The brick walls are not there to keep us out; the brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. The brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They are there to stop the other people.
This seems to be a fully general argument for the virtue of anything being difficult.
The difficulty of getting a liver transplant isn’t to make you die, it’s to give you a chance to show how badly you want to live! The system is there to stop people who don’t want to live badly enough. They are there to stop people who deserve to die!
And you could make that argument while you had a magical liver producing machine as a justification for not using it.
Where did you get that the other people deserve to die from?
They don’t want it badly enough, in the context of a prescriptive passage, ergo they deserve not to have it. Which is to say, they deserve to die.
You make a good counterargument to “make sure the brick walls stay up, because they keep out the other people,” but he didn’t say that.
As a motivational piece it doesn’t work unless you view a chance to prove yourself and stopping people who don’t want something badly enough from having it as desirable traits. The expected response isn’t to make you feel worse about brick walls, and he probably didn’t say it for no reason.
They don’t want it badly enough, in the context of a prescriptive passage, ergo they deserve not to have it.
No, they don’t want it badly enough, so they won’t get it. Not that they don’t deserve to get it.
As a motivational piece it doesn’t work unless you view [...] stopping people who don’t want something badly enough from having it as desirable traits.
No, they don’t want it badly enough, so they won’t get it. Not that they don’t deserve to get it.
I find this line of reasoning unconvincing since I take the passage as a whole to be intended to make people okay with brick walls.
Why do you believe this?
1)
I heard the whole speech last year sometime and concluded it was largely prescriptive at the time.
Ah here we go:
But remember: The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out; the brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. The brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They are there to stop the other people.
I suppose you might view it as an attempt to make people rail against the injustice of everything. However I believe that learned helplessness is a huge thing in our society and that strategy doesn’t plausibly fit into how I imagine most people as being likely to behave if you tell them something’s terribly unjust.
Ah, I’d forgotten that part. And now that you remind me of it, I remember that I intentionally started the quote after that line because I didn’t like it, for reasons similar to the ones you brought up. I now concede that he did seem to imply that keeping unmotivated people away from what they want is desirable (although I expect he would object if someone put it that way explicitly). He still mostly focused on getting around brick walls rather than leaving brick walls up, though.
The brick walls are any barriers that get in the way of getting what you want. He gives the example of that he was a faculty adviser for a team that won a trip on the vomit comet, and he wanted to go, but faculty advisers were not allowed to come. But the team was allowed to bring a journalist, so he resigned as faculty adviser and got a press pass.
This seems pretty irrational to me. Ask a lucky stock trader whether you should try to beat the market or not and he’d reply that you should, and damn the statistics, because the efficient market hypothesis applies only to other people.
Those two concepts have some overlap. Why should we use our energy trying to accomplish something that many have failed? Do we have good reason to discard the validity of their efforts? Are there good reasons to think our particular abilities are better suited to the task? Are we going to make some incremental progress that others can build on?
This seems pretty irrational to me. Ask a lucky stock trader whether you should try to beat the market or not and he’d reply that you should, and damn the statistics, because the efficient market hypothesis applies only to other people.
The obstacle is a brick wall. Not an insurmountable barrier or the resource already having been nearly completely exploited by others (as would be analogous to the efficient market). Brick walls are comparatively simple to climb or destroy.
This just begs the question of how to distinguish brick walls from insurmountable obstacles. Persistance is certainly a virtue, but there’s a very large problem with asking successful people how to succeed. Many successful academics will tell you that you will succeed, provided you sacrifice enough of your time and happiness. Asking them creates a bias though. You’d better also ask the many, many post-docs who quit, burnt out and miserable, after being denied a faculty position for the umpteenth time. If you can’t find some systematic difference you can use to succeed, then you’re faced with a gamble. And human psychology pretty much guarantees the market will overvalue that gamble.
Randy Pausch in The Last Lecture.
This seems to be a fully general argument for the virtue of anything being difficult.
The difficulty of getting a liver transplant isn’t to make you die, it’s to give you a chance to show how badly you want to live! The system is there to stop people who don’t want to live badly enough. They are there to stop people who deserve to die!
And you could make that argument while you had a magical liver producing machine as a justification for not using it.
That’s not as bad as you seem to be implying—see the last three paragraphs of Beware Trivial Inconveniences.
Where did you get that the other people deserve to die from?
You make a good counterargument to “make sure the brick walls stay up, because they keep out the other people,” but he didn’t say that.
They don’t want it badly enough, in the context of a prescriptive passage, ergo they deserve not to have it. Which is to say, they deserve to die.
As a motivational piece it doesn’t work unless you view a chance to prove yourself and stopping people who don’t want something badly enough from having it as desirable traits. The expected response isn’t to make you feel worse about brick walls, and he probably didn’t say it for no reason.
No, they don’t want it badly enough, so they won’t get it. Not that they don’t deserve to get it.
Why do you believe this?
I find this line of reasoning unconvincing since I take the passage as a whole to be intended to make people okay with brick walls.
1)
I heard the whole speech last year sometime and concluded it was largely prescriptive at the time.
Ah here we go:
http://youtu.be/ji5_MqicxSo?t=17m47s
2)
I suppose you might view it as an attempt to make people rail against the injustice of everything. However I believe that learned helplessness is a huge thing in our society and that strategy doesn’t plausibly fit into how I imagine most people as being likely to behave if you tell them something’s terribly unjust.
Ah, I’d forgotten that part. And now that you remind me of it, I remember that I intentionally started the quote after that line because I didn’t like it, for reasons similar to the ones you brought up. I now concede that he did seem to imply that keeping unmotivated people away from what they want is desirable (although I expect he would object if someone put it that way explicitly). He still mostly focused on getting around brick walls rather than leaving brick walls up, though.
What are the brick walls? Who put them there? I don’t get it.
The brick walls are any barriers that get in the way of getting what you want. He gives the example of that he was a faculty adviser for a team that won a trip on the vomit comet, and he wanted to go, but faculty advisers were not allowed to come. But the team was allowed to bring a journalist, so he resigned as faculty adviser and got a press pass.
This seems pretty irrational to me. Ask a lucky stock trader whether you should try to beat the market or not and he’d reply that you should, and damn the statistics, because the efficient market hypothesis applies only to other people.
He was saying that you should keep trying after most people would give up, not that you should expect everything to magically go your way.
Those two concepts have some overlap. Why should we use our energy trying to accomplish something that many have failed? Do we have good reason to discard the validity of their efforts? Are there good reasons to think our particular abilities are better suited to the task? Are we going to make some incremental progress that others can build on?
The obstacle is a brick wall. Not an insurmountable barrier or the resource already having been nearly completely exploited by others (as would be analogous to the efficient market). Brick walls are comparatively simple to climb or destroy.
Overall the advice is sound.
This just begs the question of how to distinguish brick walls from insurmountable obstacles. Persistance is certainly a virtue, but there’s a very large problem with asking successful people how to succeed. Many successful academics will tell you that you will succeed, provided you sacrifice enough of your time and happiness. Asking them creates a bias though. You’d better also ask the many, many post-docs who quit, burnt out and miserable, after being denied a faculty position for the umpteenth time. If you can’t find some systematic difference you can use to succeed, then you’re faced with a gamble. And human psychology pretty much guarantees the market will overvalue that gamble.
The reverse Tinkerbell effect!