To be great, be good, repeatably (2019)

https://blog.stephsmith.io/how-to-be-great/

157 56 3 years ago

blog.stephsmith.io

elliotec2• 3 years ago

Title should be “repeatably” not “repeatedly” - subtle but important difference!

Zambyte2• 3 years ago

I agree that the difference is both subtle and important, but I believe they used the right word. The key is that to be great, you do good often, not that what you do good can be done often.

seanhunter3• 3 years ago

The title of the article definitely says "Repeatably" not "Repeatedly".

elliotec2• 3 years ago

You're not wrong, but what I mean is that the actual title of the article is: "How to Be Great? Just Be Good, Repeatably"

seanhunter3• 3 years ago

It's strange how often this article gets posted to hn. I have no idea what the appeal is but neither did I get it the last 6 or so times it was posted.

seanhunter3• 3 years ago

I'm getting downvoted perhaps for being a curmudgeon, which is fair, but:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34331416

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29652029

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25169061

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20167310

etc

dang3• 3 years ago

Generally the convention is only to link to past threads that have comments - otherwise people click on links, find nothing there, and get ornery. In this case there's only one:

To be great, be good repeatably - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20167310 - June 2019 (46 comments)

I realize your point was a different one about how many times the link gets submitted, but on HN, reposts are allowed unless the thread has had significant attention in the last year or so. A few submissions over a few years, involving one major thread, isn't excessive!

sanp• 3 years ago

Perhaps the posters are getting good at posting this repeatedly and will eventually be great at posting this.

m463• 3 years ago

and you think .. yes, I will apply this to my life.

is it not do anything well? so try doing a few good things?

I will do the good things well.

also I read "Don't let the great be the enemy of the good"

etc.

But sometimes you have to stop doing a lot of small good things to do great things.

are the good things part of a great thing? or are they merely distractions?

It seems perfectionism is a fault, but really the perfectionists are the ones we read about in the history books.

purpleblue• 3 years ago

Articles like this are not worthwhile, because there's no real definition of what "good" or "great" are, except that great is better than good.

So in that sense, someone who is good very often is "more good" than someone who is good less often. But in my own personal opinion that doesn't make them great.

AnimalMuppet• 3 years ago

I think the point is, most people think of "great" as somewhere above "good" - somewhere almost unattainable. So don't paralyze yourself trying to attain it (whatever you think the threshold is). Just make it to "good" (a much more attainable threshold), and then keep doing that.

Be good often, rather than great once.

bedobi2• 3 years ago

Hard agree on this. In my career and life in general I see so many people and organizations delude themselves that they have to be the best of the best or find gimmicky ways to stand out or whatever.

Like, no. In 99% of contexts, you literally just have to do the basics well, and you will already be beating AT LEAST half of your competition, probably closer to 80% of your competition.

mi_lk• 3 years ago

Guilty. It's a lesson I have to relearn every once in a while

Jensson2• 3 years ago

Beating just half the competition is often not enough though, it depends on how the rewards are distributed in your field.

ghaff3• 3 years ago

I think that's fair. In "ordinary" professions, producing solid work, as promised, is probably good enough for a lot of situations. It probably won't work so well for a professional athlete or for an actor that looking to do something other than small-time stuff.

john-tells-all• 3 years ago

Strongly agree. In fact, here's the key insight:

“If you cannot do great things, do small things a great number of times”.

People want to "plan" themselves into being Great. So they go into a spiral of "I'm not good enough" and don't actually complete anything. They don't produce anything, no one sees their work, so it's much harder to improve.

In practice, if we produce a lot of stuff, and pay attention, the quality will increase over time. We'll become Great according to the article...

... I'd call it "Good Enough". Producing and analyzing and getting better takes time, energy, and focus. It's not fun. Once our result is Good Enough we move on and focus on another thing we want to produce.

Source: writing a book on (Developer) Feedback Loops

allenu• 3 years ago

I agree. I would say that there’s a class of lessons you only gain by, for instance, shipping things, by completing projects —- and many of them. If you only ever start things and maybe slog at it for a while and give up, there’s a whole host of things you’re not learning. I sometimes think that it’s better to sloppily ship many things than to perfect shipping one, or fewer thing. By doing something over and over again from start to finish, you gain valuable perspective on the whole and can understand what really matters in the larger context than you could if you just focused on one small part of a project.

moshegramovsky• 3 years ago

One of my favorite quotes, but I have no idea who said it.

"A series of small steps, faithfully completed, does great things".

It's influenced so much of my life. Especially in the small, quiet hours when I think about cutting corners.

michalu• 3 years ago

One of the most impactful things I've read was in the interview by Donald Knuth, shared here on HN some time ago:

"A person’s success in life is determined by having a high minimum, not a high maximum. If you can do something really well but there are other things at which you’re failing, the latter will hold you back. But if almost everything you do is up there, then you’ve got a good life."

baxtr• 3 years ago

That is indeed a great quote!

Although I’m not quite sure how it relates to the article.

yowlingcat• 3 years ago

It's the core of what the article is espousing. Greatness is not achieved by a point-wise maximum, but by consistently strong delivery. Said another way, you're "only as strong as the weakest link."

givemeethekeys• 3 years ago

It's better to set one's own criteria for happiness. Can the criteria change? Sure! But, constantly trying to live up to someone else's standards is an easy way to make one unhappy.

ensocode2• 3 years ago

Its not said, that it is about the standards of someone else. In the best case the high minimum comes intrinsic, if not why not get inspired by other's standards? I like this quote very much, thanks.

rewgs• 3 years ago

Obviously he's an unpopular guy nowadays, but I often think about Louis CK's version of this:

I'm paraphrasing, but he essentially said he didn't try to make his best performances better, he tried to make his worst performances better.

