people being mislabeled as obstinate.
IMO, "Alignment" is a bullshit word used by people to basically say "my way or the highway". I might even say it's mostly used by obstinate people. :)
* obstinate: same responses/approach even when presented with new information
* persistent: updated responses/approach when presented with new information
You need "energy, imagination, resilience, good judgement, and focus on a goal" to go places.
Funnily enough, every very successful person seems to arrive at the conclusion that "focus" is a differentiator.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/08/11/try-again/
What I've found is that many times, people like the perceived confidence that obstinacy can bring. For example, let's say that someone points out a flaw in a plan. Person A responds by saying "That's not a real problem. It doesn't matter." Person B says "Ok, that's interesting. Let's dig into it." Person A (the obstinate person who doesn't listen) usually comes across as more confident in this encounter, even though Person B (the persistent person who is engaging) may actually end up learning something new and getting a better result.
This is especially true in public forums. If you go up on a stage and do a debate, the obstinate person comes across as more confident to more people. This doesn't mean that their plan is any good. But people will vote for them, give them money, etc.
For the record, I agree with Paul's assessment that persistence is a great quality and obstinacy is not. However, it's hard to actually get this across to the public.
And honestly, I'm not sure I would have done better in the moment. On reflection? Sure. But in front of the king, presented with a completely unfamiliar argument stated with great confidence and demanding a reply? Yeah, maybe not. Even on topics where I have reasonable in-depth knowledge I sometimes really doubt myself when someone says something very wrong with great confidence, and sometimes I really double and triple-check things to make sure I'm not making a right fool of myself.
Few years back I ordered a sandwich at a deli. Still looking at the menu, the lady asked what I wanted. "Ehhh, well, ehmm, I don't eat meat, so, ehhh, something without that". "Oh, I have chicken!" And she said this so quickly and with such confidence that for a few seconds I was genuinely doubting whether "chicken" was meat or not and wasn't really sure what to answer.
I guess she had a bit of "a moment" and we had a laugh about it afterwards, but I thought that was a pretty interesting and harmless example of how you can really start doubting yourself.
NFTs are another example. When I first heard of it, I thought I had not understood it correctly because "surely it can't be this dumb". And for months when all the NFT hype was raging I thought it must be some very complex crypto bonanza I wasn't really understanding. All the obscure jargon and lingo the NFT people confidently use aided that notion. I'm not really interested in crypto in general, but finally gave in and did some more in-depth reading on it. I found that no, it really is that dumb, and I had understood it correctly months ago, and all the jargon was just meaningless bollocks word salad.
[1]: I read about this years and years ago, I can't find anything about it right now and this anecdote may be false, but it seemed trust-worthy enough at the time to remember.
My brother is an artist and absolutely refused to believe that the hype around NFTs was just bullshit. I'm sure if I called and asked right now, he'd still give me some word salad about how it's going to start paying off any day now. Now if anyone talks to me about NFTs, I send that me that Folding Ideas youtube video, 'Line goes up' and refuse to engage with them.
When someone talks to you about a topic you don't want to engage in you send them a link to a 2.5 hour long video?
I mean, can't the point be made in 3m?
Unless they don't bother to watch it. Then it gets them out of your hair permanently, because they know they're supposed to watch it before hassling you about it again.
Honestly, it can be made as fast you can say 'NFTs are bullshit' but some people don't want to hear it from a friend or family member.
Artists have it rough and I don't blame them for being charmed by con artists.
this sounds like a certain kind of stubbornness. but i wonder if the collison brothers listen with predatory intensity to critiques or their business from random strangers in the same way they listen to pg. perhaps some discrimination is useful
How can I buy a digital asset sold by an artist?
You also wouldn't be able to distinguish a fake painted for a few thousand dollars, much less so with a print or digital art, so the physical artifact is somewhat meaningless as well, at least as far as value goes. Collectors buy pieces and keep them in storage. They might buy a piece without ever laying eyes on the physical artifact.
