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.
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...
Being denied satisfaction is the important part but yeah, there are countless circumstances that can result in it. Having to waste all your time fighting for limited resources because a handful of individuals are hoarding them is by far the most common.
In the US the so called "free market" was intended to be a way for people to achieve financial independence in spite of any persecution. Unfortunately regulatory capture has made it exceedingly difficult.
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.
> 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.
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!
> 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.
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.
That still does raise the question whether he (alone, without actual experts on the fields) would have started any of the initiatives (and engineering teams) he... bought.
Didn't understand why that whole part about Elon was in the essay, though (except revealing a bizarre fascination for the guy, as he's far from the single typical example of his kind in history). It does not bring any value or demonstration to the main points that are in the two final parts.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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…
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.
You know, I didn’t get the joke until you spelled it out so clearly. Thank you.
Also I’ve heard comments to the effect that hyper loop and similar companies are basically performative art, a sort of protest against the heavy regulation required in order to do any real work in some states. The point is that we have technology to be great and do great things, but we don’t do them.
However, "no plan survives contact with [the enemy]/[reality]/[stakeholders]/[users]/[etc.]"
You have to start doing things at some point, and revise your plans continuously. It's a delicate, interdependent dance.
The worst working situations I've been in almost all had to do with either lack of planning or refusal to abandon a clearly flawed plan. It's exhausting how many people fail to recognize when they need to change their behavior in one area or the other. It's not one or the other, it's both.
“Some think, Some do, Some both, But few”.
Got that from a lecturer.