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.
Your analysis seems to assume that the only form of motivation is external. By this logic, persistent/obstinant people do things because they hope for some external reward (e.g., praise, recognition, fame, possibly financial compensation). The difference is merely at the granularity of the goal this is attached to.
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.
Thanks, I thought the same but as you mentioned, there is no 100% intrinsic/extrinsic motivation. On the other hand there could be some self esteem problem within oneself which triggers motivation intrinsically but has external sources (i.e. childhood, always not enough, no unconditional love) so in the end there might not be a difference between internal and external.
I think the line between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation is very blurry.
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?
That’s a fantastic crystallizing idea. In my experience, I’ve tried to temper that dance between self drive and flexibility by reflecting on what overarching goals to commit to… the resulting sense of understanding and control at an overarching level like that is what has helped me.
Of course, the hard part is in knowing what goals to commit to, and what to back off from!
Having someone close who is obstinate makes the article very relatable (my father, talking him into something is like to talking to a stone, no matter how convincing you are and even if he seems to budge, it will take just a single moment to spring back).
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.
I think one solution is to help them have your idea and take credit for it. If it’s their idea then they are already convinced it’s a good one. Persistent people can get a lot done when they don’t care about who gets the credit.
The distinction you outline reminds me of Carol Dweck's "Growth Mindset" research. She suggests (based on studies) that children praised for being "smart" become afraid to take risks which might show them less than perfectly smart. They become consumed with "image maintenance" to the point of even tearing down peers so as to look "smarter" than them. By contrast, she suggests children praised for effort, learning, progress, and related things learn to be persistent even when things are difficult, uncertain, or have a learning curve. If the distinction you draw is correct, perhaps "obstinate" people were praised as smart and "persistent" people were praised for hard work and stick-to-it-iveness and related things?
"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 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.”
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.
> ultimately any personality superpower you have is going to bring some consequences along with it.
This has been my experience. Some of the most talented, kindest, people that I've ever known, have "rough" exteriors. Many times, it's due to being treated like crap, for their assets.
Counterpoint: contentment is a prerequisite for healthy sustained effort. It’s easy to get up every day and chisel away at something inch by inch - sometimes with little to no perceptible progress - when you are fulfilled elsewhere in your life.
But the obstinates are mostly failing. So it can't be important to them to be right. It's more important to them to be consistent. Changing your mind about something to them is backpedaling. They are letting down everyone else who believes the same stuff.
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.
Obstinant can just be a nay-sayer though? Someone who isn't even trying to solve the problem their way but someone getting in the way of problems being solved at all.
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.
Nay-sayers exist too, but I think they are out of scope for what PG is talking about. He's talking about the people actually working on solving a problem, not someone on the sidelines.
Right. It confused me but re-reading PG's post he's certainly making that distinction. Yeah- I have seen the bash your head against a wall and not take any input kind of stubborn.
That confusion does make this exact obstinate/persistent terminology tricky for conversations outside this particular HN thread, though. Which is a shame, because the underlying distinction as you've laid it out is very important.
> Content people who feel almost everyone already loves them rarely change the world.
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.
"Giving the world a solution" vs. "showing the world how flawlessly smart they are" reminds me of being "visited" by a genius (muse, inspiration). You now have the gift to share, but it doesn't show you're a genius.
Feels like you have hit a nail, but! Seems to be more to that introspective vs extraspective difference there! Obstinants are somehow more introspective! Which could be odd!
PG comes across as obstinate, by the way.. (in this essay, but maybe not in real life)
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).
> It’s a nonsensical word salad of half-baked conjectures and aphorisms.
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?!
I think articles like TFA are a big reason why so called "obstinate" people exist to begin with. Look at the incredibly harsh judgement it passes out on them. At one point it stops just short of directly calling them stupid.
The simple fact is people want to be good. People are afraid of being wrong. They are afraid of failure. They look for the one deep truth that will guide them and protect them from wrong. Once they believe they have found that truth, is anyone surprised that they cling to it?
TFA would have you believe these fears are irrational. Just keep at it, right? Just power through the judgement of your fellow humans. But it is not irrational. Nor is it stupid as TFA seems to imply. The simple fact is if you put yourself out there, there will be consequences. You will be judged.
