2025-03-01 00:00:00
March 2025
What should one do? That may seem a strange question, but it's not
meaningless or unanswerable. It's the sort of question kids ask
before they learn not to ask big questions. I only came across it
myself in the process of investigating something else. But once I
did, I thought I should at least try to answer it.
So what should one do? One should help people, and take care of
the world. Those two are obvious. But is there anything else? When
I ask that, the answer that pops up is Make good new things.
I can't prove that one should do this, any more than I can prove
that one should help people or take care of the world. We're talking
about first principles here. But I can explain why this principle
makes sense. The most impressive thing humans can do is to think.
It may be the most impressive thing that can be done. And the best
kind of thinking, or more precisely the best proof that one has
thought well, is to make good new things.
I mean new things in a very general sense. Newton's physics was a
good new thing. Indeed, the first version of this principle was to
have good new ideas. But that didn't seem general enough: it didn't
include making art or music, for example, except insofar as they
embody new ideas. And while they may embody new ideas, that's not
all they embody, unless you stretch the word "idea" so uselessly
thin that it includes everything that goes through your nervous
system.
Even for ideas that one has consciously, though, I prefer the
phrasing "make good new things." There are other ways to describe
the best kind of thinking. To make discoveries, for example, or to
understand something more deeply than others have. But how well do
you understand something if you can't make a model of it, or write
about it? Indeed, trying to express what you understand is not just
a way to prove that you understand it, but a way to understand it
better.
Another reason I like this phrasing is that it biases us toward
creation. It causes us to prefer the kind of ideas that are naturally
seen as making things rather than, say, making critical observations
about things other people have made. Those are ideas too, and
sometimes valuable ones, but it's easy to trick oneself into believing
they're more valuable than they are. Criticism seems sophisticated,
and making new things often seems awkward, especially at first; and
yet it's precisely those first steps that are most rare and valuable.
Is newness essential? I think so. Obviously it's essential in
science. If you copied a paper of someone else's and published it
as your own, it would seem not merely unimpressive but dishonest.
And it's similar in the arts. A copy of a good painting can be a
pleasing thing, but it's not impressive in the way the original
was. Which in turn implies it's not impressive to make the same
thing over and over, however well; you're just copying yourself.
Note though that we're talking about a different kind of should
with this principle. Taking care of people and the world are shoulds
in the sense that they're one's duty, but making good new things
is a should in the sense that this is how to live to one's full
potential. Historically most rules about how to live have been a
mix of both kinds of should, though usually with more of the former
than the latter.
[1]
For most of history the question "What should one do?" got much the
same answer everywhere, whether you asked Cicero or Confucius. You
should be wise, brave, honest, temperate, and just, uphold tradition,
and serve the public interest. There was a long stretch where in
some parts of the world the answer became "Serve God," but in
practice it was still considered good to be wise, brave, honest,
temperate, and just, uphold tradition, and serve the public interest.
And indeed this recipe would have seemed right to most Victorians.
But there's nothing in it about taking care of the world or making
new things, and that's a bit worrying, because it seems like this
question should be a timeless one. The answer shouldn't change much.
I'm not too worried that the traditional answers don't mention
taking care of the world. Obviously people only started to care
about that once it became clear we could ruin it. But how can making
good new things be important if the traditional answers don't mention
it?
The traditional answers were answers to a slightly different question.
They were answers to the question of how to be, rather than what
to do. The audience didn't have a lot of choice about what to do.
The audience up till recent centuries was the landowning class,
which was also the political class. They weren't choosing between
doing physics and writing novels. Their work was foreordained:
manage their estates, participate in politics, fight when necessary.
It was ok to do certain other kinds of work in one's spare time,
but ideally one didn't have any. Cicero's De Officiis is one of the
great classical answers to the question of how to live, and in it
he explicitly says that he wouldn't even be writing it if he hadn't
been excluded from public life by recent political upheavals.
