This feels to me like the result of very specific/narrow criteria for “success” and personal ambition, which haven’t applied to most people I hang out with. (Except for becoming more risk-averse about things that have high tail risk or might destabilize one’s life once you have kids, which seems very reasonable to me and a worthwhile tradeoff for the category of person who values having children a lot.) In particular, the nurses I worked with didn’t come off to me as feeling constrained-by-success in this way.
I currently both feel pleased with my life trajectory, and also like I have a lot of freedom to go in a completely different direction this year if I want. My original undergraduate degree and job were in ICU nursing, I later pivoted to nonprofit operations & finance work, and then left that to work on writing a novel. I’m considering whether I want to continue with writing or do a programming or data science bootcamp (both of which I have minimal background in), and both of these feel like very viable options. It’s...honestly kind of hard for me to imagine what it would be like to be reluctant to start learning a new skill I know very little about, and I’m definitely not worried about being judged by my peer group for it. I do think I’m pretty lucky in what peer group I have, and also in having a background that doesn’t lend itself to people having those expectations of me.
It’s...honestly kind of hard for me to imagine what it would be like to be reluctant to start learning a new skill I know very little about, and I’m definitely not worried about being judged by my peer group for it.
Curious if you’ve had anything like the following experiences: most Starcraft players I know only play the one race they picked up in the first couple weeks of play, and finds switching races difficult psychologically (more so than learning the game fresh). Most DOTA players I know only play one role (or two similar ones) out of five and find picking up other roles difficult.
(One of) the feature(s) I’m pointing out is that nobody has to be mean or judge you for you to feel bad for switching...because you start losing a lot.
I suspect with Starcraft there might be the issue of… conflicting intuitions/muscle-memories? Muscle-memory mix-ups sometimes happen when you learn 2 things that have similar cues, and avoiding those mistakes can cost you in reaction-time.
If there’s a batch of early-game keystrokes you need to drill into muscle-memory to begin a Zerg play, and a different batch of keystrokes for a Protoss play, having them mash-up on you under stress is a setback on both skillsets.
A more glaring example: learning to ride left-right reversed bikes is likely to disrupt your ability to do regular bike-riding for some time.
I’d have suspected that for things as different as baseball and basketball, this probably wouldn’t apply as much. (And if you commit HARD to the switch, it’s probably not as big of an issue; just a hill to climb initially, then smooth sailing for a while, but some transition-time needed when you switch back.)
...but the Michael Jordan article actually mentions that there was at least one case where MJ followed basketball intuitions to run more bases than anyone else thought was optimal. So the “misapplied cross-field intuitions” disadvantage might still have a role here.
(Something something generalizability vs hyperspecialization trade-off)
I related hard to the dota thing because that happened to me. After 5k hours spent honing one role… I couldn’t switch. Nobody judged me but I hate losing and that was enough to sour it.
Uh, I haven’t strongly had that experience, I think mainly because my life hasn’t contained that much in the way of competitive games with very legible winning metrics? One of the “switching skills” cases I’m thinking of is when I was hired for an operations role, and most of my previous experience was in volunteer event logistics, but for a bunch of contingent reasons I ended up instead focusing on finance work (largely because the person previously doing that was now spending most of their time on other work, and the team already had a person with a lot of skill at event-running.) This did mean I was going from an area where I felt comfortable and had a sense of mastery to one where I felt very inexperienced and sometimes overwhelmed, and made more mistakes as a result, but I don’t think it parsed to me or anyone else on the team as “losing”? There was work that needed doing, it was my comparative advantage if not absolute advantage, and me doing it imperfectly was much better than it not happening.
I play StarCraft 1 month a year, and it’s true, I stick with Protoss. Although now that you mention it, next time I play I’ll play Terran to see what happens...
But I also learn bits of languages frequently and maintain 2 foreign languages, and although there is always some switching cost with languages, it’s not competitive and so the costs to switching are low.
This feels to me like the result of very specific/narrow criteria for “success” and personal ambition
Agreed. I think it would be great to factor the term “success” into more descriptive and specific terms. But at the same time, for the purpose of this post I think the usage of the word is clear and there isn’t really a need to disambiguate.