The art market has always run on provenance and certificates of authenticity. You could argue that fine art is bullshit, and you can also that a blockchain is not necessary to keep track of certificates of authenticity, but arguing that the entire concept of art ownership without copyright is bullshit is to ignore what the reality of the art market has always been.
Any use case in which some blob of data corresponds to an individually specifiable concrete thing is a suitable use case for NFTs.
The problem with the speculative frenzy a few years ago was that the NFTs in question did not convey ownership over anything -- people were trading the NFTs themselves rather than using them as deeds/contracts/tickets corresponding to some other external asset. If the NFTs were used to convey copyright ownership or exclusive usage rights to the underlying artwork, they'd have made a lot more sense, but as it played out, people were paying huge sums of money for what amounted to tickets to nowhere.
Many places make money off of digital assets, but there’s no pretext of it somehow being scarce.
The NFTs just included public URLs pointing to files, so pepole were effectively buying and selling certificates of authenticity for artwork without owning the actual artwork itself!
Tough situations to handle.
The problem with that method of evaluation, is that it's not First Principles. Basically, pg's essay in this case just reduces down to, "Is that person steered by First Principles thinking?"
https://youtu.be/wmVkJvieaOA?feature=shared&t=276
The problem is exacerbated by content and replies trending shorter over time. It's hard to have a nuanced and thoughtful take in 10 seconds. It's much easier to have a simple, easy to understand, "dominant" take in the same amount of time.
I wonder if there's a social solution to this, somehow.
“It’s very important to live your life by an internal yardstick,” he told us, noting that one way to gauge whether or not you do so is to ask the following question: “Would you rather be considered the best lover in the world and know privately that you’re the worst — or would you prefer to know privately that you’re the best lover in the world, but be considered the worst?”
source: https://time.com/archive/6904425/my-650100-lunch-with-warren...
Both of those options sound terrible. It's a curse either way. I'd rather be known as publicly as "better than average" and privately know that I'm doing pretty well/my best.
If forced to pick between the two though, being publicly known as 'the best lover in the world' would seem most likely to present more opportunities to improve my skill/confidence. It's still a lot of pressure nobody needs.
Obstinate - Stubbornly adhering to an opinion, purpose, or course in spite of reason, arguments, or persuasion.
I was talking to a friend about this, and I've come to see this as the opposite of real-recognize-real, something like bullshit-interfaces-with-bullshit. That is, often people that haven't executed complex projects have a skewed view of the factors of success, something that they try to imitate and at the same time is more easily misled by people emulating the same signals.
I find that inability to understand qualified language is a decent marker. Note I said "I suspect that often", and not "I know this is always". Black/white thinkers will reply with something like "no, that's not true, here's an example where that's not the case: [..]" Well, okay ... that's what "often" means, further weakened by the "I suspect". But for black/white thinkers it's Highlander time: there can only be one (explanation).
---
Bit of a related aside:
For the last year or so I've been using an extension to completely block people from Hacker News. The way this works is that I have two buttons: "bozo" to merely mark a post, and a list of marked posts in shown on the profile. And "block" to completely block them. Everyone has bad days, myself included, and I don't want to write people off for the occasional bad day.
But some people have a lot of bad days. And by "marking" people's posts some interesting patterns emerge. I mark a post for extreme black/white views on something like Israel and being pretty obstinate about it, and then 2 months later I see the same person with extreme black/white views on databases and being pretty obstinate about that. Are these two topics related? Not at all. But the same type of thinking is used: extremely simplistic black/white thinking with almost no room for nuance or "it depends".
Another person posted that thieves should be executed, "but if that is too extreme the chopping off of hands is also acceptable" (true story), and also rants about programming languages like they're 13, and rants about "wokeness".
The same person where a substantial number of their posts are rants about what inferior languages Go and Ruby are, also literally wishes death on politicians they disagree with, and claims "McCarthy was absolutely right" (which is a complete bollocks historical revisionism pushed by some people who are unable to understand "yes, turned out there were real Soviet spies in US gov't during the 50s, but there was zero overlap with the people McCarthy accused and he was just an unhinged nutjob who operated without any evidence against random people").
etc. etc.