I sent some code for an idea I had to a mailing list. At some point someone called it "schizophrenic". Maybe to you this is literally nothing, just an innocuous comment that promptly slides off. However, for a long time I actually thought I was insane for thinking and imagining the things that I did. I have to make an effort to suppress thoughts like that to even so much as write this comment on this website. So for me that was a particularly harsh judgement. I don't think I'll forget the moment I read that word until the day that I die. I will certainly never show my face there again.
It takes a certain audacity to put yourself out there. It takes a certain sociopathy, a certain arrogance. Succeed, and it actually leads to the judgement of your naysayers instead of you. They are quite literally judged by history as wrong. Such judgement is even observed in TFA, look at how the so called "obstinate" are singled out for being stupid failures. Such is the nature of humanity.
> It takes a certain audacity to put yourself out there. It takes a certain sociopathy, a certain arrogance.
I am sorry but you are taking things far too seriously. People have always had to "put themselves out there", it's part of living in a society rather than as a hermit. If you don't pull your weight in a tribe, others, not just you, may literally die, every hand counts. Others expect you do that, justifiably. Being judged is always going to be part of living in a society. But that's a good thing, not a bad thing! Learn to take criticism well. Some word someone said shouldn't affect you so strongly. Perhaps that was said by a 13 year old that doesn't know any better. Or by someone suffering from serious mental illness who finds some solace in trying to get other people on the internet disturbed.
Being judged as stupid is of course very harsh, but it's also not wrong sometimes. Do some people behave stupidly sometimes?? Of course they do, we all do. That doesn't make us bad people, and we shouldn't despair because we believe we have been categorized as stupid: we should definitely consider whether it's a fair assessment given the circumstances, and try to do better next time. Very smart people can, and do, behave stupidly, specially when talking about religion or politics. Even smart people can say the most stupid things. I think no one is very smart or very stupid in every context, there's always a context where you'd look totally stupid even if you're Albert Einstein. Imagine Mr. Einstein trying to hunt in a jungle in Africa. Even with practice, he'd probably never get good at it. His very way of thinking, very scientific and evidence driven, what we consider intelligent, would get him eaten in no time over there. What count there is being fast thinking, acting on instinct... that's how you survive there, and that's what you would count as "smart" if you lived there.
Anyway, hope some of what I say here helps someone :).
> as someone who recently published a Steam title and has glowing community reviews
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.
This is a great article on the difference between an obstinate person and a persistent person, but I'm not sure the general public perceives them the same way that Paul does.
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.
There are certain areas where the popular opinion is irrelevant. Warren Buffet said this in a more folksy way,
“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?”
> “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?”
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.
The options aren't meant to be realistic. They're only meant to tease out which side you personally have a preference for, by making you think about how these two extreme options make you feel. One probably feels worse than the other.
I mean, considered by whom? I'd like my partner's assessment of my ability as a lover to be more positive than my self-assessment. The reverse just sounds sociopathic.
There's an old anecdote where I think Pascal, but I'm not sure, argued the existence or non-existence of God in front of the king with another philosopher. Maybe-Pascal exclaimed loudly and with great confidence "A plus C equal B squared! Therefore God exists! COUNTER!" The other philosopher didn't know much about mathematics, had no idea to reply, got flustered, and "lost" the argument.[1]
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.
I had a similar issue recently. Someone suggested a technical solution that based on my experience has zero chance of being correct. It was said with great confidence that makes me doubt my experience. Great confidence but zero supporting details or experience. For someone observing from the side there's no way to tell who is right and my double-take doubting my own experiences can appear to make the extremely confident but likely wrong person be the right one. For someone that really knows stuff, being 100% confident on nuanced/complex issues is very hard, you're used to moving forward with 90% or 80% or 95% confidence. I.e. you're very likely right, but there are can be surprises or something you didn't anticipate. For someone confident but wrong they have like 100% confidence for something that's 0% chance of success. As you say, this is a lot more difficult when you're put on the spot, e.g. the CEO might question what's the right decision in a meeting (the king in your example.). Often there's not enough time for a deep study and even after studying a problem it might still not be 100%.
Yes, and there is an incentive problem too that people are rewarded for being decisive but rarely punished for being wrong. In many contexts the odds are really stacked against you if you have a strong opinion that deviates from the consensus which is perhaps why persistence is a trait that we valorize given that it does require real courage.
Euler, not Pascal, but the story is most likely apocryphal anyway. See http://www.fen.bilkent.edu.tr/~franz/M300/bell2.pdf , which contains a link to a PDF discussing (and dismissing) the original story, and is a nice read on its own.
