This is a mean vs median or Mediocristan vs Extremistan issue. Most people cannot do lone wolf, but if you can do lone wolf, you will probably be much more successful than the average person.
I cannot disagree with this more strongly. I am serial entrepreneur, and a somewhat successful one. Still chasing the big exit, but I’ve built successful companies that are still private. Besides myself I’ve met many other people in this industry which you’d be excused for thinking are lone wolfs. But the truth is the lone wolf’s don’t make it as they build things that fail to have product/market fit, fail to listen to feedback if and when it is even made available to them (since they don’t seek it), and usually fail to raise or maintain funding from lack of communication and organizational skill.
The successful entrepreneurs, hedge funders, etc. are not afraid of thinking that conventional wisdom is wrong. The success they have is not from trailblazing a new path—that just goes with doing something new—but from having the tenacity to ask “but why is that so?” of conventional wisdom. Every now and then you find something that just shouldn’t be so—it has no good justification except historical accident—and then you execute. And a very important part of execution is building a team that can work together to avoid the heuristics and biases that follow lone wolfs around.
Don’t be a lone wolf. Be a social rationalist willing to question everything and go where that takes you. It’s not the same thing.
I agree with you in the context of entrepreneurship, but the OP was talking about self improvement. The best strategy for learning or self-improving may be very different from the best strategy for building a company.
Most people cannot do lone wolf, but if you can do lone wolf, you will probably be much more successful than the average person.
Maybe we disagree on what it means to “lone wolf.” If I try to steel-man your position, I can come up with a weak and a strong interpretation:
The weak interpretation is that being a autodidact (capable of learning things on your own) will bring you higher chances of success. Being an autodidact myself, I agree from anecdotal experience. Also just being an expert in your field means developing autodidact skills at some point because eventually you surpass the level of all available classes and have to learn from the latest research journals and technical reports. However I would argue that this should still remain a social activity where you continue to interact with collaborators and bounce ideas off of trusted colleagues in order to avoid many of the pitfalls that come from truly working alone. This isn’t a lone wolf so much as a free-thinking pack wolf, to carry the metaphor, that enjoys the best of both worlds.
The strong interpretation is that you will or even can be successful by truly embarking on a lone quest all by yourself. It is this interpretation that I disagree with so strongly for the reasons given. In my experience smart people who go the “lone wolf” route inevitably end up in crackpot / crank territory as they accumulate bad ideas in their personal blind spots, assuming they don’t fall prey to akrasia in the first place. In this sense I agree with the OP: glorifying the “lone wolf” path has done a lot of harm to a lot of LW’ers.
I cannot disagree with this more strongly. I am serial entrepreneur, and a somewhat successful one. Still chasing the big exit, but I’ve built successful companies that are still private. Besides myself I’ve met many other people in this industry which you’d be excused for thinking are lone wolfs. But the truth is the lone wolf’s don’t make it as they build things that fail to have product/market fit, fail to listen to feedback if and when it is even made available to them (since they don’t seek it), and usually fail to raise or maintain funding from lack of communication and organizational skill.
The successful entrepreneurs, hedge funders, etc. are not afraid of thinking that conventional wisdom is wrong. The success they have is not from trailblazing a new path—that just goes with doing something new—but from having the tenacity to ask “but why is that so?” of conventional wisdom. Every now and then you find something that just shouldn’t be so—it has no good justification except historical accident—and then you execute. And a very important part of execution is building a team that can work together to avoid the heuristics and biases that follow lone wolfs around.
Don’t be a lone wolf. Be a social rationalist willing to question everything and go where that takes you. It’s not the same thing.
I agree with you in the context of entrepreneurship, but the OP was talking about self improvement. The best strategy for learning or self-improving may be very different from the best strategy for building a company.
Your post said:
Maybe we disagree on what it means to “lone wolf.” If I try to steel-man your position, I can come up with a weak and a strong interpretation:
The weak interpretation is that being a autodidact (capable of learning things on your own) will bring you higher chances of success. Being an autodidact myself, I agree from anecdotal experience. Also just being an expert in your field means developing autodidact skills at some point because eventually you surpass the level of all available classes and have to learn from the latest research journals and technical reports. However I would argue that this should still remain a social activity where you continue to interact with collaborators and bounce ideas off of trusted colleagues in order to avoid many of the pitfalls that come from truly working alone. This isn’t a lone wolf so much as a free-thinking pack wolf, to carry the metaphor, that enjoys the best of both worlds.
The strong interpretation is that you will or even can be successful by truly embarking on a lone quest all by yourself. It is this interpretation that I disagree with so strongly for the reasons given. In my experience smart people who go the “lone wolf” route inevitably end up in crackpot / crank territory as they accumulate bad ideas in their personal blind spots, assuming they don’t fall prey to akrasia in the first place. In this sense I agree with the OP: glorifying the “lone wolf” path has done a lot of harm to a lot of LW’ers.