What I learned from this is that by and large this kind of obstinance is not a "strong feelings about issue X"-problem, but rather a "brain just works in that way"-problem, whether that's due to black/white thinking, or something else.
There's an old joke: "A 9/11 truther, anti-vaxxer, sovereign citizen, and homeopath walk in to a bar. He orders a beer." Sometimes people are just misinformed on these issues and believe maybe one or two of them, but especially when they're knee-deep in nuttery it's just a thinking error.
I am still undecided if these people really are incapable of thinking in another way, or are just unwilling to do so. Or maybe there isn't actually any difference.
Thinking there's a way to distinguish the two in the moment without you yourself being the more competent one is to believe in crystal balls. You only know for sure who was right in hindsight when everything else that could have been decided is also known.
It's a categorical error to attribute success to personality and behavioral traits. There are just as many benevolent geniuses as there are assholes at every level.
For myers-briggs, here's a massive 70,000 person sample survey and analysis: https://www.truity.com/blog/personality-type-career-income-s...
As I recall that book used the example of Franz Reichelt, who "is remembered for jumping to his death from the Eiffel Tower while testing a wearable parachute of his own design" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Reichelt
persistence is also defined by flexibility in thinking, appetite for risk/comfort with uncertainty, low ego. equally useless
(I still love you PG, despite my dyspepsia)
These are all properties of people, that ebb and flow and change from each problem they are working on. It is more productive to talk about contextualized behaviors over the properties of people.
Yes, exactly. You put it better than I did. Shit's messy, non-linear, non-monotonic. No need to put a bow on it.
https://anderson-review.ucla.edu/new-study-disavows-marshmal...
As a concept, it is important to understand human behavior and what motivates it, but I try and not brand people with a permanent attribute.
I have tons of personal experiences where a new developer seems very obstinate because they've never had anybody really challenge the way they do things. They get onto a project and suddenly get put in their place by a more senior developer. It might have to happen once, or several times before they start to change how they approach things and become more humble over time.
But I agree, properties of people can change, behaviors you can change for a short time, but you inevitably will regress back to how you normally behave. As such, behaviors tend to be easier to observe and predict.
I think a lot of the distinction between persistence and obstinance comes down to identity, attachment, and self esteem.
Almost everyone who is persistent or obstinant has something to prove. They have some deep-seated feeling that they need to demonstrate something to their community, a sense that maybe their value is in some ways conditional on what they provide. Content people who feel almost everyone already loves them rarely change the world. (That's no indictment of contentment, maybe changing the world is overrrated.)
The difference between persistence and obstinance is that obstinant people feel that every step on the path to solving the problem is a moment where they may be judged and found wanting. They are rigid because any misstep or dead end is perceived as a sign that they are a failure. It's not enough for them to solve the problem, they have to have been completely right at every step along the path.
Persistent people still have that need to prove themselves, but they hold it at a different granularity. They give themselves enough grace to make mistakes along the way, take in advice from others, and explore dead ends. As long as they are making progress overall and feel that they will eventually solve the problem, they are OK with themselves.
In other words, persistent people want to garner respect by giving the world a solution to the problem. Obstinant people want that respect by showing the world how flawlessly smart they are at every step, sometimes even if they never actually solve the problem.
Or put another way, persistent people have the patience to get esteem only after the problem is solved. Obstinant people need it every step of the way, which is another sign that obstinance has a connection to insecurity.
It's a delicate art to balance the drive to prove yourself with the self love to allow yourself to make mistakes, admit being wrong, and listen to others.
Of course, the hard part is in knowing what goals to commit to, and what to back off from!
I have a lot of respect for people that are confident in something who are willing to actually go and do that something, even if they're wrong. Persistence in this context is persevering through being wrong and not giving up until you figure out a way to solve the problem.
In other words they want to increase their relative status in their community.
Since you’re the GPP author - as someone who recently published a Steam title and has glowing community reviews, I wish your comment was the article.
pg just doesn’t do it for me. It’s a nonsensical word salad of half-baked conjectures and aphorisms. There’s nothing to discuss because there’s nothing thought provoking in there.