>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.
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.
> 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.
this sounds like a certain kind of stubbornness. but i wonder if the collison brothers listen with predatory intensity to critiques or their business from random strangers in the same way they listen to pg. perhaps some discrimination is useful
The thing with GameStop being a meme stock is crazy. If they were smart they would have used their increased value to restructure the business and make it viable so that it would actually be worth what the stock is worth.
Well, it gets them out of your hair for 2.5 hours...
Unless they don't bother to watch it. Then it gets them out of your hair permanently, because they know they're supposed to watch it before hassling you about it again.
Fine artists who are known in the international art market do not take commissions. They also do not give buyers of a piece copyright (obviously both of these things are even more true if they are dead).
You also wouldn't be able to distinguish a fake painted for a few thousand dollars, much less so with a print or digital art, so the physical artifact is somewhat meaningless as well, at least as far as value goes. Collectors buy pieces and keep them in storage. They might buy a piece without ever laying eyes on the physical artifact.
The art market has always run on provenance and certificates of authenticity. You could argue that fine art is bullshit, and you can also that a blockchain is not necessary to keep track of certificates of authenticity, but arguing that the entire concept of art ownership without copyright is bullshit is to ignore what the reality of the art market has always been.
What digital assets are you referring to? During the NFT frenzy, the NFTs in question did not convey any assets that I'm aware of -- they transferred no unique physical artifacts, nor ownership of any copyrights or trademarks.
The NFTs just included public URLs pointing to files, so pepole were effectively buying and selling certificates of authenticity for artwork without owning the actual artwork itself!
However you want, but you can’t prevent it being copied or made “ununique” in any “real” way. Or somehow have control over the means by which it is consumed or produced.
Many places make money off of digital assets, but there’s no pretext of it somehow being scarce.
NFTs are not a good solution to buying artwork. They are a novel concept, but translating that to conventional problems around ownership is difficult and probably not the best solution.
Digital tickets for anything that uses tickets, deeds for transfer of real property, execution of contracts, etc.
Any use case in which some blob of data corresponds to an individually specifiable concrete thing is a suitable use case for NFTs.
The problem with the speculative frenzy a few years ago was that the NFTs in question did not convey ownership over anything -- people were trading the NFTs themselves rather than using them as deeds/contracts/tickets corresponding to some other external asset. If the NFTs were used to convey copyright ownership or exclusive usage rights to the underlying artwork, they'd have made a lot more sense, but as it played out, people were paying huge sums of money for what amounted to tickets to nowhere.
NFTs are a great solution for demonstrating provenance. They can function as digital certificates of authenticity for an asset. Treating them as assets themselves, though, is pretty ridiculous.
What I've found is that many times, people like the perceived confidence that obstinacy can bring.
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?"
Most people ain't steered by first-principles thinking, though, and that's the problem. To most people, first-principles-driven thinking lacks sufficient actionability; they just want definite answers, and first-principles-driven thinking tends to produce answers that are anything but definite.
First principles are great in principle, but what really makes for greater thinking is focusing on the reality and details of a problem, then picking applicable first principles. Often when I hear principled stances they’re entirely devoid of links between the real world and the utopia in the person’s head.
Could we say that biologically/culturally receptive to performed dominance and being dominant has nothing to do with rationally understand the world. I think this is the whole point of the jock/geek binary opposition in culture even though, as all oppositionnal pairs in culture, they are often porquenolosdossed : Some people can perform dominance and do master rationality quite well and some can do neither. Maybe we don't notice it either because they don't fit the cultural mental map or because they are not part of our social milieus (too high or too low status) ?
Yeah, "performed dominance" as you call it definitely is orthogonal to rationally understanding the world.
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.
This has been pretty much my experience as well, and honestly I think it's because most of the audience in any public forum hasn't ever needed to push through a complex project.
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.
I used to work for a corporation that was legendary for their Quality (note the capital "Q" -I got used to denoting it that way). They have been making precision optical gear for over a hundred years, and fetch many thousands, for their consumer (really, professional) kit. Thousands of successful people have built their entire careers around this company's gear.
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.
When I first joined Microsoft as an SDET back in 2006, the culture was such (at least in my org) that any SDET could halt shipping.
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.
This also reminds me of the 1-way vs 2-way doors analogy Bezos mentioned in his interview with Lex Fridman — sweat the 1-way door decisions, not the 2-way door decisions.
