Make an Extraordinary Effort
overcomingbias.com
overcomingbias.com
When I moved to America, I realized that this notion sounded or would sound pretty absurd to most people around me. Inevitably, I was drawn to entrepreneurship, because that's where I found like minded people.
Within these class boundaries, you do have people striving to reach conventional goals, but rarely at risk to the family (which tends to be established early).
Also, the largest nurturing family structure, the Indian bureaucracy (where most of the educated Indian workforce was employed until the nineties) instills passivity and "do-just-enough-ness".
These value are changing, but the change is really glacial outside the few, truly cosmopolitan, western influenced cities and social strata.
I went to one of the IIT's. Unless you've been through the system, it's hard to imagine the level of parental and peer pressure the kids who train for the entrance exam face and the kind of work ethic it fosters in you. How many countries in the world do you think there are where it is common to go to boarding school for two years and forgo any kind of social life and a normal childhood just to have a shot at getting into a specific college? Pretty much just Japan, Korea and India.
Every year, hundreds of thousands of kids attempt the IIT. But that was just an example. In general, competition for resources is so scarce that it is common to make a Herculean effort to get things that are taken for granted in the developed world. Like a car.
I'm willing to admit that this might be an entirely urban phenomenon, and that rewards for hard work were much harder to come by in socialist India, until the early 90s. But we live in the new century, and a third of the country is now urban, where social stratification has largely broken down. That's more than the total population of the U.S.
China as well, iirc.
How many have kept up the effort, after getting through (or not)?
As I said before, a conventional trajectory passing through a marriage in the mid-twenties, is also one that makes the uptake of risk (and consequently effort) much harder in life. I keep bringing up risk because effort without the possibility of significant success is rather pointless. And without risky opportunities that afford that kind of success, people reach for the cruise control after just-enough.
Malthusian scarcity should reward and select for effort, ( and also voluntary birth control and later marriage) as it did in the period right before Industrial England (([1] ; descriptive review: [2])), but, in India, it strangely doesn't! Predestiny, passivity, and fatalism, all predate socialist India. Our mythology reflects this.
I do agree that we are turning a new chapter and we are host to a whole new set of cultural ideas, but the numbers aren't, unfortunately, high enough. Yes, while about 300 million people, are (or were in 2001) technically urban, 50 million are slum dwellers; I'd wager that only a tiny slice is literate enough to accept cultural transmissions.
Still, I hope that this tiny slice of a humongous pie proves to be big enough....
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Farewell-Alms-Economic-History-Princet...
[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/07/science/07indu.html?pagewa...
"If a pretty poster and a cute saying are all it takes to motivate you, you probably have a very easy job. The kind robots will be doing soon."
It's sometimes hard to convey in a sentence what we mean, especially something translated, so we take a whole blog post.
Another thing I've noticed is that it also matters how much I like whatever it is I'm working on. If I like it a lot, I will naturally remember thing about it well, have better insight, and learn more about it. However, I may also be less productive because of this, i.e. going off on tangents.
The idea of making an "extraordinary effort" compels you to define your efforts relative to what's "ordinary", pitting you against not only your own everyday level of effort, but also against the masses. "Work smarter and harder" doesn't.
Granted, the post could've been more concise.
I think trying to reduce this post to one sentence is probably a bad idea anyways. I thought it was worthwhile reading.
Work smarter and harder.
[1] http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/10/trying-to-try.html
What does "work smarter" mean operationally? If there were a little switch you could throw in your head, we wouldn't need the Overcoming Bias blog.
It takes an effort for me to step back and ask myself what the problem is, rather than just sitting down and working on it.
Usually "just sitting down and working on it" works, which may mean my problems are too easy. :)
But you'll notice that it takes something more specific than "work smarter" to change up the way you approach a problem.
Only a wretch would aspire to surpass others. This guy's epitaph pegs him as shallow and insecure, and the rest of the post only further showcases his ignorance.
If you are just trying to compete randomly then you end up lost, with no direction of your own, and easily manipulated.
But if you have a goal, getting there may require that you surpass others. If it is a large goal, it almost certainly will. You have to leave the village to get to the top of the mountain.
Only a wretch would aspire to be mediocre.