That idea has been hugely impactful for me -- it's resulted in far less anxiety and self-flagellation in the pursuit of excellence, while still probably resulting in about the same overall improvement.

kozd• 3 years ago

See also Strong vs Weak link problems

ensocode2• 3 years ago

Wow thanks, that's interesting. I always thought the common sense was the SWOT terminology. Strengthen your strengths and weaken your weaknesses.

JackFr• 3 years ago

You know what would be good? No longer repeating:

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.” - Albert Einstein

Does anyone writing that really think Einstein said that? Apart from it being completely apocryphal, it’s a terribly shallow appeal to authority.

digging• 3 years ago

Funny, I've actually never seen it attributed before (to Einstein or anyone).

Besides being a shallow appeal to authority, it's just a very stupid thing to say. It's not just wrong, it's bad to believe in.

pcdoodle• 3 years ago

Amen

alehlopeh• 3 years ago

It’s weird to me how people always say it the same way: The definition of insanity. Is anything else referred to as being “the definition” of something in a commonly used phrase?

Hate to break it to you, Mr Albert Einstein, but the definition of insanity can be found, like every other definition, in a dictionary. And thats not what it says in the dictionary under insanity.

wkjagt• 3 years ago

He never actually said that though. It’s attributed to him a lot (on “inspirational” quote sites, printed on mugs etc) but apparently there’s no proof he actually said that.

auggierose• 3 years ago

I'd say there is a big difference between being great and being good, but at least being good is entirely in your hands.

mark_undoio• 3 years ago

Remember: great is just good, but repeatable.

Great advice. I wish it was listened to more in tech - there's a lot of effort spent trying to jump up to the next big level in commercial performance, at the cost of not just improving things continuously and benefiting from compounding returns.

bluedino• 3 years ago

"Don't practice until you get it right, practice until you don't get it wrong"

debo_• 3 years ago

I used to be concerned with stuff like this, and then I almost died several times and it all seems so inane. Interestingly, now that I care less about what I should do and a lot more about what I want to do, those good achievements come a lot more often and with much less effort.

wayfarer2s2• 3 years ago

The premise doesn't hold up when you think about it. If to be great is to be good repeatably, then what does it mean to be great repeatably? Is that also great or do we need a new word?

Producing good work consistently means you are good overall. Being great means you produce great work consistently.

One of the linked articles in the piece contradicts the notion that consistently being good would lead to greatness. (Well a link to a tweet of images of the article -- https://autotranslucence.com/2018/03/30/becoming-a-magician/). That author argued that while they were consistently very good at body painting (top 5 in the world championships), they were not able to conceive how the 2016 winner produced the work they did in the same amount of time (6 hours). Even though they were improving incrementally, they were so far behind the winner's work that they couldn't wrap their head around what sorts of improvements they would need to add in order to reach the same level of competency. So it was not just a matter of being consistent. Their mental model was off.

That seems to fit reality and greatness more than the original article. A good mathematician does not simply reach the level of Terence Tao by being consistently good over time.

from-nibly• 3 years ago

The article is arguing just that. There is no great consistently and yes you do achieve whatever level Terence Tao is at by being good and improving consistently.

Software is a particularly good form of this. You can't really just vomit out a codebase that's perfect immediately. If we could do that then there wouldn't be so many versions of even the most mundane tools on your computer.

Even though when you look at a great piece of spftware you can just look ay the whole completed thing, it didn't just pop into existence that way. It was honed over time.

rakejake• 3 years ago

The word "Great" has to be qualified here. Reading the article, I don't believe the author means to say you can "work" your way to actual greatness - say being the best in the world at something, or one of the world's leading experts in a tough field.

Rather greatness here is simply being close to one's true potential. Whether you are Lebron James or a random bench-warmer, the trick is to show up everyday and consistently improve. LeBron is great because his floor is higher than most other player's ceilings. There are many players who can give a brilliant performance on their day, but can't do much on others. If you've watched any sport, the great players are very very good even on their worst days. On their best days, they are unbeatable.

If you can identify the area where you can achieve the same and put in the work, then you're on the path to greatness (at your level).

lelanthran• 3 years ago

That author argued that while they were consistently very good at body painting (top 5 in the world championships), they were not able to conceive how the 2016 winner produced the work they did in the same amount of time (6 hours). Even though they were improving incrementally, they were so far behind the winner's work that they couldn't wrap their head around what sorts of improvements they would need to add in order to reach the same level of competency. So it was not just a matter of being consistent. Their mental model was off.

I think that that author would be able to improve her article by many orders of magnitudes simply by incorporating the images she is referring to (his own, and the winner's).

That she is incapable of understanding how poor a written comparison of pictures is when making a point of comparison tells me that she might have difficulty understanding things in general, not just the visual art she is, ironically, only able to talk about and not show.

linhvn• 3 years ago

This is the similar mindset in sport athletes. On a good day, a strong driver could beat Verstappen, or a chess player could beat Carlsen. Over the course of a tournament, or a season, then Verstappen and Carlsen are unbeatable. They get to the top, and go on great length to stay there.

kashunstva• 3 years ago

I wonder if “great” has other dependencies including the factor of luck, whereas “excellence” is more purely a function of the showing up part that this article deals with.

I was just talking with my spouse about this in the last couple of days. She’s editor of the main journal in her academic field and junior colleagues ask her how she ended up there. Her answer: by doing my reviews on-time every time.

jb1991• 3 years ago

As a great person myself, I can attest this is true: I’m good at pretty much everything.

To be great, be good, repeatably (2019)

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