[2]
There were of course people doing what we would now call "original
work," and they were often admired for it, but they weren't seen
as models. Archimedes knew that he was the first to prove that a
sphere has 2/3 the volume of the smallest enclosing cylinder and
was very pleased about it. But you don't find ancient writers urging
their readers to emulate him. They regarded him more as a prodigy
than a model.
Now many more of us can follow Archimedes's example and devote most
of our attention to one kind of work. He turned out to be a model
after all, along with a collection of other people that his
contemporaries would have found it strange to treat as a distinct
group, because the vein of people making new things ran at right
angles to the social hierarchy.
What kinds of new things count? I'd rather leave that question to
the makers of them. It would be a risky business to try to define
any kind of threshold, because new kinds of work are often despised
at first. Raymond Chandler was writing literal pulp fiction, and
he's now recognized as one of the best writers of the twentieth
century. Indeed this pattern is so common that you can use it as a
recipe: if you're excited about some kind of work that's not
considered prestigious and you can explain what everyone else is
overlooking about it, then this is not merely a kind of work that's
ok to do, but one to seek out.
The other reason I wouldn't want to define any thresholds is that
we don't need them. The kind of people who make good new things
don't need rules to keep them honest.
So there's my guess at a set of principles to live by: take care
of people and the world, and make good new things. Different people
will do these to varying degrees. There will presumably be lots who
focus entirely on taking care of people. There will be a few who
focus mostly on making new things. But even if you're one of those,
you should at least make sure that the new things you make don't
net harm people or the world. And if you go a step further and
try to make things that help them, you may find you're ahead on the
trade. You'll be more constrained in what you can make, but you'll
make it with more energy.
On the other hand, if you make something amazing, you'll often be
helping people or the world even if you didn't mean to. Newton was
driven by curiosity and ambition, not by any practical effect his
work might have, and yet the practical effect of his work has been
enormous. And this seems the rule rather than the exception. So
if you think you can make something amazing, you should probably
just go ahead and do it.
Notes
[1]
We could treat all three as the same kind of should by saying
that it's one's duty to live well — for example by saying, as some
Christians have, that it's one's duty to make the most of one's
God-given gifts. But this seems one of those casuistries people
invented to evade the stern requirements of religion: you could
spend time studying math instead of praying or performing acts of
charity because otherwise you were rejecting a gift God had given
you. A useful casuistry no doubt, but we don't need it.
We could also combine the first two principles, since people are
part of the world. Why should our species get special treatment?
I won't try to justify this choice, but I'm skeptical that anyone
who claims to think differently actually lives according to their
principles.
[2]
Confucius was also excluded from public life after ending up
on the losing end of a power struggle, and presumably he too would
not be so famous now if it hadn't been for this long stretch of
enforced leisure.
Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica
Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.
2025-01-01 00:00:00
January 2025
The word "prig" isn't very common now, but if you look up
the definition, it will sound familiar. Google's isn't bad:
A self-righteously moralistic person who behaves as if superior to others.This sense of the word originated in the 18th century, and its age is an important clue: it shows that although wokeness is a comparatively recent phenomenon, it's an instance of a much older one.
An aggressively performative focus on social justice.In other words, it's people being prigs about social justice. And that's the real problem — the performativeness, not the social justice.
The middle-class student protestors of the New Left rejected the socialist/Marxist left as unhip. They were interested in sexier forms of oppression uncovered by cultural analysis (Marcuse) and abstruse "Theory". Labor politics became stodgy and old-fashioned. This took a couple generations to work through. The woke ideology's conspicuous lack of interest in the working class is the tell-tale sign. Such fragments as are, er, left of the old left are anti-woke, and meanwhile the actual working class shifted to the populist right and gave us Trump. Trump and wokeness are cousins.[2] It helped that the humanities and social sciences also included some of the biggest and easiest undergrad majors. If a political movement had to start with physics students, it could never get off the ground; there would be too few of them, and they wouldn't have the time to spare.
