Of course, the real question here is whether productivity is what one should be ultimately aiming at. Doing very few things very well (alternatively, creating a small number of high-quality things) is a better ideal, to my mind.
'It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.' - Friedrich Nietzsche
This is a very good question also for the society as a whole. We are technically able to sustain the whole population with a fewer and fewer percentage of people working on holding up our living conditions (food, water, heat, housing, network communication, etc.).
On top of that we (as a society) create lots of bullshit work which we again try to perform as efficiently as possible. And as soon as productivity increases, we work hard to create more demand for more of the same nonsense, and if that doesn't work anymore, we invent a new type of bullshit.
Why are we doing that? (Well, I'm aware of the typical cynical answer: reducing violence and crime, but there must be a better way to achieve this.)
What if we concentrate on improving our living conditions, and on top of that, everyone who wants to work just picks their favourite problem and tries to find a solution for it, valuing quality over being the first, valuing long-term solutions over short-term minded crap?
What do you expect? The natural course for "the leisure majority class" would be a colorful ever-varying ever-shifting mixture of play, hobbyist endeavours, gamble, drugs, bohemian lives, sports, creative outputs of all kinds, a mild occasional flavour of anarchy. Actual human weathers instead of perpetual eternal grey September. Either "we, collectively", or our grown structures don't seem to prefer that.
Make-work and bureaucracy and petty in-fights and peer politics are the fallback behavioural patterns --- almost everywhere people aren't, mentally speaking, "fighting for a cause" (whether it's a small firm trying to survive or grow to 'more leisurely levels', or collectively-militarily, or post-war reconstruction, or faked-but-masterfully-orchestrated as Big Consulting somehow manages to ;)
Also, check out this link: https://fivebooks.com/best-books/martin-kemp-leonardo-da-vin...
There was some teaching expirements (don't hold me to its quality) with ceramics. Students either focused on quality or quantity. Iirc.. the quantity group produced better quality by the end. Quantity was just a good way of practicing productivity, which could then be used to produce quality.
I think you need both. Focused minds can construct incredible things in their discipline. Open minds can apply the ideas and tools from multiple disciplines in novel ways.
By avoiding or skipping over the boring problems i think you tend to miss a lot of the bottlenecks for actually making something valuable.
You mention machine learning and brilliant algorithms? Did you clean your data? Did you refine the parameters to the algorithm? Did you try different algorithms and compare? Machine learning is -boring-. Like, the things it enables are exciting, once it's working it's exciting, but the process is boring as hell. And I find that aspect every bit as 'hard' as understanding the underlying math.
There is this idea that if you can just get this hard workout done even though you're not fully recovered, you will get closer to your goal. You hear the siren song to be patient, skip the workout or make it an easy day, but choose to push hard anyway. And so instead of missing one good training day, you have to spend 4 weeks or more off of running.
And so everyday I have to remind myself to be patient, be consistent, and be honest with myself.
Unless they invested right in 2011, and your benchmark for "impatience" is investing in late 2007, their accidental market timing probably lost them money.
Plopping everything they made into some popular ETF when they made it probably would've been better.
The only actionable advice I saw in here was journaling. Pure platitudes otherwise, and as talon pointed out the examples aren't great.
Dollar cost averaging, diversifying assets, and keeping liquid on hand is easier than trying to predict the market.
Be consistent.
Unless he thinks The Last Supper is supposed to be like that.
You can't be patient and wait for opportunities. You have to be consistently searching for them, and execute as you find them - staying as nimble as possible.
For instance, I am always 100% invested, but always in various types of assets. Some investments I can get my money out in 24 hours, others take weeks or months to divest. That enables me to execute quickly when I see opportunity, but only in a limited fashion.
I don't believe it's "impatience" that keeps me invested at that level. It's the fact that, being idol does nothing.
Hell, I'm even platform around identifying new opportunities. I didn't / don't want to be patient, so now I'm building something to enable faster decisions:
Kind of reminds me of a similar parable from the story Time Enough for Love by Robert Heinlein, in it there was a man "too lazy to fail"[1]. The idea is summed up by a quote:
> Progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something.
Ambition is just trying to accomplish things. In my opinion, it's impatience that pushes us to solve problems, else we'd all settle for the way things are. The trick, is learning to solve them in a way that mitigates risk. Which is really what the author is trying to get at. Arrogance (or over confidence) might be a better description of the pitfall, than impatience.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Enough_for_Love#"The_Tale...
My favorite quote.
Rough heuristic is that in most projects, delay + downside-uncertainty = go-nowhere failure/death. You need to chip away at one or the other with your loop of actions to get anything done. Otherwise it is just luck.
It has the air of being a quite typical interview-y type question, though I think it's useful to see, given youthful optimism and the astounding future promise of our field (software + computing), just how many shy away from declaring great personal hope and aspiration, seeing no place for themselves in the future's next great achievements or assuming they will 'just happen' around them.
It's a shot in the arm to actually hear someone young candidly express grand aspirations whilst soberly embracing the year and years of toil those aspirations demand. It galvanises me, and no matter how much work I've taken on recently, makes me feel far less tired.
