I noticed the most successful people, in the sense of advancing their career and publishing papers, I meet at work have a certain belief in themselves. What is striking, no matter their age/career stage, it is like they are already taking certain their success and where to go in the future.
I also noticed this is something that people from non-working class backgrounds manage to do.
Second point. They are good at finishing projects and delivering results in time.
I noticed that this was somehow independent from how smart is someone.
While I am very good at single tasks, I have always struggled with long term academic performance. I know it is true for some other people too.
What kind of knowledge/mentality am I missing? Because I feel stuck.
I’m not quite sure how to answer your question, but at least I have similar feelings: that my conscientiousness is relatively low ; and that many people who do cooler stuff than me appear to be more driven, with clearer goals and a better ability to actually go and pursue them. I have various thoughts on this:
To an extent, it’s just an impression. Many people will struggle to do more than a fraction of what they wanted, and yet because they still do quite a lot and remain very upbeat, you don’t notice than they achieve relatively little compared to what they want, but they certainly notice that. Similarly, many people are working on cool projects and apparently having tons of fun doing it, but if you asked you’d learn that they have no clue about “what they want to do with their lives” or similar super long-term goals.
In fact, I suspect that most people feel at least a little like that at least sometimes, and that we grossly underestimate how likely others are to feel that way.
Yet, some people genuinely are better able to get stuff done and stay relentlessly focused on tasks than others. It can be built from habit, it can come from being really really into the one specific thing you’re working on, etc. If you struggle with that anyway, it might be something to do with mental health: famously ADHD, but also autism, or depression/anxiety can impact conscientiousness, and all these seem somewhat more common among LW readers than in the general population, so I dunno, maybe?
And some people are also better than others at being optimistic, enthusiastic, eager to do cool stuff. I guess there are many causes, and therefore many potential ways of dealing with it, but I personally like the explanation from low self-confidence, fear of failure, etc., making you less willing to try ambitious stuff (notice how you said “it’s like they’re already taking their success for certain”, when, yeah that might be the case, but it might also be that they’re aware they can fail, but they think it’s likely they could easily recover from that failure anyway). It’s quite well described (imho) here.
But I’m pretty sure I’m covering only a relatively narrow part of the space of all the things that could be said on that topic, so I hope other people write other replies with completely different takes on the problem :-)
I noticed the most successful people, in the sense of advancing their career and publishing papers, I meet at work have a certain belief in themselves. What is striking, no matter their age/career stage, it is like they are already taking certain their success and where to go in the future.
I also noticed this is something that people from non-working class backgrounds manage to do.
Second point. They are good at finishing projects and delivering results in time.
I noticed that this was somehow independent from how smart is someone.
While I am very good at single tasks, I have always struggled with long term academic performance. I know it is true for some other people too.
What kind of knowledge/mentality am I missing? Because I feel stuck.
I’m not quite sure how to answer your question, but at least I have similar feelings: that my conscientiousness is relatively low ; and that many people who do cooler stuff than me appear to be more driven, with clearer goals and a better ability to actually go and pursue them. I have various thoughts on this:
To an extent, it’s just an impression. Many people will struggle to do more than a fraction of what they wanted, and yet because they still do quite a lot and remain very upbeat, you don’t notice than they achieve relatively little compared to what they want, but they certainly notice that. Similarly, many people are working on cool projects and apparently having tons of fun doing it, but if you asked you’d learn that they have no clue about “what they want to do with their lives” or similar super long-term goals.
In fact, I suspect that most people feel at least a little like that at least sometimes, and that we grossly underestimate how likely others are to feel that way.
Yet, some people genuinely are better able to get stuff done and stay relentlessly focused on tasks than others. It can be built from habit, it can come from being really really into the one specific thing you’re working on, etc. If you struggle with that anyway, it might be something to do with mental health: famously ADHD, but also autism, or depression/anxiety can impact conscientiousness, and all these seem somewhat more common among LW readers than in the general population, so I dunno, maybe?
And some people are also better than others at being optimistic, enthusiastic, eager to do cool stuff. I guess there are many causes, and therefore many potential ways of dealing with it, but I personally like the explanation from low self-confidence, fear of failure, etc., making you less willing to try ambitious stuff (notice how you said “it’s like they’re already taking their success for certain”, when, yeah that might be the case, but it might also be that they’re aware they can fail, but they think it’s likely they could easily recover from that failure anyway). It’s quite well described (imho) here.
But I’m pretty sure I’m covering only a relatively narrow part of the space of all the things that could be said on that topic, so I hope other people write other replies with completely different takes on the problem :-)