The middle-class origins of wokeness smoothed its way through the institutions because it had no interest in "seizing the means of production" (how quaint such phrases seem now), which would quickly have run up against hard state and corporate power. The fact that wokeness only expressed interest in other kinds of class (race, sex, etc) signalled compromise with existing power: give us power within your system and we'll bestow the resource we control — moral rectitude — upon you. As an ideological stalking horse for gaining control over discourse and institutions, this succeeded where a more ambitious revolutionary program would not have.
2024-10-01 00:00:00
October 2024
I'm usually reluctant to make predictions about technology, but I
feel fairly confident about this one: in a couple decades there
won't be many people who can write.
One of the strangest things you learn if you're a writer is how
many people have trouble writing. Doctors know how many people have
a mole they're worried about; people who are good at setting up
computers know how many people aren't; writers know how many people
need help writing.
The reason so many people have trouble writing is that it's
fundamentally difficult. To write well you have to think clearly,
and thinking clearly is hard.
And yet writing pervades many jobs, and the more prestigious the
job, the more writing it tends to require.
These two powerful opposing forces, the pervasive expectation of
writing and the irreducible difficulty of doing it, create enormous
pressure. This is why eminent professors often turn out to have
resorted to plagiarism. The most striking thing to me about these
cases is the pettiness of the thefts. The stuff they steal is usually
the most mundane boilerplate — the sort of thing that anyone who
was even halfway decent at writing could turn out with no effort
at all. Which means they're not even halfway decent at writing.
Till recently there was no convenient escape valve for the pressure
created by these opposing forces. You could pay someone to write
for you, like JFK, or plagiarize, like MLK, but if you couldn't buy
or steal words, you had to write them yourself. And as a result
nearly everyone who was expected to write had to learn how.
Not anymore. AI has blown this world open. Almost all pressure to
write has dissipated. You can have AI do it for you, both in school
and at work.
The result will be a world divided into writes and write-nots.
There will still be some people who can write. Some of us like it.
But the middle ground between those who are good at writing and
those who can't write at all will disappear. Instead of good writers,
ok writers, and people who can't write, there will just be good
writers and people who can't write.
Is that so bad? Isn't it common for skills to disappear when
technology makes them obsolete? There aren't many blacksmiths left,
and it doesn't seem to be a problem.
Yes, it's bad. The reason is something I mentioned earlier: writing
is thinking. In fact there's a kind of thinking that can only be
done by writing. You can't make this point better than Leslie Lamport
did:
If you're thinking without writing, you only think you're thinking.So a world divided into writes and write-nots is more dangerous than it sounds. It will be a world of thinks and think-nots. I know which half I want to be in, and I bet you do too.
2024-09-01 00:00:00
September 2024
At a YC event last week Brian Chesky gave a talk that everyone who
was there will remember. Most founders I talked to afterward said
it was the best they'd ever heard. Ron Conway, for the first time
in his life, forgot to take notes. I'm not going to try to reproduce
it here. Instead I want to talk about a question it raised.
The theme of Brian's talk was that the conventional wisdom about
how to run larger companies is mistaken. As Airbnb grew, well-meaning
people advised him that he had to run the company in a certain way
for it to scale. Their advice could be optimistically summarized
as "hire good people and give them room to do their jobs." He
followed this advice and the results were disastrous. So he had to
figure out a better way on his own, which he did partly by studying
how Steve Jobs ran Apple. So far it seems to be working. Airbnb's
free cash flow margin is now among the best in Silicon Valley.
The audience at this event included a lot of the most successful
founders we've funded, and one after another said that the same
thing had happened to them. They'd been given the same advice about
how to run their companies as they grew, but instead of helping
their companies, it had damaged them.
Why was everyone telling these founders the wrong thing? That was
the big mystery to me. And after mulling it over for a bit I figured
out the answer: what they were being told was how to run a company
you hadn't founded — how to run a company if you're merely a
professional manager. But this m.o. is so much less effective that
to founders it feels broken. There are things founders can do that
managers can't, and not doing them feels wrong to founders, because
it is.
