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.
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?
Of course, the hard part is in knowing what goals to commit to, and what to back off from!
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.
"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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
PG comes across as obstinate, by the way.. (in this essay, but maybe not in real life)
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).
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??
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.
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.
“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.
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.
Tough situations to handle.
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.
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?"
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.
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.
If you want to see "stubborn," look no further than their QA Division. In the US, there used to be a running joke, that if you had "Quality" in your job title, it meant your career was dead. At this company, it meant that you were headed for Executive Row. Many VPs and General Managers (a very powerful title, at this company), were former QA people.
And, boy, were they a pain to deal with. They would have 3,000-line Excel spreadsheets, and if even one of those lines was a red "X", the entire product line could get derailed. I had a project that we worked on, for 18 months, get nuked at the last minute, because they didn't like the Quality. I worked with an SV startup, that had a project canned, for pretty much exactly the same reason. The startup folks didn't seem to take the Quality seriously, which was basically a death sentence.
In that company, the kind of "stubborn" the QA people demonstrated, would be considered absolutely essential. I know that most folks around here, would not put up with it for a second.
They wouldn't be wrong. Making superb-Quality stuff is not a big moneymaker. You want lots of money, make lots of cheap, crappy things, and sell them at a small margin. The market is a lot bigger, and most people have much higher tolerance for crap than this company's customers.
As is the case with almost anything in life, "it depends." There's really no one-size-fits-all, "magic elixir." Every end may be reached by a different path.
A bit less than a year out of college I found a pretty significant bug in the compiler (I forget the bug! I do remember the one major bug I let slip out into a release though) well after everything had been signed off on. I brought it up in the team meeting and the principle dev asked me directly "Do you think we should cancel the release to fix this bug?" I wasn't sure of myself and he told me that "it's your call", and I said that yeah, we should fix the bug.
For anyone under 35 who is confused by this, was before releases were rolling and shipped online. When Microsoft released a major version back then, it had a (IIRC) ~10 year support contract attached to it (and if you found a bug and were on a good enough of a support contract, the dev team would develop a custom patch for you to fix a bug in a 9 year 6 month old release!), and a lot of gears were set in motion to make a release happen.
This was the norm at Microsoft for a long time. I was originally attracted to the SDET role because they were the last defender of the customer experience, they were the engineers who held the line on quality. The entire industry is worse off for the SDET role having been eliminated across all major software companies.
Make one small 1 degree mistake on a rocket launch, you will end up hundreds of miles off target.
Make a small mistake in an organic system and you'll be fine, you can just iterate. You'll drive yourself crazy trying to get it perfect.
The trick is knowing which situation is which.
Persistence to me extends the reality principle to even minor and potential issues: they *must* be addressed (the "almost predatory" response) - driving engagement.
Obstinance to me reduces the reality principle to consistent facts, and serves more as avoidance.
(The flaw of the Quality perspective stems more from expanding bureaucratic incentives and achieving scale through excessive punishment driving aversive behaviors.)
I'm not sure that it was, in the aggregate, the most beneficial decision for the company, but it was the decision they made, and I had to go along with it.
I do think that we could have addressed the Quality issues, in a couple of months, and the app was something that I think would have been "revolutionary." That "revolutionary" part probably contributed to its demise. Many QA types are very conservative, and risk-averse. I suspect that they wanted to find problems, because they didn't want to deal with a very different (albeit awesome) kind of application. There were also a couple of other reasons, which I won't go into, here, but they weren't particularly well-handled. They did make it easier for the conservatives to sway upper management.
Or sell small amounts at a crazy margin. Getting rich is about profits not about sheer revenue.
The closest thing he mentions is this, "persistence often requires that one change one's mind. That's where good judgement comes in. The persistent are quite rational. They focus on expected value."
Following that, if I'm working on x thing, and the expected value is < some other big thing, I should quit and start the other thing.
But there should be a "grass is always greener on the other side" counter weight - some other thing may LOOK like higher expected value, but that's because you don't know the shit under the hood.
I would've liked him to have touched on this, as I don't think you can truly call someone persistent but not obstinate unless they can actually walk away from something if necessary.
“One thing that distinguishes the persistent is their energy. At the risk of putting too much weight on words, they persist rather than merely resisting. They keep trying things. Which means the persistent must also be imaginative. To keep trying things, you have to keep thinking of things to try.”
If you have ideas on what else to try, you persist. If not, maybe time to move on or risk it becoming obstinance.
There is a book that addresses this question: Quit by Annie Duke
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.
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.
Yes, exactly. You put it better than I did. Shit's messy, non-linear, non-monotonic. No need to put a bow on 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.
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.
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
If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There's no point in being a damn fool about it.
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.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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?
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.
A confident person who is trying to be right. Like kryptonite for your company.