At least for the purpose of communicating. Maybe it’s worth it for the purpose of nudging society towards thinking about success differently.
This feels to me like the result of very specific/narrow criteria for “success” and personal ambition, which haven’t applied to most people I hang out with. (Except for becoming more risk-averse about things that have high tail risk or might destabilize one’s life once you have kids, which seems very reasonable to me and a worthwhile tradeoff for the category of person who values having children a lot.) In particular, the nurses I worked with didn’t come off to me as feeling constrained-by-success in this way.
I currently both feel pleased with my life trajectory, and also like I have a lot of freedom to go in a completely different direction this year if I want. My original undergraduate degree and job were in ICU nursing, I later pivoted to nonprofit operations & finance work, and then left that to work on writing a novel. I’m considering whether I want to continue with writing or do a programming or data science bootcamp (both of which I have minimal background in), and both of these feel like very viable options. It’s...honestly kind of hard for me to imagine what it would be like to be reluctant to start learning a new skill I know very little about, and I’m definitely not worried about being judged by my peer group for it. I do think I’m pretty lucky in what peer group I have, and also in having a background that doesn’t lend itself to people having those expectations of me.
Curious if you’ve had anything like the following experiences: most Starcraft players I know only play the one race they picked up in the first couple weeks of play, and finds switching races difficult psychologically (more so than learning the game fresh). Most DOTA players I know only play one role (or two similar ones) out of five and find picking up other roles difficult.
(One of) the feature(s) I’m pointing out is that nobody has to be mean or judge you for you to feel bad for switching...because you start losing a lot.
I suspect with Starcraft there might be the issue of… conflicting intuitions/muscle-memories? Muscle-memory mix-ups sometimes happen when you learn 2 things that have similar cues, and avoiding those mistakes can cost you in reaction-time.
If there’s a batch of early-game keystrokes you need to drill into muscle-memory to begin a Zerg play, and a different batch of keystrokes for a Protoss play, having them mash-up on you under stress is a setback on both skillsets.
A more glaring example: learning to ride left-right reversed bikes is likely to disrupt your ability to do regular bike-riding for some time.
I’d have suspected that for things as different as baseball and basketball, this probably wouldn’t apply as much. (And if you commit HARD to the switch, it’s probably not as big of an issue; just a hill to climb initially, then smooth sailing for a while, but some transition-time needed when you switch back.)
...but the Michael Jordan article actually mentions that there was at least one case where MJ followed basketball intuitions to run more bases than anyone else thought was optimal. So the “misapplied cross-field intuitions” disadvantage might still have a role here.
(Something something generalizability vs hyperspecialization trade-off)
I related hard to the dota thing because that happened to me. After 5k hours spent honing one role… I couldn’t switch. Nobody judged me but I hate losing and that was enough to sour it.
Uh, I haven’t strongly had that experience, I think mainly because my life hasn’t contained that much in the way of competitive games with very legible winning metrics? One of the “switching skills” cases I’m thinking of is when I was hired for an operations role, and most of my previous experience was in volunteer event logistics, but for a bunch of contingent reasons I ended up instead focusing on finance work (largely because the person previously doing that was now spending most of their time on other work, and the team already had a person with a lot of skill at event-running.) This did mean I was going from an area where I felt comfortable and had a sense of mastery to one where I felt very inexperienced and sometimes overwhelmed, and made more mistakes as a result, but I don’t think it parsed to me or anyone else on the team as “losing”? There was work that needed doing, it was my comparative advantage if not absolute advantage, and me doing it imperfectly was much better than it not happening.
I play StarCraft 1 month a year, and it’s true, I stick with Protoss. Although now that you mention it, next time I play I’ll play Terran to see what happens...
But I also learn bits of languages frequently and maintain 2 foreign languages, and although there is always some switching cost with languages, it’s not competitive and so the costs to switching are low.
Agreed. I think it would be great to factor the term “success” into more descriptive and specific terms. But at the same time, for the purpose of this post I think the usage of the word is clear and there isn’t really a need to disambiguate.
At least for the purpose of communicating. Maybe it’s worth it for the purpose of nudging society towards thinking about success differently.