Being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage

> the "taste-skill discrepancy." Your taste (your ability to recognize quality) develops faster than your skill (your ability to produce it). This creates what Ira Glass famously called "the gap," but I think of it as the thing that separates creators from consumers.

This resonated quite strongly with me. It puts into words something that I've been feeling when working with AI. If you're new to something and using AI for it, it automatically boosts the floor of your taste, but not your skill. And you end up never slowing down to make mistakes and learn, because you can just do it without friction.

In the spirit of July 4, John Lewis Gaddis explores a similar theme in "On Grand Strategy". This is one of my favourite explorations, where he compares Abraham Lincoln and John Quincy Adams:

> Compare Lincoln’s life with that of John Quincy Adams. Great expectations inspired, pursued, and haunted Adams, depriving him, at critical moments, of common sense. Overestimations by others—which he then magnified—placed objectives beyond his reach: only self-demotion brought late-life satisfaction. No expectations lured Lincoln apart from those he set for himself: he started small, rose slowly, and only when ready reached for the top. His ambitions grew as his opportunities expanded, but he kept both within his circumstances. He sought to be underestimated.

The point -- being too ambitious can slow you down if you're not strategic.

The first two sections reminded me of an observation I've made about myself: the more I delay "doing the thing" and spend time "researching" or "developing taste", the more I turn into a critic instead of a creator.

> Your taste develops faster than your skill

> "the quality group could tell you why a photograph was excellent"

They are critics now. People with a huge taste-skill gap are basically critics — first towards themselves and gradually towards others. I don't want to generalize by saying "critics are just failed creators", but I've certainly found it true for myself. Trying to undo this change in me and this article kind of said all the words I wanted to hear. :)

It's both dense and beautifully written. Feels like every paragraph has something profound to say. This kind of "optimizing-for-screenshot-shares" writing usually gets overdone, but since this actually had substance, it was amazing to read.

(See how I turned into a critic?)

This resonates a lot with me. In fact it's a trait that has made me unhappy for as long as I can remember.

I'm seeing a therapist later this month because in a talk with my GP she saw strong enough hints of ADHD to send me there, and the kind of situations and some feelings and situations talked about in the article came up a lot in the conversation.

I size up my oil paints against the old masters, not the old ladies in the atelier. I paint miniatures way better than average but hang around with Golden Demon winners so I always find myself wanting. Can play beautiful Renaissance pieces on my uke, but infuriatingly not at a professional performance level. Can win many sim races, but not against the top 0.1%, yet I size myself against their telemetry and laptimes. I dabble in Chess but being forever stuck around lowly 1300 ELO makes me feel dumb. My dead side projects cemetery has subdirectories approaching 3 figures. I go out and cycle with my brother but I huff and puff while he tops the Strava segments and wins the regional amateur championship again.

So too many days I just sit and do nothing, or just look for something else to enjoy for a few months until I become an unhappy promising beginner at yet another thing, adding to the overall problem.

I’m very good at one thing (thank goodness), but I do some other things that I’m not good at, to remind myself how nice it feels to just do something without the pressure of having to be good at it.

I also think being a beginner at other things reminds me that failure is what learning feels like, which gives me some perspective when my “real” job feels difficult although I’m supposedly so good at it.

When I look back at big things I’ve done, they’re all the result of just “doing the thing” for a long time and making thousands of course corrections. Never the result of executing the perfect crystalline plan.

What is "too ambitious"?

Are there dreamers who overthink and never get anything done? Absolutely!

Are there also people who do what other people regularly say is impossible? Also an absolute yes.

Ambition has nothing to do with it. There are doers and there are talkers.

Recognizing delusions is probably the highest form of wisdom. It can help us avoid entire wasted lives.

That said, "Do-learn" sort of begs the question, and it's only a half-step. How do you know when you're polishing a turd? Who's to say this cycle is virtuous or vicious?

The second part is that after you drop your self-centered delusion of seeking perfection, you actually start to find and solve other people's problems.

It might not be pretty or fun, but that's what has value.

If you're interested in building companies, the key factor is not the technology or even the team, but the market -- the opportunity to help.

Then it's not really your ambition: it's a need that needs filling, and the question is whether you can find the people and means to do it, and you'll find both the people and the means are inspired not by your ambition, but by your vision for how to fill the need, in a kind of self-selected alignment and mutual support.

It's closely related to another truth:

Unconstrained curiosity is a vice, not virtue.

Being lazy is a clever form of productivity

“I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.”

― Bill Gates

I find it surprisingly difficult to lower my standards once I feel committed to an idea. I wish this article leaned a little more into ways to address that sort of dilemma.

Don't get me wrong, I agree fully with the article. I put it into practice plenty well in many areas of my life. I've made great progress with my diet, self-care, and physical fitness routines by keeping my goals SMART.

And yet, a few years ago, I got this idea in my head for a piece of software I wanted to create that is, if not too ambitious, then clearly asking all of me and then some. The opening paragraph of the article really resonated with me -- "The artwork that will finally make the invisible visible."

And so, I've chipped away at the idea here and there, but I find myself continually put off by "the gap" - even though I know it's to be expected and is totally human.

Part of me wishes I had never dared to dream so big and wishes I could let the idea go entirely. Another part of me is mad and ashamed for thinking like that about a personal dream.

Anyway, don't know where I'm going with all this. Just felt like remarking on the article since it struck close to home.

P.S. if you haven't seen the Ira Glass video, I'd take a look. It's pretty inspirational. Here's Part 3 which is what the article was referencing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2wLP0izeJE

I hate the title but actually a pretty decent article.

> We are still the only species cursed with visions of what could be. But perhaps that's humanity's most beautiful accident. To be haunted by possibilities we cannot yet reach, to be driven by dreams that exceed our current grasp. The curse and the gift are the same thing: we see further than we can walk, dream bigger than we can build, imagine more than we can create.

> And so we make imperfect things in service of perfect visions. We write rough drafts toward masterpieces we may never achieve. We build prototypes of futures we can barely envision. We close the gap between imagination and reality one flawed attempt at a time.