In effect there are two different ways to run a company: founder
mode and manager mode. Till now most people even in Silicon Valley
have implicitly assumed that scaling a startup meant switching to
manager mode. But we can infer the existence of another mode from
the dismay of founders who've tried it, and the success of their
attempts to escape from it.
There are as far as I know no books specifically about founder mode.
Business schools don't know it exists. All we have so far are the
experiments of individual founders who've been figuring it out for
themselves. But now that we know what we're looking for, we can
search for it. I hope in a few years founder mode will be as well
understood as manager mode. We can already guess at some of the
ways it will differ.
The way managers are taught to run companies seems to be like modular
design in the sense that you treat subtrees of the org chart as
black boxes. You tell your direct reports what to do, and it's up
to them to figure out how. But you don't get involved in the details
of what they do. That would be micromanaging them, which is bad.
Hire good people and give them room to do their jobs. Sounds great
when it's described that way, doesn't it? Except in practice, judging
from the report of founder after founder, what this often turns out
to mean is: hire professional fakers and let them drive the company
into the ground.
One theme I noticed both in Brian's talk and when talking to founders
afterward was the idea of being gaslit. Founders feel like they're
being gaslit from both sides — by the people telling them they
have to run their companies like managers, and by the people working
for them when they do. Usually when everyone around you disagrees
with you, your default assumption should be that you're mistaken.
But this is one of the rare exceptions. VCs who haven't been founders
themselves don't know how founders should run companies, and C-level
execs, as a class, include some of the most skillful liars in the
world.
[1]
Whatever founder mode consists of, it's pretty clear that it's going
to break the principle that the CEO should engage with the company
only via his or her direct reports. "Skip-level" meetings will
become the norm instead of a practice so unusual that there's a
name for it. And once you abandon that constraint there are a huge
number of permutations to choose from.
For example, Steve Jobs used to run an annual retreat for what he
considered the 100 most important people at Apple, and these were
not the 100 people highest on the org chart. Can you imagine the
force of will it would take to do this at the average company? And
yet imagine how useful such a thing could be. It could make a big
company feel like a startup. Steve presumably wouldn't have kept
having these retreats if they didn't work. But I've never heard of
another company doing this. So is it a good idea, or a bad one? We
still don't know. That's how little we know about founder mode.
[2]
Obviously founders can't keep running a 2000 person company the way
they ran it when it had 20. There's going to have to be some amount
of delegation. Where the borders of autonomy end up, and how sharp
they are, will probably vary from company to company. They'll even
vary from time to time within the same company, as managers earn
trust. So founder mode will be more complicated than manager mode.
But it will also work better. We already know that from the examples
of individual founders groping their way toward it.
Indeed, another prediction I'll make about founder mode is that
once we figure out what it is, we'll find that a number of individual
founders were already most of the way there — except that in doing
what they did they were regarded by many as eccentric or worse.
[3]
Curiously enough it's an encouraging thought that we still know so
little about founder mode. Look at what founders have achieved
already, and yet they've achieved this against a headwind of bad
advice. Imagine what they'll do once we can tell them how to run
their companies like Steve Jobs instead of John Sculley.
Notes
[1]
The more diplomatic way of phrasing this statement would be
to say that experienced C-level execs are often very skilled at
managing up. And I don't think anyone with knowledge of this world
would dispute that.
[2]
If the practice of having such retreats became so widespread
that even mature companies dominated by politics started to do it,
we could quantify the senescence of companies by the average depth
on the org chart of those invited.
[3]
I also have another less optimistic prediction: as soon as
the concept of founder mode becomes established, people will start
misusing it. Founders who are unable to delegate even things they
should will use founder mode as the excuse. Or managers who aren't
founders will decide they should try to act like founders. That may
even work, to some extent, but the results will be messy when it
doesn't; the modular approach does at least limit the damage a bad
CEO can do.