The Quality perspective seems more like persistence to me, attacking every potential issue (like Howard Hughes polishing rivets).
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.)
Wouldn't nuking a product after 18 months be the opposite of the wrong kind of stubborn if it's the right thing to do? That's exactly my problem with views like these, it's always the other party that is "obstinate" and doesn't listen, but what if after 18 months the product as a whole didn't meet enough expectations? Then it would be very obstinate to insist on releasing it anyway, and a more pragmatic way to reach the goal (which in this case is ultimately to have a successful company) would be to shelve the product and eat the loss. I'm not saying that's the case here, but I am sure those QA people feel like if you asked them.
It wasn't the wrong kind of stubborn. It was exactly the right thing to do, for this organization.
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.
I can't know what's correct there, but I don't need to. Ultimately it comes down to was it a success or not, for a company this basically means does it exist and is it profitable. In the alternate universe where things are done differently it could be better or worse. My main point is that whether it's the right or wrong stubborn depends on your point of view. Now Paul Graham has been very successful in business, but even there you might have different businesses. People took different approaches and were still successful. And business is just a narrow part of life. So what's bothering me here is that there are broad generalizations that in most cases come down to your point of view. This could ironically be interpreted as the wrong kind of stubborn.
My experience, is that folks can't deal with "it depends." We have to have "hard and fast" rules, to be applied in all contexts.
Determining "it depends" almost always requires scars and contusions. Less-experienced folks often have a much more difficult time, making these decisions, than folks that have been around the track a few times.
The folks that decided to cancel that project were very highly-placed executives. It wasn't an easy decision. However, one of my mistakes, was underestimating just how obstinate and change-averse, the QA people could be, and how much real power they wielded. If I had accepted this, I maybe could have saved the project. It was a hard lesson, but one I learned well.
That corporation made some serious mistakes, mainly from being so risk-averse, that they allowed their competitors to eat their lunch, and suffered a pretty big implosion. I suspect that they will do OK, in the long run, but they took a real beating. Ironically, the reason they survived that drubbing, was because of their fiscal conservatism.
"Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment."
> 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.
Or sell small amounts at a crazy margin. Getting rich is about profits not about sheer revenue.
I wish this article hit on an important point: when should the persistent quit? We all know we should know when to hold and when to fold, but in practice that's a hard decision to make especially when we're invested. And someone who is "persistent" vs "obstinate" should be able to do this: quit when it's right to do so.
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.
It's a paradox, expertise will tell you which one to pick (know when to quit | never give up). Tom Sachs called principals like these "Paradox Bullets". The movie: https://vimeo.com/293569057
Apologies, I was referring to the specific thing one is doing (and giving up on) as a node below the "do something great" headline.
That is you don't give up on the overarching objective "do something great" because you have realised that the something you are doing is not helping you achieve that headline goal.
I like his articles, but the artificial constructs sometimes drive me up the wall. After reading through a fairly rudimentary strawman about outcomes defining the difference between obstinacy and persistence, we reach the last paragraph that trades a poorly defined word (persistence) for five poorly defined words (imagination, focus, energy, judgement, resilience)
persistence is also defined by flexibility in thinking, appetite for risk/comfort with uncertainty, low ego. equally useless
I too like these Just So Stories of the Startup Underground, but damn, they come off like Malcolm Gladwell forming a taxonomy of the kids that got it vs the kids that don't.
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've found that properties and other traits in people can be malleable and change over time.
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.
The marshmellow test was debunked. Turns out like many if these bad experiments when you factor socioeconomic status the test cannot be reproduced. Turns out poor hungry kids just tend to eat free food when its available.
HN downvoting scientific studies... I'm worried that this site has reached its eternal September. A huge loss since reddit went public and killed all real discussion, this was one of the last places with intelligent discourse.
> "The persistent are attached to the goal. The obstinate are attached to their ideas about how to reach 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.
> Persistence and obstinacy often overlap in practice, sharing traits like energy, imagination, resilience, good judgment, focus on a goal, and listening intently.
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.
> Obstinacy is defined by a lack of imagination, good judgement, and intent listening
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.