I try to build up my confidence from experience and data. Always happy to change tack but the incoming input needs to be more credible than what I’ve gone through. Vs my (excellent) ex boss who was confident always, but if you wanted to convince him you needed to do it quietly out of earshot so no egos were harmed. I proposed and we agreed it was a good version of “strong opinions weakly held”, but I’d have appreciated a little more openness without all the dancing. And he was streets ahead of a feral exec who was seemingly confident, defensive and who would rather burn the building down than change his mind.
But if you replace that term with something like "virtue" or "eudaimonia" and read from that perspective, there can sometimes be some truths to glean from his writing. Nothing really novel, but interesting to read nonetheless.
These are generally ego-centric qualities that don't clearly benefit the people around us outside of our not being a liability to others under most moral frameworks. Greek philosophy is quite a poor fit for modern relations between individual and society.
Some obstinate people may not be stupid in the Forrest Gump sense. They may just be operating at their information processing capacity. Facing a hard choice, the first step is shedding the willingness to argue the foundations of the castle they built.
The psychological ramifications vary. Their predicament may even induce them to be unwilling to argue at all levels as a way to conceal it, leading to full incorrigible stubbornness.
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. :)
So obstinate people expect the desired outcome to depend on their expertise at some point(s) in the past. Is the difference between the two just humility?
I quickly learned that every person who found out I was working on this problem was eager to share the same three or four ideas on how to fix it. All of these ideas were early on the list of ideas that the previous engineer had ruled out multiple times in multiple ways. For the sake of thoroughness, I also tried them and ruled them out. But of course each person who wanted to share ideas didn't know they were saying the same thing I had heard a hundred times before, so the suggestions kept repeating.
Over time, dealing with the same suggestions over and over again, I learned an important lesson: when someone suggested an idea, it didn't do any good to explain that multiple people had tried it and ruled it out in multiple ways. That made people perceive me as close-minded, stupid, and inflexible. Instead I just nodded and said, interesting, that's worth checking out, thanks, or, hmm, I wonder how I could measure that.
At first I was afraid that if I acted intrigued about a very basic obvious idea, people would think we were idiots for not trying it long ago, but that turned out not to be the dominant dynamic at work. The dominant dynamic was that people think you're smart if you are receptive to your advice, and and they think you are stupid if you are not receptive to their advice. This only stops being true when you work with someone closely or consistently over time.
I might have tried earnest curiosity. "And what results would you expect from that?" or "Let's say we do this, and get such-and-such result?" or "What kind of result would diminish your confidence in this approach?"
Or, better yet, invite them to pair on the implementation! (Organizational agility permitting.)
I wonder, also, why were none of these "dead ends" accessibly documented? If so many people can offer suggestions, shouldn't they be able to see the results of prior experiments? Maybe in the form of closed tickets, at the very least.
In retrospect, there's an obvious suspect. It was early AWS days, and our deployments were controlled by sysadmins, who refused to give us any access to the infrastructure on security grounds. Our dev boxes were in our datacenter. They promised us the infrastructure we were running on was 100% reliable and consistent, but it probably wasn't.
Fame plays also a big role in this, in that some people are simply rewarded by others for their stubbornness or even stupidity while most are not, the infamous "reality distortion field" effect when some people have amassed so much clout their mistakes don't even register and they can even bring stubbornly bad ideas into reality.
I feel this post needs a counterpart "The Right Kind of Naysayer", which distinguishes between good and bad ways of pointing out problems.
I believe the environment matters (did I learned around people who made valid points, or around sophist ideologues?). If you're around obstinate stubborns, you're likely to become more like one, specially if they are rewarded by their obstinance.
Of course, all of this is ultimately anectodal. We can't seriously put people in boxes like this. It is good food for thought though.
Yes Grahams two cents here makes sense, but always talk about why the trait from an evolutionary perspective even exists. It exists because it worked for a certain context and was good for millions of years. Explain why it doesn't work for this new context.
Instead all I hear is people calling certain traits bad and explaining how we should live life like suppressing all these traits that took millions of years to evolve.
People are a lot more complex, have their own quirks, traits and decades of reasons in their surroundings why they turned out that way, and continue to change all the time. A lot more complex than this simplistic, caricature, cardboard cutout view of people presented in the article.
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.
It is a nice distinction coming from someone who is habitually stubborn and can border on obstinate if not checked.
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.
* obstinate: same responses/approach even when presented with new information
* persistent: updated responses/approach when presented with new information
> Energy, imagination, resilience, good judgement, and focus on a goal
It's nice to frame it that way so we can know what to focus on.
Personally, I'm strong in terms of energy, imagination and resilience.
I'm probably a bit weaker in terms of judgment and focus on a goal. I think my approach to the latter 2 has something to do with my environment.
Good judgement is actually harder to achieve than it seems. I think my issue is that I was conflating 'good judgment' with 'common sense'. But it's not the same. We're humans and things can be complex for irrational, artificial reasons. Good judgement these days often entails adapting to the subtle irrationalities of the environment and learning to exploit them. That lesson has been really tough for me.