Thanks to Brian Chesky, Patrick Collison,
Ron Conway, Jessica
Livingston, Elon Musk, Ryan Petersen, Harj Taggar, and Garry Tan
for reading drafts of this.
2024-09-01 00:00:00
September 2024
There's some debate about whether it's a good idea to "follow your
passion." In fact the question is impossible to answer with a simple
yes or no. Sometimes you should and sometimes you shouldn't, but
the border between should and shouldn't is very complicated. The
only way to give a general answer is to trace it.
When people talk about this question, there's always an implicit
"instead of." All other things being equal, why wouldn't you work
on what interests you the most? So even raising the question implies
that all other things aren't equal, and that you have to choose
between working on what interests you the most and something else,
like what pays the best.
And indeed if your main goal is to make money, you can't usually
afford to work on what interests you the most. People pay you for
doing what they want, not what you want. But there's an obvious
exception: when you both want the same thing. For example, if you
love football, and you're good enough at it, you can get paid a lot
to play it.
Of course the odds are against you in a case like football, because
so many other people like playing it too. This is not to say you
shouldn't try though. It depends how much ability you have and how
hard you're willing to work.
The odds are better when you have strange tastes: when you like
something that pays well and that few other people like. For example,
it's clear that Bill Gates truly loved running a software company.
He didn't just love programming, which a lot of people do. He loved
writing software for customers. That is a very strange taste indeed,
but if you have it, you can make a lot by indulging it.
There are even some people who have a genuine intellectual interest
in making money. This is distinct from mere greed. They just can't
help noticing when something is mispriced, and can't help doing
something about it. It's like a puzzle for them.
[1]
In fact there's an edge case here so spectacular that it turns all
the preceding advice on its head. If you want to make a really
huge
amount of money — hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars
— it turns out to be very useful to work on what interests you the
most. The reason is not the extra motivation you get from doing
this, but that the way to make a really large amount of money is
to start a startup, and working on what interests you is an excellent
way to discover startup ideas.
Many if not most of the biggest startups began as projects the
founders were doing for fun. Apple, Google, and Facebook all began
that way. Why is this pattern so common? Because the best ideas
tend to be such outliers that you'd overlook them if you were
consciously looking for ways to make money. Whereas if you're young
and good at technology, your unconscious instincts about what would
be interesting to work on are very well aligned with what needs to
be built.
So there's something like a midwit peak for making money. If you
don't need to make much, you can work on whatever you're most
interested in; if you want to become moderately rich, you can't
usually afford to; but if you want to become super rich, and you're
young and good at technology, working on what you're most interested
in becomes a good idea again.
What if you're not sure what you want? What if you're attracted to
the idea of making money and more attracted to some kinds of work
than others, but neither attraction predominates? How do you break
ties?
The key here is to understand that such ties are only apparent.
When you have trouble choosing between following your interests and
making money, it's never because you have complete knowledge of
yourself and of the types of work you're choosing between, and the
options are perfectly balanced. When you can't decide which path
to take, it's almost always due to ignorance. In fact you're usually
suffering from three kinds of ignorance simultaneously: you don't
know what makes you happy, what the various kinds of work are really
like, or how well you could do them.
[2]
In a way this ignorance is excusable. It's often hard to predict
these things, and no one even tells you that you need to. If you're
ambitious you're told you should go to college, and this is good
advice so far as it goes, but that's where it usually ends. No one
tells you how to figure out what to work on, or how hard this can
be.
What do you do in the face of uncertainty? Get more certainty. And
probably the best way to do that is to try working on things you're
interested in. That will get you more information about how interested
you are in them, how good you are at them, and how much scope they
offer for ambition.
Don't wait. Don't wait till the end of college to figure out what
to work on. Don't even wait for internships during college. You
don't necessarily need a job doing x in order to work on x; often
you can just start doing it in some form yourself. And since figuring
out what to work on is a problem that could take years to solve,
the sooner you start, the better.
