haters

The following statements are simultaneously true:

1) You can do anything if you put your mind to it” is a lie.

If your last name is McCaffery, you have a chance of engineering elite athletes. If you are an Abdelmessih, you’ll be waiting for the metaverse for the sensation of what a 4.3 40 feels like.

2) You are currently very far from your ceiling.

You can drive a truck through the gap between these 2 ideas so they are not really in conflict.

To let the first disappoint you is to let perfection thwart the good. The cost of this pedantically true statement is self-defeat. It’s the kind of victory only an intellectual would recognize because it’s familiar territory — an unnatural use of technicalities to excuse failure because they define success as adherence to fine print. It’s a strange inversion of “It’s better to be roughly right than precisely wrong”. They are precisely right but roughly wrong, but the wrongness touches their life ceaselessly and in the most material ways.

To let the second statement disappoint you is known as a “start”. Congratulations. Recognition is the first step. This should be obvious, but the path to improvement starts by realizing there’s room for it. In you. Not in the world changing such that your conditions are improved, but for you to improve your station, with a smiling indifference to a world you can’t control anyway.

But I stay “start” because beginnings are sensitive to expectations. If you start anything expecting it to be easy, you will likely not finish. It’s such a simple observation, but it bears a life-changing load. It means that anything you are serious about doing should start with the expectation that it will test your resolve, so when the moment comes, you are not hit with the double indignity of difficulty but also surprise.

And one of those negative surprises always comes from others. Haters. But haters also come from people who don’t actually hate you. They may even love you. But this is how they deal with being disappointed in themselves.

This is not an easy subject. It’s at the root of how everyone relates to everyone else. It’s wrapped up in status, luck, a sense of narrow justice when it has to do with the promotion at work, and global justice in the sense of being born on third (or America…although whether the runner is heading home or to second is today’s “dress” debate).

It’s not as easy as saying “ignore everyone else”. There’s a scammer in jail or even just a common internet grifter who dismissed sober advice from someone they respect who they dismissed as speaking behind a veil of risk-aversion. Or less scandalous scenarios like “I’m dropping out of school to pursue acting”.

It’s a good idea to consider the judgement of those you are certain love you. But even then you need to grade them on a curve based on their own risk bias which takes some judgement of your own. Parents want to see their adult children on solid ground. If you win an Oscar and they get to walk the red carpet, that’s just gravy. That will never be in their calculus. But it might be in yours. They’re running a max-min strategy, you want to win the tournament.

(Rob Carver’s analogy to the Wordle starting word choice is a tangible expression of this for most of the English-speaking world who got swept up in that game.)

So if you should consider the judgment of loved ones and even then with skepticism, you know who you should definitely ignore? Randos and water-cooler friends. There’s just too much at stake.

I posted this on X in a thread where Ryan was parrying haters.

When it comes to haters its useful to remember that the correct retaliation is nothing but apathy which if the detractor was smart in the first place, they would realize that themselves. What’s that line about hate being like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die?

The internet fools us because when life’s most important moments happen, your world shrinks. The volume on everything turns down, and you are left with a few people. The hater? Might as well be an atom in another galaxy. Why would they occur to you?

Attention is everything. Lots of people on here give you the gift of permitting yourself to ignore them. Accept it gratefully

Scott Adams, the Dilbert cartoonist, died this week after a battle with prostate cancer. He’s a politicized figure (Scott Alexander’s memorial post is a bizarre mix of tribute and psychoanalysis). But like many others, I’ve read his work on career advice and even the thought experiment book “God’s Debris” which I remember precisely nothing about. But I did see a quote from it this week, which I strongly agree with:

“People think they follow advice but they don’t. Humans are only capable of receiving information. They create their own advice. If you seek to influence someone, don’t waste time giving advice. You can change only what people know, not what they do.”