I am however glad it spurred you to write something worth reading (again).
Congratulations!
> pg just doesn’t do it for me.
For me, he's hit or miss. He has a writing style that tries very hard to boil things down into very simple terms while also approaching subjects that are deep and complex. Often the result is so oversimplified that it misses the mark.
But I do believe pg is thinking deeply about this stuff and there's often insight in his writing even if the narrative ends up too simple and self-satisfied for my taste.
I found this article excellent and definitely thought provoking, and I am just wondering how can someone read that and come out with a bad impression like that?!
Do you have some undisclosed issue with PG??
The simple fact is people want to be good. People are afraid of being wrong. They are afraid of failure. They look for the one deep truth that will guide them and protect them from wrong. Once they believe they have found that truth, is anyone surprised that they cling to it?
TFA would have you believe these fears are irrational. Just keep at it, right? Just power through the judgement of your fellow humans. But it is not irrational. Nor is it stupid as TFA seems to imply. The simple fact is if you put yourself out there, there will be consequences. You will be judged.
I sent some code for an idea I had to a mailing list. At some point someone called it "schizophrenic". Maybe to you this is literally nothing, just an innocuous comment that promptly slides off. However, for a long time I actually thought I was insane for thinking and imagining the things that I did. I have to make an effort to suppress thoughts like that to even so much as write this comment on this website. So for me that was a particularly harsh judgement. I don't think I'll forget the moment I read that word until the day that I die. I will certainly never show my face there again.
It takes a certain audacity to put yourself out there. It takes a certain sociopathy, a certain arrogance. Succeed, and it actually leads to the judgement of your naysayers instead of you. They are quite literally judged by history as wrong. Such judgement is even observed in TFA, look at how the so called "obstinate" are singled out for being stupid failures. Such is the nature of humanity.
I am sorry but you are taking things far too seriously. People have always had to "put themselves out there", it's part of living in a society rather than as a hermit. If you don't pull your weight in a tribe, others, not just you, may literally die, every hand counts. Others expect you do that, justifiably. Being judged is always going to be part of living in a society. But that's a good thing, not a bad thing! Learn to take criticism well. Some word someone said shouldn't affect you so strongly. Perhaps that was said by a 13 year old that doesn't know any better. Or by someone suffering from serious mental illness who finds some solace in trying to get other people on the internet disturbed.
Being judged as stupid is of course very harsh, but it's also not wrong sometimes. Do some people behave stupidly sometimes?? Of course they do, we all do. That doesn't make us bad people, and we shouldn't despair because we believe we have been categorized as stupid: we should definitely consider whether it's a fair assessment given the circumstances, and try to do better next time. Very smart people can, and do, behave stupidly, specially when talking about religion or politics. Even smart people can say the most stupid things. I think no one is very smart or very stupid in every context, there's always a context where you'd look totally stupid even if you're Albert Einstein. Imagine Mr. Einstein trying to hunt in a jungle in Africa. Even with practice, he'd probably never get good at it. His very way of thinking, very scientific and evidence driven, what we consider intelligent, would get him eaten in no time over there. What count there is being fast thinking, acting on instinct... that's how you survive there, and that's what you would count as "smart" if you lived there.
Anyway, hope some of what I say here helps someone :).
For me this line "The persistent are attached to the goal. The obstinate are attached to their ideas about how to reach it." explained what's going on but the article doesn't seem to provide a solution (I know that's not the point). Now you say it's related to insecurity and it makes sense in my case and looks like a probable root cause. Something that can be worked on. But that's one sample, now I want to know if all stubborn / obstinate people like that are insecure.
My experience is that the persistent people I know have at least some degree (and often a large degree) of internal motivation. They do things because the process of problem solving is rewarding in and of itself, and/or they have some intrinsic motivation about solving the problem. They are not out to please anyone else except themselves.