In terms of 'Focusing on a goal', my issue is that I chose a huge audacious goal with small milestones along the way. While I managed to achieve all of the milestones, they don't bear any financial rewards; their utility was just a risk mitigation strategy so that I could easily pivot to other, less ambitious goals if the big audacious goal didn't pan out.
My goal over the past 10 years was to create a platform that would make it much easier easy to build fast, secure, bug-free, highly maintainable software. That's a really difficult goal especially on the sales side as it is a highly competitive space. I managed to build a platform which achieves that. See https://saasufy.com/
But unfortunately, I'm realizing that my goal is too big. I'd be competing against many big tech platforms and also against existing software development paradigms (which is even harder!). So now I'm shifting my strategy towards using my platform Saasufy.com just for myself and my friends to build more niche products like this HR/Recruitment platform: https://insnare.net/
I'm thinking I may have to even re-imagine what 'niche' means.
I actually think this turns out to be the case most of the time. Look at Linus Pauling. Two Nobel prizes and then he fixated on Vitamin C. Did he all of a sudden forget how to be persistent and became obstinate?
Many persistent leaders become obstinate when they develop a success history that surrounds them with positive feedback - yes-men, resources to waste, etc.
Obstinate people flock together for mutual validation (and form protective bureaucracies).
"The persistent are attached to the goal. The obstinate are attached to their ideas about how to reach it."
Pretty much sums up the entire argument!
I don't think you can argue against being obstinate without understanding it. I suspect being obstinate has value. It is basically the whole chesterson's fence kind of thing.
Sort of like "electric cars are impractical!"
That said, persistence is how the future is created. But sometimes it doesn't work.
I'm also reminded of "Often wrong, never in doubt". Unfortunately this seems to work well in society, but it takes people with experience to argue against it.
I like the lens of the Big Five model of personality. I think what's at play here is
(1) Low neuroticism = resilient and confident
(2) Low agreeableness = willing to go against the prevailing tide
and then you need
(3) high openness = inventive/curious
The first two personality traits without the third = stubborn
Add the third = persistent
(some people don't even need #2 to be stubborn, when they consider their tribe to be correct even if it goes against prevailing thought in the broader world)
Maybe there should be a footnote here? I’m not sure what “rational” means in this context, or whether it’s reasonable to focus on expected value. Buying insurance usually has negative expected value, if you measure it in dollars.
We mostly don’t do the math, though. If we assume Graham is just using math metaphorically, there are lots of ways you could interpret “expected value.”
Let him be taught to be curious in the election and choice of his reasons, to abominate impertinence, and, consequently, to affect brevity; but, above all, let him be lessoned to acquiesce and submit to truth so soon as ever he shall discover it, whether in his opponent's argument, or upon better consideration of his own;
Another thing that I think distinguishes a tenacious person from a stubborn one is that when two tenacious people collaborate, magic happens. When two stubborn people meet, they cancel out.
The fact is people are involved and success and failure can be determined by any number of reasons beyond the control of the obstinate.
You can control the effort but not the outcome. Judgement will come regardless.
It does remind me of an old joke about English conjugation rules. For example:
I/we are persistent.
You are obstinant.
He/she/they are pig-headed.
...
Obstinacy is a reflexive resistance to changing one's ideas. This is not identical with stupidity, but they're closely related."
IMO you see this rear its head all the time in the form of language wars. Many people who are entrenched in the belief that $LANG is the best way to build software well beyond the point where it is reasonable to do so. And it's kind of funny because a lot of them quote PG in their reasoning.
Steve Jobs famously decided he no longer needed to shower because he only ate fruit. Unsurprisingly, he reeked. If this isn't obstinacy, I don't know what is. For a decade he denied his child was his, in the face of overwhelming evidence. And yet he is lauded for having the right energy, imagination, resilience, and excellent judgement.
You can make similar observations about Ray Dalio, Noam Chomsky, Nassim Taleb, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk. I think their persistence has veered into suboptimal obstinance at times. But would they be any more successful without their character flaws?
This essay would have been stronger had pg looked for counterexamples to his theory, because there are many.
I often am impatient with people not because I am obstinate or stubborn or persistent, but because some new ideas require a new mindset. For example, let us suppose - just for argument - that the great failing of the internet is that it prevents community. I'm just saying suppose.
If one then foolishly tried to discuss this, one would be inundated with comments about Facebook, X (or is it Y?) and on and on. None of this is helpful or even interesting because the context/mind set is wrong.
Once we decide the world is not flat (even if just for the sake of argument) a discussion of where you will fall off and what will happen to you when you fall off, is not interesting. Or helpful.
To my mind then, the issue of stubborn or obstinate people is not innovators - it is the inability to examine or even imagine a new mindset. Which is too bad because that is the fun part.
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.
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.
> 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.