On thinkers and doers (2022)
40 comments
·May 11, 2025tangue
And talkers… How many thinkers died without self promoting their ideas ? How many doers didn’t have the ressources to execute their ideas ?
okr
Isn't a doer without ressources a thinker?
J0nL
They're wasted potential. Burnout isn't necessarily from overwork, it comes from pouring your heart and soul into things that you never get the satisfaction of seeing completed.
nchmy
Burnout is not from failing to complete things. Most work never truly "succeeds". It comes from trying hard to do good work, and having it sabotaged, prevented, micromanaged, and even punished etc...
evanharwin
I wonder if social media could actually be a really positive push for the “small stakes big thinkers” type, in some cases.
There’s loads of great content on YouTube for example, with channels doing genuine and interesting science and experimentation in public. Channels like Breaking Taps, Journey to the Microcosmos, The Thought Emporium, all come to mind, for me. I’m sure you can think of others.
More hackernews-coded, perhaps, there’s also lots of cool small blogs positing some pretty neat ideas… although, sites like YouTube might arguably provide easier access to finance for sustaining these people!
cadamsdotcom
In the mid to late 20th century seeds were planted; of ideas & inventions we now take for granted.
Then progress exploded! Quality of life massively expanded.
Now: a slowdown. Stuff still gets made yet we feel disenchanted.
It never stopped being a good time to planting more idea-seeds.
Tenure sounds a lot like basic income. Maybe it’s a coincidence.
karmakaze
> Toulouse noted that Poincaré kept very regular hours. He did his hardest thinking between 10 a.m. and noon, and again between 5 and 7 in the afternoon. The 19th century’s most towering mathematical genius worked just enough to get his mind around a problem—about four hours a day.
The two 2-hour hard thinking hours chart was the most useful takeaway for me.
accrual
Reminds me of a quote (paraphrasing), "a vector without a force is not a useful vector". I thought it was by Theo de Raadt (OpenBSD team lead), but not finding it in a search.
The opposite makes sense too, a vector with magnitude but no direction isn't super useful on its own either.
kookamamie
Cookie Policy cannot be accepted on mobile. Chrome/iOS.
mistrate
Have been noticing this recently with substack.
What works for me on iOS is to first scroll down until the "subscribe" splash, close it, and then reject the cookies.
Sometimes I still need to click some combination of "only necessary" and "reject" a few more times
chgs
Sad thing is the performance and experience would be far better if they didn’t ask me to set some unnecessary cookies.
But then they couldn’t sell my data.
blankx32
Same, reader mode to avoid
fluidcruft
No problems whatsoever with Firefox Focus/Android.
konmaz
Same on Chrome/Android
andrewrn
An article I enjoyed about leisure’s role in breakthroughs, in addition to hard work.
betterThanTexas
I'm struggling to figure out why you'd pick Musk as an example of a doer when you also can't distinguish coalescing money and talent from the thing money and talent does. What distinguishes doers from capital being capital? How do you distinguish between a "generational genius" and a useful idiot?
mpnsk1
I think you hit the nail on the head why we are in a doers world. Musk is a good representation for doers not because of what he does and achieves, but because of the way he whips his employees into shape.
He is very vocally against giving resources to thinkers and letting them slow cook.
betterThanTexas
I suppose. It's difficult to view capital as "doing" anything but entrenching itself. We're still stuck with the same power structures as we had before; none of neuralink or starlink or tesla or spacex will fundamentally change anything about our world.
Like, it is true that capital is responsible for the charging networks being deployed across america. But it's this same deployment of resources that is also responsible for my needing a damn car to do anything in life, and it has zero plan on doing anything about that.
I find the analysis of this without addressing what should people be doing do be a nearly useless view of humanity. What can be gleaned from this aside from seeing that the people with the greatest impact care the least about their impact?
asdf6969
Starlink is one of the few inventions that really could fundamentally change everything. It’s an enormous expansion of viable lifestyles and places to live. I know people who use it at the cottage, on a boat, while camping, etc. and if WFH + personal electricity generation (solar) improves the Jeffersonian yeoman software engineer fantasy could be real.
It really would fundamentally change my life and my relationship to power structures if I didn’t have to bend my whole life around living “in the system”.
Alternatively, Elon could just disable my life if I post something he doesn’t like online so maybe we’re not there yet…
Completely agree about neuralink and tesla
J0nL
There's a thing in psychology called "Lucky Fool Syndrome" where people tend to take credit for success that was the result of dumb luck. Space-X was one launch failure away from oblivion when they got insanely lucky.
"A lucky fool doesn't know they're lucky."
somethingsome
I'm not sold, there are thinkers and doers in both camps..
At some levels there is no line anymore.
EdwardDiego
> Which is why he has undeniably succeeded in doing incredibly hard things, things that many (most) said were well nigh impossible.
> Built an EV car company, operating at scale
He bought into a pre-existing company.
> Produced batteries for those cars at scale
How is the 4680 going? And is BYD eating its lunch yet? Last I looked they losing court cases over a particular dry cathode patent.
And well, BYD's new fast charging tech is far more performant than Tesla superchargers, multiple car makers (including Tesla!) are using their batteries not the 4680, so...
> Launched brand new self-made rockets to space, at scale, including catching them on a ship when they fell back from the sky!
That is indeed pretty cool, but did Elon actually do that? Also, how's Starship looking? Can it take more payload to orbit than a Falcon Heavy yet? Is it exploding less often?
> Bored tunnels cheaply
[citations really needed] If they can do this, the Boring Company isn't capitalising on it, I see a lot of cancelled projects, and only one where the public actually uses it (in Las Vegas).
But hey, Elon's definitely a doer, just you know, sometimes he's doing things that are very bad for the companies involved.
If he could stop trying to micromanage his companies, and just trust the very very very smart people who work there, and maybe I dunno, turn back time and not get radicalised on the Internet because his child transitioned, and avoid getting involved in politics in the absolute worst way possible, he'd accomplish so much more.
Someone once told me that Tesla and SpaceX largely succeeded in spite of Elon, and it rings true.
But I feel mean-spirited commenting this on a 3 year old post, that feels like an eternity ago in the Muskverse.
andrewrn
Man people really get hung up on the fact that he wasn’t there when Tesla was incorporated. Does that disqualify him from having done the heavy lifting in the 20+ year life of Tesla?
I’m ambivalent about the dude on a lot of points but I wish people would stop parroting that point as if it means anything.
Robotbeat
I can see how someone arrives at this if they have a pretty hermetically sealed information environment, but if you actually talk to people who worked extensively with Musk, it’s clear how laughably false it is.
EdwardDiego
My comments or the original? Happy to be illuminated if you have the time.
dotcoma
They lost me at Elon Musk’s wonderful Boring tunnels.
My first big startup had the following on the cover of the business plan (it disrupted consulting):
“Some think, Some do, Some both, But few”.
Got that from a lecturer.