Mental traps that afflict the ambitious

Back in 2008 I thought Paul Krugman was insane. The USA was facing a crisis caused by too much debt, and Krugman said the answer to this was to issue more debt. The argument was counter-intuitive, to an extreme degree. However, it wasn’t the first time Krugman had said something crazy. In 1994 he had said the growth of the “4 Tigers” in Asia would have to end soon, and in 1997 he was proven right. Given the blazing speed with which the Tigers were growing in 1994, I remember reading Krugman’s essay and thinking he was not only wrong, but irrational and stupid — he was arguing against common sense. But then the crisis came around in 1997 and it played largely as he had suggested. I was amazed.

Likewise, his argument in 2008 seemed ludicrous. But I’d already learned that he was capable of making counter-intuitive arguments that turned out to be true, so I started reading his weblog everyday, so could get a better understanding of what he was saying. On every metric that might matter to an investor (bond prices, inflation, growth, etc) Krugman has been right about everything since 2008. He counter-intuitive arguments turned out to be true. This has taught me a certain amount of humility.

I thought of all that when I read this essay, comparing pundits to chess players. The pundit who predicts revolution in some country, 20 years from now, gets very little feedback about whether they are right or wrong, whereas a chess player learns about their mistakes after just a few moves.

In chess, for example, you pretty quickly discover whether you made a smart move or a disastrous error, and it’s even more obvious in other sports (when practicing free-throws, it’s pretty obvious if the ball misses the net). As a result, chess players can try different tactics and learn which ones work and which don’t. Our pundit is not so lucky. Predicting a wave of revolutions in the next twenty years can feel very exciting at the time, but it will be twenty years before you learn whether it was a good idea or not. It’s hard to get much deliberate practice on that kind of time frame.

I’ve noticed very ambitious people often fall into this sort of trap. Any old slob can predict what will happen tomorrow, they think, but I want to be truly great, so I will pick a much harder challenge: I will predict what will happen in a hundred years. It comes in lots of forms: instead of building another silly site like Instagram, I will build an artificial intelligence; instead of just doing another boring experiment, I will write a grand work of social theory.

But being great isn’t as easy as just picking a hard goal — in fact, picking a really hard goal avoids reality almost as much as picking a really easy one. If you pick an easy goal, you know you’ll always succeed (because it’s so easy); if you pick a really hard one, you know you’ll never fail (because it will always be too early to tell). Artificial intelligence is a truly big problem — how can you possibly expect us to succeed in just a decade? But we’re making great progress, we swear.

The trick is to set yourself lots of small challenges along the way. If your startup is eventually going to make a million dollars, can it start by making ten? If your book is going to eventually persuade the world, can you start by persuading your friends? Instead of pushing all your tests for success way off to the indefinite future, see if you can pass a very small one right now.

And it’s important that you test for the right thing. If you’re writing a program that’s supposed to make people’s lives easier, what’s important is not whether they like your mockups in focus groups; it’s whether you can make a prototype that actually improves their lives.

One of the biggest problems in writing self-help books is getting people to actually take your advice. It’s not easy to tell a compelling story that changes the way people view their problems, but it turns out to be a lot easier than writing something that will actually persuade someone to get up off the couch and change the way they live their life. There are some things writing is really good at, but forcing people to get up and do something isn’t one of them.

The irony, of course, is that the books are totally useless unless you take their advice. If you just keep reading them, thinking “that’s so insightful! that changes everything,” but never actually doing anything different, then pretty quickly the feeling will wear off and you’ll start searching for another book to fill the void. Chris Macleod calls this “epiphany addiction”: “Each time they feel like they’ve stumbled on some life changing discovery, feel energized for a bit without going on to achieve any real world changes, and then return to their default of feeling lonely and unsatisfied with their life. They always end up back at the drawing board of trying to think their way out of their problem, and it’s not long before they come up with the latest pseudo earth shattering insight.”7