One useful trick for judging different kinds of work is to look at
who your colleagues will be. You'll become like whoever you work
with. Do you want to become like these people?
Indeed, the difference in character between different kinds of work
is magnified by the fact that everyone else is facing the same
decisions as you. If you choose a kind of work mainly for how well
it pays, you'll be surrounded by other people who chose it for the
same reason, and that will make it even more soul-sucking than it
seems from the outside. Whereas if you choose work you're genuinely
interested in, you'll be surrounded mostly by other people who are
genuinely interested in it, and that will make it extra inspiring.
[3]
The other thing you do in the face of uncertainty is to make choices
that are uncertainty-proof. The less sure you are about what to do,
the more important it is to choose options that give you more options
in the future. I call this "staying upwind." If you're unsure whether
to major in math or economics, for example, choose math; math is
upwind of economics in the sense that it will be easier to switch
later from math to economics than from economics to math.
There's one case, though, where it's easy to say whether you should
work on what interests you the most: if you want to do
great work.
This is not a sufficient condition for doing great work, but it is
a necessary one.
There's a lot of selection bias in advice about whether to "follow
your passion," and this is the reason. Most such advice comes from
people who are famously successful, and if you ask someone who's
famously successful how to do what they did, most will tell you
that you have to work on what you're most interested in. And this
is in fact true.
That doesn't mean it's the right advice for everyone. Not everyone
can do great work, or wants to. But if you do want to, the complicated
question of whether or not to work on what interests you the most
becomes simple. The answer is yes. The root of great work is a sort
of ambitious curiosity, and you can't manufacture that.
Notes
[1]
These examples show why it's a mistake to assume that economic
inequality must be evidence of some kind of brokenness or unfairness.
It's obvious that different people have different interests, and
that some interests yield far more money than others, so how can
it not be obvious that some people will end up much richer than
others? In a world where some people like to write enterprise
software and others like to make studio pottery, economic inequality
is the natural outcome.
[2]
Difficulty choosing between interests is a different matter.
That's not always due to ignorance. It's often intrinsically
difficult. I still have trouble doing it.
[3]
You can't always take people at their word on this. Since
it's more prestigious to work on things you're interested in than
to be driven by money, people who are driven mainly by money will
often claim to be more interested in their work than they actually
are. One way to test such claims is by doing the following thought
experiment: if their work didn't pay well, would they take day jobs
doing something else in order to do it in their spare time? Lots
of mathematicians and scientists and engineers would. Historically
lots have. But I don't think as many investment bankers would.
This thought experiment is also useful for distinguishing between
university departments.
Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Paul Buchheit,
Jessica Livingston,
Robert Morris, Harj Taggar, and Garry Tan for reading drafts of
this.
2024-07-01 00:00:00
July 2024
Successful people tend to be persistent. New ideas often don't work
at first, but they're not deterred. They keep trying and eventually
find something that does.
Mere obstinacy, on the other hand, is a recipe for failure. Obstinate
people are so annoying. They won't listen. They beat their heads
against a wall and get nowhere.
But is there any real difference between these two cases? Are
persistent and obstinate people actually behaving differently? Or
are they doing the same thing, and we just label them later as
persistent or obstinate depending on whether they turned out to be
right or not?
If that's the only difference then there's nothing to be learned
from the distinction. Telling someone to be persistent rather than
obstinate would just be telling them to be right rather than wrong,
and they already know that. Whereas if persistence and obstinacy
are actually different kinds of behavior, it would be worthwhile
to tease them apart.
[1]
I've talked to a lot of determined people, and it seems to me that
they're different kinds of behavior. I've often walked away from a
conversation thinking either "Wow, that guy is determined" or "Damn,
that guy is stubborn," and I don't think I'm just talking about
whether they seemed right or not. That's part of it, but not all
of it.