"Confidence is belief in yourself. Certainty is belief in your beliefs. Confidence is a bridge. Certainty is a barricade." - Kevin Ashton, "How To Fly A Horse"
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
I liked PG's essays better when they were more concretely rooted in the details of his work his work at his startup and at YC. This one feels like a sort of non-specific variant of Bulverism - diagnose a bunch of people without presenting evidence, then start psychoanalysing them (also without evidence).
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.
There's pretty clear, stat sig relationships between personality traits like OCEAN/Big 5 and lifetime income. Even less scientific categorization like Myers-Briggs have the most successful types earning double the least successive types in massive surveys.
Might be worth considering that in a specific example or context this may make sense, but zoom out further you will find that goals are solutions and solutions are goals.
It's a hierarchy, as Paul referred to as a "tree".
Each node in the acyclic graph is connected to a "why" node above it (goal) and a "how" node below it (solution).
OKRs reflect this in an organization.
People make decisions based on their values hierarchy, implicit or explicit.
If this isn't easy to follow maybe an example will help...
Let's say I have a goal of "provide reliable shelter for my family", the solution may be to "buy a house". Buying a house is also a goal, which maybe is slightly out of reach. So my solution is to "save a large portion of my income" and "secure a high paying job", these are also goals. The solution to saving may be a fintech app, discipline, good communication with my spouse, etc.. every solution is a goal with its own solutions and you can follow this tree down until you get into really specific motor tasks like taking a credit card out of a wallet or opening a door or turning the key to start a car.
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day."
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 became aware of this quite recently (on this site too IIRC), but it's worth noting that the "growth mindset" findings of the last several decades haven't quite panned out or been replicable upon further review: https://matheducators.stackexchange.com/questions/24418/are-...
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.
Not sure if this is such a great goal after all. Investors like PG treat people like racehorses: they have thousands to pick from when placing their bets. But you and I have just the one "horse" to work with - ourselves - quirks, inefficiencies and all. And perhaps we should just play to our strength rather than contorting ourselves to fit a gambler's ideal. Peter Drucker seems to agree.
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.
I often wonder into which of these two categories I fall with my epaper calendars.
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).
Sounds like a marketing problem. It wouldn't be weird at all to see that at every bookstore in the country. So why isn't it there? Are you focusing on making the product better forever, instead of getting it in front of people, or tuning it to what they are most eager to pay for, or tuning the website to get more sales? What beliefs are causing you to make that mistake? Are you scared of those parts, and therefore avoiding them and convincing yourself they're not important?
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.
Well, I'm no expert, but I can say what I think. First, your product looks awesome.
But I do think the landing page is a _little_ less good than it probably could be, but I'm not sure I can say exactly why. I bet there is some company out there that could take this thing from an obscure product to a Christmas staple, if they got their hands on it. Maybe there is a way that you could do it in a profit-sharing way so you're not taking a financial risk yourself. After all that is the point of venture capital also: they fund the endeavor and then own part of it.
My one suggestion would be de-emphasizing "you can do whatever you want with it" and emphasizing "here are the things that you can easily do with it". Because most people aren't gonna do any customization, or at least, will be intimidated by that. The ideal impression is that I might impulse-buy it because it's a cool desktop calendar, but then use it in other ways afterwards, and power users might get it for the customization features.
(couple other small things: that _particular_ NYT article makes kind of a weird impression. Maybe make something that doesn't involve a picture of Trump? People hate Trump and they hate seeing pictures of him also. Also, the phrase "an acquired taste" is not worth including. Black and white is stylish! someone who wants that is going to already know they like it.)
hey, thank you for the comments. I think these are all good points.
I will try to get some help with marketing, maybe also find a distributor etc.
As you pointed out, I am especially struggling around the question of how to market the different features, and how much to market the customisation options.
And I will try to choose a more neutral article for the website photo. I didn't think about the impression it could leave.
That's cool. The news front-page screenshot & calendar use-cases appeal to me. (Although, it seems like I could just do the news FP thing myself, with "Any image URL", rather than your $3/mo service.)
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?
Are you using something like an ESP32 to run the thing? I ask because a lot of them have a surprising amount of random sensors tacked on, like accelerometers. (capacitive, and hall-effect sensors too) Auto-orientation is probably a thing you'd need to design for though.
Exactly, the market he is trying to serve has the customer as his own competitor. That is a bad position to be in. I wouldn't want to be my own customer, would you?
Two recommendations.
1) Go wireless with enough power for like 500 screen updates for 6 weeks between recharges.
2) Find a market where your customers can't make the product
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.
