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Being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage

(maalvika.substack.com)
759 points alihm | 4 comments | 04 Jul 25 21:11 UTC | HN request time: 0.64s | source
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strogonoff ◴[05 Jul 25 03:24 UTC] No.44469893[source]▶
To be strategic, you think hard enough how to get somewhere and carefully plan and eliminate unknowns until you reach a point when getting there is no longer interesting.

Congratulations: you have successfully turned your cool idea into a chore. It’s just a lot of trivial typing and package management and it might not even be all that impressive when it is done.

Your idea is not at all a path well-trodden, but it is a path down which you’ve sent a high-resolution camera FPV drone so many times that you doubt you will see anything new in person.

What might happen then is that you try to keep it interesting by making it more impressive and raising the bar, by continuing to think and plan even harder. Why not write it in Rust? Why not make it infinitely extensible? More diagrams, hundreds more of open tabs…

It can absolutely lead to cool ideas with strategic and well-defined execution plans. Unfortunately, it is also difficult to break this loop and actually implement without an external force or another mind giving you some reframing.

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1. raynr ◴[05 Jul 25 06:31 UTC] No.44470530[source]▶
> Congratulations: you have successfully turned your cool idea into a chore.

The article gave me a vague, off-topic sense of unease but your comment crystallised the feeling for me.

I really wish less emphasis is placed on this kind of blue-sky, "strategic" thinking, and more placed on the "chores". Legwork, maintenance, step-by-step execution of a plan, issue tracking, perspective shifting etc. are all, in my opinion, critically important and much more deserving of praise and respect than so-called "strategic" thinking.

Which, IME, most people can't do anyway! After they've talked their big talk you suggest that there's a practical, on-ground problem and they look at you accusingly, like you're sabotaging their picture. And I'm like, no, my friend; reality is sabotaging your picture, it's just the two of us here and you're not losing any face by me pointing that out, and also if you were an actual strategic thinker you'd have taken my on-ground problem into account already...

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2. strogonoff ◴[05 Jul 25 09:14 UTC] No.44471295[source]▶
This might come from childhood and problematic praise patterns. You can grow to both crave praise and surprise, but at the same time when you get it not really value it. You might be interested to do impressive work as play when you don’t know how it will pan out, but if you don’t feel like it is interesting enough then you are demotivated.

I think it is important to be able to strategise, especially if you can delegate parts of the work. If you cannot delegate, there needs to be a balance with capacity for grunt work. One way to address it perhaps is learning to get in the zone and enjoy ongoing work as a process. Unfortunately, sometimes it is hard to snap out of big picture view and get to it.

3. manapause ◴[05 Jul 25 16:14 UTC] No.44473713[source]▶
I’ve found the best strategies are the ones you can abandon. clearly defined tactics and an appropriate application of people and resources require a quarterback with an ability to audible.

It’s possible to make no mistakes and still lose, it’s when people get offended about something they are wrong about that creates a tolerance for Pyrrhic victories.

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4. strogonoff ◴[06 Jul 25 04:47 UTC] No.44477924[source]▶
> clearly defined tactics and an appropriate application of people and resources require a quarterback with an ability to audible

Can you rephrase?