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Comment by tkiley | Hacker News Reader

Before my wife and I got married, we had a very intense year-long running argument about this exact topic. She told me I could do anything I wanted to do; I told her that was bullshit. I think this argument may have delayed our marriage significantly. :)

Since then, I've noticed that naively optimistic views are relatively common among people who accomplish interesting things. It's almost as if naive optimism is a semi-necessary precursor to remarkable achievement.

"You can do anything" is nonsense. It's a crutch. But many people use this crutch to get to really cool places, and I can't help but respect their accomplishments in the end.

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I posted an article earlier this week that got no traction, but discusses exactly this.

According to the article and the paper it references, people fall predominantly into two populations which are distingquished by their beliefs vis-a-vis achievement. The first population believes, inherently and without evidence, in the supremacy of accomplishing achievements. People in second population have as their primary motive the avoidance of failure.

The paper and the article go on to detail the set of post-hoc rationalizations which support these beliefs, and how these were discovered.

Article and paper: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/youre-hired/201110/how-d...

HN (non-)discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4307947

Thanks. That's much more interesting and informative than the post in question and the comments in this thread.

Here's the thing. "You can do anything" is obviously bullshit if you take it too literally. It's trivial to spend your time thinking of loads of counterexamples, especially if you have that engineer knack of being painfully logical.

I think people mean it as shorthand for "You can do amazing things if you put your mind to it," and damn it, there's an awful lot of truth to that.

I think that kind of thing is often mistaken for being "logical" when it is just pedantry and kind of a sign of not being a great problem solver. It's like when people give out problems like the Two Egg Problem and those people spend all the time going on about the properties of actual eggs rather than getting to the real mathematics. Part of the reason it is so silly is that it is like a case of a human behaving as a computer program with absolutely no AI (or robots from SciFi going "does not compute" and then blowing up).

"You can do anything passably" is not nonsense though. Anyone without a major disability can learn how to write working code. Anyone without a major disability can learn how to play the piano a bit. Anyone can learn how to make a knife, a sword, or a bow, or a pair of shoes.

You may never beat Phelps, but you can still learn to swim and have fun doing it. It might even save your life.

You may never be world class at most of these things regardless of what you put into it, but you can do it well enough to contribute to happiness in your life and in the end, that's really what matters.

You let what amounts to basically childish pedantry make that big of a deal in your personal life? OK, I guess ...

I don't think a view that basically says "stop making excuses about your genetics and current station in life and work hard to achieve your goals" is naive optimism. First of all this kind of thing is not that easy to predict, how do you really know you can't do certain things, it's easy to retrodict. By all rights, the vast majority of successful people should have just given up and come to reality without even trying. Sure, if we all send our intellects back to fourth grade and make really literal interpretations like "you mean I can fly?" then it gets ridiculous, but then we would be ridiculous. :)

I'm a lucky pessimist. I've done really well for my standards, and I'll be the first to admit that luck played a huge role. I don't think being naively optimistic is semi-necessary. It may help in not giving up when things are not going your way.

You can be a pessimist and still be persistent as hell. Sometimes you're pleasantly surprised, the rest of the time things just suck as expected :)

There is definitely something to being too dumb or optimistic to realize that what you're trying to do is much harder than you thought. Most entrepreneurs have encountered this.

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