There's something annoying about the obstinate that's not simply
due to being mistaken. They won't listen. And that's not true of
all determined people. I can't think of anyone more determined than
the Collison brothers, and when you point out a problem to them,
they not only listen, but listen with an almost predatory intensity.
Is there a hole in the bottom of their boat? Probably not, but if
there is, they want to know about it.
It's the same with most successful people. They're never more
engaged than when you disagree with them. Whereas the obstinate
don't want to hear you. When you point out problems, their eyes
glaze over, and their replies sound like ideologues talking about
matters of doctrine.
[2]
The reason the persistent and the obstinate seem similar is that
they're both hard to stop. But they're hard to stop in different
senses. The persistent are like boats whose engines can't be throttled
back. The obstinate are like boats whose rudders can't be turned.
[3]
In the degenerate case they're indistinguishable: when there's only
one way to solve a problem, your only choice is whether to give up
or not, and persistence and obstinacy both say no. This is presumably
why the two are so often conflated in popular culture. It assumes
simple problems. But as problems get more complicated, we can see
the difference between them. The persistent are much more attached
to points high in the decision tree than to minor ones lower down,
while the obstinate spray "don't give up" indiscriminately over the
whole tree.
The persistent are attached to the goal. The obstinate are attached
to their ideas about how to reach it.
Worse still, that means they'll tend to be attached to their first
ideas about how to solve a problem, even though these are the least
informed by the experience of working on it. So the obstinate aren't
merely attached to details, but disproportionately likely to be
attached to wrong ones.
Why are they like this? Why are the obstinate obstinate? One
possibility is that they're overwhelmed. They're not very capable.
They take on a hard problem. They're immediately in over their head.
So they grab onto ideas the way someone on the deck of a rolling
ship might grab onto the nearest handhold.
That was my initial theory, but on examination it doesn't hold up.
If being obstinate were simply a consequence of being in over one's
head, you could make persistent people become obstinate by making
them solve harder problems. But that's not what happens. If you
handed the Collisons an extremely hard problem to solve, they
wouldn't become obstinate. If anything they'd become less obstinate.
They'd know they had to be open to anything.
Similarly, if obstinacy were caused by the situation, the obstinate
would stop being obstinate when solving easier problems. But they
don't. And if obstinacy isn't caused by the situation, it must come
from within. It must be a feature of one's personality.
Obstinacy is a reflexive resistance to changing one's ideas. This
is not identical with stupidity, but they're closely related. A
reflexive resistance to changing one's ideas becomes a sort of
induced stupidity as contrary evidence mounts. And obstinacy is a
form of not giving up that's easily practiced by the stupid. You
don't have to consider complicated tradeoffs; you just dig in your
heels. It even works, up to a point.
The fact that obstinacy works for simple problems is an important
clue. Persistence and obstinacy aren't opposites. The relationship
between them is more like the relationship between the two kinds
of respiration we can do: aerobic respiration, and the anaerobic
respiration we inherited from our most distant ancestors. Anaerobic
respiration is a more primitive process, but it has its uses. When
you leap suddenly away from a threat, that's what you're using.
The optimal amount of obstinacy is not zero. It can be good if your
initial reaction to a setback is an unthinking "I won't give up,"
because this helps prevent panic. But unthinking only gets you so
far. The further someone is toward the obstinate end of the continuum,
the less likely they are to succeed in solving hard problems.
[4]
Obstinacy is a simple thing. Animals have it. But persistence turns
out to have a fairly complicated internal structure.
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.
Energy and imagination make a wonderful combination. Each gets the
best out of the other. Energy creates demand for the ideas produced
by imagination, which thus produces more, and imagination gives
energy somewhere to go.
[5]
Merely having energy and imagination is quite rare. But to solve
hard problems you need three more qualities: resilience, good
judgement, and a focus on some kind of goal.
Resilience means not having one's morale destroyed by setbacks.
