Most approaches to increasing agency and ambition focus on telling people to dream big and not be intimidated by large projects. I’m sure that works for some people, but it feels really flat for me, and I consider myself one of the lucky ones. The worst case scenario is big inspiring speeches get you really pumped up to Solve Big Problems but you lack the tools to meaningfully follow up.
Faced with big dreams but unclear ability to enact them, people have a few options.
try anyway and fail badly, probably too badly for it to even be an educational failure.
fake it, probably without knowing they’re doing so
learned helplessness, possible systemic depression
be heading towards failure, but too many people are counting on you so someone steps in and rescue you. They consider this net negative and prefer the world where you’d never started to the one where they had to rescue you.
discover more skills than they knew. feel great, accomplish great things, learn a lot.
The first three are all very costly, especially if you repeat the cycle a few times.
My preferred version is ambition snowball or “get ambitious slowly”. Pick something big enough to feel challenging but not much more, accomplish it, and then use the skills and confidence you learn to tackle a marginally bigger challenge. This takes longer than immediately going for the brass ring and succeeding on the first try, but I claim it is ultimately faster and has higher EV than repeated failures.
I claim EA’s emphasis on doing The Most Important Thing pushed people into premature ambition and everyone is poorer for it. Certainly I would have been better off hearing this 10 years ago
What size of challenge is the right size? I’ve thought about this a lot and don’t have a great answer. You can see how things feel in your gut, or compare to past projects. My few rules:
stick to problems where failure will at least be informative. If you can’t track reality well enough to know why a failure happened you definitely* need an easier project.
if your talk gives people a lot of ambitions to save the world/build billion dollar companies but their mind goes blank when they contemplate starting a freelancing business, the ambition is fake.
GET AMBITIOUS SLOWLY
Most approaches to increasing agency and ambition focus on telling people to dream big and not be intimidated by large projects. I’m sure that works for some people, but it feels really flat for me, and I consider myself one of the lucky ones. The worst case scenario is big inspiring speeches get you really pumped up to Solve Big Problems but you lack the tools to meaningfully follow up.
Faced with big dreams but unclear ability to enact them, people have a few options.
try anyway and fail badly, probably too badly for it to even be an educational failure.
fake it, probably without knowing they’re doing so
learned helplessness, possible systemic depression
be heading towards failure, but too many people are counting on you so someone steps in and rescue you. They consider this net negative and prefer the world where you’d never started to the one where they had to rescue you.
discover more skills than they knew. feel great, accomplish great things, learn a lot.
The first three are all very costly, especially if you repeat the cycle a few times.
My preferred version is ambition snowball or “get ambitious slowly”. Pick something big enough to feel challenging but not much more, accomplish it, and then use the skills and confidence you learn to tackle a marginally bigger challenge. This takes longer than immediately going for the brass ring and succeeding on the first try, but I claim it is ultimately faster and has higher EV than repeated failures.
I claim EA’s emphasis on doing The Most Important Thing pushed people into premature ambition and everyone is poorer for it. Certainly I would have been better off hearing this 10 years ago
What size of challenge is the right size? I’ve thought about this a lot and don’t have a great answer. You can see how things feel in your gut, or compare to past projects. My few rules:
stick to problems where failure will at least be informative. If you can’t track reality well enough to know why a failure happened you definitely* need an easier project.
if your talk gives people a lot of ambitions to save the world/build billion dollar companies but their mind goes blank when they contemplate starting a freelancing business, the ambition is fake.