Maybe no one is purely 100% internally motivated. But my experience is that the more persistent people I know generally have a higher percentage of internal motivation. In contrast the people who give up more easily generally have a lower percentage of internal motivation; if they really only care about the external reward, it often turns out there are lots of ways to do that, and many are shorter than solving "hard" problems.
If you're doing something because you want some recognition or fame, that's arguably extrinsic: you're doing the thing because you want other people out in the world to pat you on the back. But while you're doing the work, you're mostly thinking about how good it will feel to get that pat on the back. At that point, is it really that different from other instrinsic motivations?
I remember someone I knew, saying “I can’t tell if it’s an asset or a defect! If I’m stubborn, it’s a defect, but if I’m tenacious, it’s an asset.”
> That's no indictment of contentment, maybe changing the world is overrrated.
I think a significant number of “world-changers” have not had personal happy endings. They may have done a lot of good, but it didn’t do much for their own personal happiness.
I tend to be “tenacious,” but I also like to do really high-Quality work, so it may look like “stubbornness,” to a lot of folks.
For example, I have spent the entire day, today, tweaking haptics and voiceover text in the app I’m developing. I became aware of a very small, rare, cosmetic bug, that most folks would shrug off, but it really bothers me, and I’m going to make sure it gets fixed, tomorrow.
I've had very similar conversations with my therapist many times. The conclusion I've come to is that almost every personality trait has both adaptive and maladaptive aspects. You can try to maximize the former and avoid the latter, but ultimately any personality superpower you have is going to bring some consequences along with it.
I try to be more accepting of the fact that most of the psychological stuff is comes from one side coins where the other sides are often my most valuable attributes.
This has been my experience. Some of the most talented, kindest, people that I've ever known, have "rough" exteriors. Many times, it's due to being treated like crap, for their assets.
PG comes across as obstinate, by the way.. (in this essay, but maybe not in real life)
Probably some obstinates fell for the all-American "believe in yourself" nonsense. If you just have confidence and believe in yourself, you will succeed in spite of setbacks.
The obstinate interprets that as never changing one's mind; if you change your mind, then that means you didn't believe in yourself and are letting down everyone who believed in the same program.
I believe there is a "trying too hard". Solving a worthwhile problem itself might be difficult enough to begin with, but trying to map out a solution plan and stubbornly make every checkpoint a success along the way statistically leads to failure.
Every single step has a chance of ("perfect") success that is not 100%. The more steps, the lower the overall chance of hitting the original problem/solution with the exact path of steps. And if the original plan contains a dead end one could not foresee, people give up at some point alltogether.
But persistence simply means more like "lets take multiple shots at solving the problem", discovering stuff along the way, pivot the strategy or change direction, but ultimately just trying to solve the problem X times, which over time increases the chance of solving it.
I don't think this is true. For the majority of tasks which are small and relatively easy, both obstinate and persistent people will hit the winning solution on the first try and can't be distinguished.
It's only when you hit a really large or hard problem that these psychological differences start being more apparent.
"What Having a “Growth Mindset” Actually Means" by Carol Dweck https://hbr.org/2016/01/what-having-a-growth-mindset-actuall... "[It is a common misconception that] growth mindset is just about praising and rewarding effort. This isn’t true for students in schools, and it’s not true for employees in organizations. In both settings, outcomes matter. Unproductive effort is never a good thing. It’s critical to reward not just effort but learning and progress, and to emphasize the processes that yield these things, such as seeking help from others, trying new strategies, and capitalizing on setbacks to move forward effectively. In all our research, the outcome — the bottom line — follows from deeply engaging in these processes."
What's wrong with that ?
I've grown tired of listening to people's tales and rants on their constant need to disrupt something, change some industry , empower someone and put a dent somewhere.
Stop, Look around, why is it so hard to find something meaningful ? Because it isn't profitable (without being exploitative).
More people ought to learn to be content. When the need arises, it will find its heroes.
I love personality theory so I just wanted to dig into what that would mean using those terms.
Energy + Resilience would probably fit best under - Extraverted Sensing.
Imagination, good judgment and focus on goal - Introverted Intuition.