Setbacks are inevitable once problems reach a certain size, so if
you can't bounce back from them, you can only do good work on a
small scale. But resilience is not the same as obstinacy. Resilience
means setbacks can't change your morale, not that they can't change
your mind.
Indeed, 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. It's this, not recklessness,
that lets them work on things that are unlikely to succeed.
There is one point at which the persistent are often irrational
though: at the very top of the decision tree. When they choose
between two problems of roughly equal expected value, the choice
usually comes down to personal preference. Indeed, they'll often
classify projects into deliberately wide bands of expected value
in order to ensure that the one they want to work on still qualifies.
Empirically this doesn't seem to be a problem. It's ok to be
irrational near the top of the decision tree. One reason is that
we humans will work harder on a problem we love. But there's another
more subtle factor involved as well: our preferences among problems
aren't random. When we love a problem that other people don't, it's
often because we've unconsciously noticed that it's more important
than they realize.
Which leads to our fifth quality: there needs to be some overall
goal. If you're like me you began, as a kid, merely with the desire
to do something great. In theory that should be the most powerful
motivator of all, since it includes everything that could possibly
be done. But in practice it's not much use, precisely because it
includes too much. It doesn't tell you what to do at this moment.
So in practice your energy and imagination and resilience and good
judgement have to be directed toward some fairly specific goal. Not
too specific, or you might miss a great discovery adjacent to what
you're searching for, but not too general, or it won't work to
motivate you.
[6]
When you look at the internal structure of persistence, it doesn't
resemble obstinacy at all. It's so much more complex. Five distinct
qualities — energy, imagination, resilience, good judgement, and
focus on a goal — combine to produce a phenomenon that seems a bit
like obstinacy in the sense that it causes you not to give up. But
the way you don't give up is completely different. Instead of merely
resisting change, you're driven toward a goal by energy and resilience,
through paths discovered by imagination and optimized by judgement.
You'll give way on any point low down in the decision tree, if its
expected value drops sufficiently, but energy and resilience keep
pushing you toward whatever you chose higher up.
Considering what it's made of, it's not surprising that the right
kind of stubbornness is so much rarer than the wrong kind, or that
it gets so much better results. Anyone can do obstinacy. Indeed,
kids and drunks and fools are best at it. Whereas very few people
have enough of all five of the qualities that produce the right kind
of stubbornness, but when they do the results are magical.
Notes
[1]
I'm going to use "persistent" for the good kind of stubborn
and "obstinate" for the bad kind, but I can't claim I'm simply
following current usage. Conventional opinion barely distinguishes
between good and bad kinds of stubbornness, and usage is correspondingly
promiscuous. I could have invented a new word for the good kind,
but it seemed better just to stretch "persistent."
[2]
There are some domains where one can succeed by being obstinate.
Some political leaders have been notorious for it. But it won't
work in situations where you have to pass external tests. And indeed
the political leaders who are famous for being obstinate are famous
for getting power, not for using it well.
[3]
There will be some resistance to turning the rudder of a
persistent person, because there's some cost to changing direction.
[4]
The obstinate do sometimes succeed in solving hard problems.
One way is through luck: like the stopped clock that's right twice
a day, they seize onto some arbitrary idea, and it turns out to be
right. Another is when their obstinacy cancels out some other form
of error. For example, if a leader has overcautious subordinates,
their estimates of the probability of success will always be off
in the same direction. So if he mindlessly says "push ahead regardless"
in every borderline case, he'll usually turn out to be right.
[5]
If you stop there, at just energy and imagination, you get
the conventional caricature of an artist or poet.
[6]
Start by erring on the small side. If you're inexperienced
you'll inevitably err on one side or the other, and if you err on
the side of making the goal too broad, you won't get anywhere.
Whereas if you err on the small side you'll at least be moving
forward. Then, once you're moving, you expand the goal.
Thanks to Trevor Blackwell,
Jessica Livingston, Jackie McDonough,
Courtenay Pipkin, Harj Taggar, and Garry Tan for reading drafts of
this.