1.) I don't like your name. Your computers are not invisible. They are definitely visible. If you were making an Alexa/Siri smart speaker computer that you hid in the walls, that would make sense to call it Invisible Computers.
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.
First, change the image at the top of that link to show the different apps. Right it's calendars until below the fold (on a desktop), and I didn't scroll down because "eh, physical calendar, not interested". Also, apparently I did not read the text very carefully (maybe because clearly it's a calendar, it says so in the link) and didn't notice the "other apps" bit for several minutes.
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.
I have a shorthand: I respect people who are looking for the right answer, rather than trying to be right. Ignores intelligence etc.
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.
I can't be the only person who doesn't want to be a successful person. Most problems worth solving won't be solved in a way that benefits individuals in the manner described. Optimizing for self-gain just leads to more investors and fewer problems getting solved.
I do really think that PG often glosses over what he really means when he says "success." From a critical view, you could interpret the word to mean solely financial/economic success. Given his occupation, I would imagine that's his intention with the term.
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.
> But if you replace that term with something like "virtue" or "eudaimonia"
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.
Excellent article that really delivers on the difference between obstinacy and persistence. However, I think its thesis uncovers a hidden IQ correlation.
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.
Within the context of persistent people at the top of the decision tree, how often are persistent people labeled obstinate because they disagree with another persistent person (likely their boss) on a decision that will likely lead to 2 separate but nearly successful outcomes?
None of this matters, not even PGs post, but it's the comment section, so here we are...
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. :)
Alignment in the context of a firm (industrial organization) is important.. you can be as "right" as you want but misaligned with your boss and you will have all power removed from you..
"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..."
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?
Some do that humility was the mother of all virtues in the same way that pride is the mother of all vices ... I don't have any data to back it up either way, but I would say anecdotally (and thus providing a single datum), "yes".
I once inherited a very thorny performance problem with a service. Thorny as in, the previous engineer was ordered to give up and move on because our boss was worried it was adversely affecting their mental health and their performance on other tasks.
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.
No. My boss kept me busy with other things. After the work my colleague had done, he was convinced that we weren't going to solve it, and the idea that I was going to get to work on it turned out to be kind of a white lie so the original engineer could mentally let go and get his sanity back. I didn't have many fresh ideas anyway.
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.
Considering how many founders he's come into contact with, I'm curious why PG chose the Collison Brothers as the exemplary persistent entrepreneurs. Perhaps it's their inclination to tackle complex and unwieldy regulatory challenges that most tech founders shy away from?
I think the essay would benefit from adding examples for "obstinate". Surely there must be specific characters from fiction (or history) that he can reference to better support his argument (without offending anyone living).
One world that should be in capital letters at the top is hidden in the footnotes at the bottom, luck. A much simpler theory is, the difference between stubbornness and persistence is that losers are labeled as stubborn and winners are labeled as persistent, simply as a post-hoc rationalization based on outcome rather than any grandiose internal differences.
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.
Imo, PG's latest essays have been meandering, overly political, and far outside of his core competency. This feels like an oldschool 2009-era startup-focused chicken soup for the soul with some actionable takeaways.
> When you point out problems, their eyes glaze over, and their replies sound like ideologues talking about matters of doctrine
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.
People often ignore evolutionary psychology. You should ask the question why do humans have these bad traits and tendencies? Because these traits helped us dominate in the game of the survival of the fittest.
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.
It’s just bad luck and survival instinct. Stubborn genes end up in a position of power and then they cling to it. For a stupid, stubborn king, it’s sometimes easier (more selfish, evolutionary fit) to just kill the intelligent court advisor or jester than to acknowledge mistakes and give up power for the benefit of the state. In a game of thrones, absolute reason gives in to back stabbing. Also beauty and strength sometimes don’t have the patience for intelligence and outsource it or kill it if it gets in the way of self propagation.
This is an extreme oversimplification based probably on the author's surroundings. I've met people recently who are extremely successful and good at persistently hacking away at a problem from different angles, but turns out are horrible listeners. In some of them however I've noticed they also have a tendency to stick to their initial solution, although not always. Simultaneously I am a pretty good listener, but noticed recently I stick to my plan more, sometimes too long, which is the opposite of my younger self that also hacked away at problems pretty persistently until they were solved. This potentially has something to do with a general loss of interest in solving some problems or types of problems (e.g. I'd done it in some form a dozen times).
