I wish I had realized this when I was younger. People overestimate raw intelligence and underestimate sheer persistence. Just staying with a problem longer—pushing past the point where most would quit—feels almost like magic. Time + focus can take you incredibly far.

Stubbornness might just be the most valuable trait a scientist can have.

No, stubbornness plus being right are the most valuable trait a scientist can have. A whole lot of scientists were stubbornly wrong and are justifiably forgotten.

Stephen J. Gould wrote many of his Natural History magazine essays on these sorts of scientists. The most notable example would probably be Louis Agassiz, who was enormously famous in their own time, but held out stubbornly against evolution, and most of these stubborn scientists today are mere footnotes if they are remembered at all. (Agassiz also was a huge player in scientific racism- his special flavor of the idea was that Black and White people- as Americans defined them- were separate species created separately by God. Again he held onto this idea long after it had gone out of vogue with the rest of the scientific community.) He was the head of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, was hugely prominent in his time, and his stubbornness in defense of wrong ideas is why he had his name removed from the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology and elsewhere.

The stubborn correct few may become famous, but they also had to be stubborn first.

And those who defied something we know to be true now may have also done great work elsewhere before they made that mistake, and that stubbornness served them.

I dislike looking at those who win the fame lottery and trying to say they were never wrong and their opponents were never right. They just got one really big thing really right and stuck with it.

Oh believe me, that's Gould's main point, and the reason that he kept writing these monthly essays for three decades.

Looking at, say, Linnaeus attempt to categorize rocks in exactly the same hierarchical way that he was able to successfully categorize animals (1) reminds us that we are making the same sorts of mistakes, and that a century from now they will look back at our quaint beliefs about X, Y, and Z and say what fools that we are. But this is why stubbornness is a double-edged sword. Sometimes being stubborn means that you can see the truth when no one around you can, and sometimes it means that you are the person whose funeral causes science to advance one Planck unit forward. (2) The only difference is whether you are correct!

1: He didn't realize that Darwinian common descent and evolution were the reasons that his scheme worked for life- those ideas became commonly accepted almost a century after his death- and that rocks, not having any sort of common descent, couldn't be mapped into that sort of hierarchy. He himself didn't spend that much time on the subject, he mostly just asserted that they would fit into the same scheme because he was revealing God's True Law, and it would therefore have to be in rocks just like in living things, but several of his followers spent their lives trying to fit rocks into that same sort of scheme and it just fell apart every time.

2: Stubbornness is not necessarily related to age- there seems to have been no correlation between age and acceptance of either evolution or plate tectonics- so Planck's Principle is a little loose.

> his stubbornness in defense of wrong ideas is why he had his name removed from the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology and elsewhere.

It strikes me that nowadays that would result in outrage about "wokeness and cancel culture".

It can work both ways though, I've had projects that I kept going far beyond what was sensible.

Raw intelligence is just another tool in the toolbox. Sure, it gives advantage if used right, or massive disadvantage (often paired with ocd-ish behavior, general unhappiness since one sees more what a clown show real world often is and who often gets success).

Not ashamed to say - I am not anyhow special re intelligence compared to my most of my uni peers, I struggled with memory too, a lot of endless rota. I was lets say above average on high school and thats it, facing same memory & non-stellar intelligence issues. So I learned to work longer on stuff, learning, everything, not giving up quickly, simply more patience. Saw this already on uni - bright folks were so unused to putting in effort from high school (which they coursed through effortlessly), they hit literal wall on uni.

At the end, I left most of those peers behind professionally, financially and life fulfillment wise, some non-easy choices with long term consequences. A lot of folks jump to their comfort zones way too early and eagerly. I've had some luck too but luck is just wasted chances if not prepared to seize them and take some risks.

When one hits those few crucial moments in life when big-consequence choices are done (which uni, which job, who to marry, where to settle etc), stamina can mean choosing more intense path with rewards in future, instead of going for the easy and a bit safer path from step #1.

energy = distraction + success/time

profound

in a sense, yes, because distraction and "success" are just different types of work. you're burning neurons either way.

the important thing is to latch onto the the independent variables, the knobs you can turn.

Somewhat related, I've seen a similar equation for motivation:

        E*V
    M = ---
        I*D

Motivation = (Expectancy * Value) / (Impulsiveness * Delay)

Which comes from "The Procrastination Equation" by Piers Steel, an academic focused on motivation. I haven't finished the book since it's pretty self help-y, but I do like the equation. Here, expectancy is perceived likelihood of finishing the task, value is obvious, delay is how long until the payoff, and importantly, impulsiveness is the general impulsiveness of the task doer.

BJ Fogg's book Tiny Habits is great, particularly about the important of motivation vs ability in starting new routines. His main point is that ability relative to the task is much more important than motivation, because motivation is volatile. That is, it's much more likely that your ability to do something will remain stable long term than your motivation to do something. So if you choose really easy things to do to start a new habit (drink a glass of water in the morning), your motivation won't matter much, and the habit will stick.

https://www.amazon.com/Tiny-Habits-Changes-Change-Everything...

So I think Piers is skating over that very important part of the equation.

Another piece of it is, if you manage to get healthy somehow, sleep better etc, then your motivation changes; the base level is reset. You have more energy to spare which you can devote to goals.

But I think there is a simpler way to think about motivation, which comes down to the ratio of effort to reward. The smaller the effort-reward ratio of a given activity, the more likely one is to do it. That single idea seems to rule my own behavior and that of many people I see. But it's also something you can hack, partly by using Fogg's idea of starting small. To change a behavior (and ultimately, your life), you just need to find a small enough starting activity to trigger action. It's not about motivation at all, and all the "motivational speakers" out there are misleading people in some fundamental way about the path to change.

One of the traps in that dynamic is that as we decrease the magnitude of the activity (drink a glass of water as oppposed to "go to the gym once a week to get stacked"), our motivation decreases as it loses its grandiose visions of change. I don't think task size and motivation necessarily decrease at the same rate tho. And I do think that grandiose visions are sometimes a form of self-sabotage or psychological homeostasis; ie "i'm only motivated to do things that i can't follow through on."

I don't find I effectively build small habits. I tried doing 10 pushups a day and failed, but then I started going to the gym and that full-on, hours of effort keeps me motivated and wanting to go. I'm not great at half-assing two things, I certainly can't 100th-ass 100 things ;)

Thank you for saying that. I learned something.

Now that I'm thinking of it, I have a lot of small habits that were once large habits. I can get up and go for a run any given day, and I might do it every day for months if I have time, or I may not. Doing 10 pushups a day is no problem even on off-gym days. I wonder how much of it is related to the fact that these stimuli are not novel, and I know I can do them effectively and don't have to slog through something where I won't see results. I'd still love to build up a reading habit again.

Makes sense how it depends on both the task and the person. I wonder if there is any way to change impulsiveness or if it's some sort of genetic trait. There are probably both learned and genetic factors.

It's certainly both. The genetic component is clearest to me when I see kids grow up in the same household and have differing levels of patience and impulse control from a young age. Then, people tend to become less impulsive as they age through both biological and deliberate means.

The degree to which impulsiveness can be directly reduced is an interesting question. I think a big part of the human condition is a frustration with one's impulsivity, and I suspect that that's driving the surge in adult ADHD diagnoses in some countries.

> Success = Focus x Time

You're forgetting a term on the RHS: Luck.

Most people are either certain that it dominates, or certain that it's negligible.

very true. this is just about controllable inputs tho.