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.
He put it very nicely that stubborn people are like a boat under full throttle (will take a while to slow down), and obstinate people are like a boat that has no rudder (unwilling or unable to change direction).
It is a nice distinction coming from someone who is habitually stubborn and can border on obstinate if not checked.
I would say the difference is that there’s no new evidence that would change an obstinate person’s mind, whereas a persistent person knows what evidence it would take to change their mind, sees it’s not happening, and maintains confidence in their position.
Sort of obvious, but he expertly made the distinction very clear and maybe even made it look easy. The extreme of obstinate is insanity: "The definition of insanity is -- doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result."
> 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.
> 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?
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?
Both persistence and obstinance are somewhat social.
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 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."
"The persistent are attached to the goal. The obstinate are attached to their ideas about how to reach it."
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)
> The persistent are quite rational. They focus on expected value.
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.”
Montaigne, in 'on the education of children' agrees:
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;
I'm sure I'm a mix of both. I'm stubborn when it comes to things I care about but don't understand how to navigate. I'm persistent about problems I'm confident I can navigate even when they are hard. But I can also give up on either problem when I run out of either joy or necessity.
The adage should be "the definition of obstinacy is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results". However, some obtusely obstinate people keep hanging on to it being "the definition of insanity ...". Moreover, they persist in misattributing it to Einstein.
I think the term tenacious fits better than persistent here.
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.
This sounds wishy washy to me. So the difference between persistent and obstinate is up to the individual? Or consensus? In other words, what would be an example of someone who was persistent and not obstinate but didn’t succeed?
Funnily enough, 'obstinate' was one of the first words I picked up in ESL, fresh off the boat. I loved throwing it into conversations just to practice and feel smart... And here I am, years later, reflecting on that word.
I think there maybe more than the five qualities that comprise persistence. But those five make a lot of sense and I like how he shows their interplay. Good read!
"The persistent are attached to the goal. The obstinate are attached to their ideas about how to reach it.
...
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.
A surprising amount of wildly successful people disregard evidence that conflicts with their worldview. This essay suggests that they are wrong kind of stubborn, but real world outcomes suggest otherwise.
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.
Context or domain shifting is how I tend to think of that skill and for me it is very visceral and spatial. the ability to shift between different contexts or domains and then much like walking into a new room, or getting off a plane in a new country or taking a staircase to a new level, you are exposed to new routes and options but you old ones leave you and to leave the area is to once again change contexts and return.
I suspect that obstinance this is rooted in strong black/white thinking. I don't really know how this works for these people and can't experience it myself because I have just one brain. While I am flawed in many ways, I am not flawed in that particular way. I don't really understand how this works.
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).
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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.
It's interesting to use these guidelines to evaluate dating prospects. Is this guy a persistent catch, or a stubborn creep? Don't know why, but "stubborn catch" and "persistent creep" sound like better matchups, because you'd be okay with using the word "stubborn" on yourself?
Who wouldn't kill for a foolproof way to generate Collison brothers on cue, from cheap inputs. Now that we've heard the arguments for talent recognition, what are some prospects for talent development?
You state this as fact without providing a dataset to back it. I think
this is not true at all.
> most of the most successful people on the planet write little or nothing
It depends on how you define "success".
I would consider people like Linus and Dwayne Richard Hipp and TBL to
be among the most successful people on the planet, and they write
quite a lot.
Do you call people who capture then give away a billion dollars the
most successful? I don't. To me the most successful are the ones who
create billions in wealth and capture just a tiny fraction--enough to
support their family and friends and live a good life.
> You state this as fact without providing a dataset to back it. I think this is not true at all.
Look at your own comments. My comment is effectively "people whose day job is to write, write the most". It's borderline self evident.
Your argument has devolved into: "people who write a lot are by definition successful. I wonder if there is a correlation between writing a lot and success."
lol - so your opinions are valid, everyone else must bring data.
Here the dumb thing about this - almost anything worth discussing is uncertain, else it wouldn't be discussed. If the only way you can change your mind is for someone to present an absolute, water tight, backed up by data argument, you'll never change your mind. You make several assertions in this thread with zero data.
It seems that "wants attention", "managing career", "promoting x" are 99% of written content these days... There was a very small window where writing really did signal someone who was thoughtful, and there are still some thoughtful writers, but it's so rare now you can almost rely on the rubric "oh they write, run".
> 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.
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.