Being misunderstood is a great temporary moat. I could write a book on this, but suffice it to say, I didn't have confidence in my own vision until I took the time to really look at others and realized that the main difference between me and the average idiot was that I had bothered to look at the ideas of other idiots at all. It was like their entire ontology had become an ant farm. It was the moment I realized, I am a super-idiot.
I only half joke, because becoming a super-idiot liberated me from the perfectionism and the addiction to approval that caused a stultifying and primal narcissistic fear of criticism.
If you are struggling with this, take it from someone on the other side of it: It's ok, you're an idiot.
This is a great take. If I may piggyback, one of the things that’s been important in my own development (personal, social, professional) is to recognize where my lack of confidence is inhibiting actions or improvements I want to pursue, and try to get closer to risking failure without hesitating. Mistakes can be embarrassing or even tragic, but they can still be a source of growth. And they can reveal that some anxieties are partly or wholly unwarranted, either because I have more strength in whatever area than I expected or because... it’s really not so bad when I reveal that I don’t.
I have a similar take, but I framed my thought around failure. I realized there are hundreds of ways that my life will get worse by taking some kind of choice, and also hundreds of ways that my life will get worse if I take the opposite choice. So by embracing the fact that is quite likely that I will fail, I got rid of the fear and the paralysis.
I can sort of resonate with this. I also realized that once I make it my default assumption that whatever it is I plan to do is most likely going to result in some sort of dumpster fire, and if I'm still ok with it, than the fear, concerns over other people's judgment, everything goes away. But of course it has to be important enough that you are genuinely on with it failing
I used to take some yoga classes where the series of beginner poses was the same every class. I was told that this was to keep people feeling as if they themselves were always a beginner — our shared revelation here really reminds me that there is tremendous value in sometimes questioning the “sure things”!
Neither addiction, perfectionism nor being an idiot is OK. The word OK has an opposite meaning. A different matter is whether it is possible to be without addiction, perfectionism or idiocy.
Thanks. My general book advice would be to read for pleasure above all, and to find mentors and practice something (anything) instead.
Current favourite minds that still bother to write include people like Matthew B. Crawford, Joscha Bach, and Alex Danco, mostly because they talk about the ideas of other people I've read. Be light.
Format of a techno-optimist essay. Formulate a common neurosis that people are self conscious about. State common knowledge about this neurosis. State that the common knowledge is an oversimplification. Break the problem into a graph on two axes. Bonus points if you help people think they are avoiding identity politics in some way with this new knowledge.
Format of a snarky unfruitful comment. Don't address the main point of the article, dismiss with a platitude. Attack article structure. Bonus points for unwarranted political supremacy.
The new “contrarian” religious belief that many thought leaders are now writing about.
Is this a trend with high value that some people are getting huge gains for themselves from? I think so.
Alternatively is it an echo chamber of high status people signalling just how contrarian they are? I suspect that some trend victims do this. However I think Sam Altman is just reflecting his thoughts in an essay to help him explore his own understanding, by getting feedback from others.
I believe there is something of real value within the trend: I have seen too many extremely successful people (in business, science and the arts) that have said they relied upon contrarian thinking to help them achieve success. I recognised the belief first in a 1998 book by George Soros, where he vividly wrote of his struggles (internal and external) with his own contrarian thinking.
My favourite example however is Jim Keller, in an interview by Lex Friedman, where Jim casually states “Imagine 99% of your thought process is protecting your self conceptions and 98% of that's wrong. Now you've got the math right. How do you think you're feeling when you into that one bit that's useful and now you're open and you have the ability to do something that's different?”.
When some of the undeniably smartest people in the world start saying the same thing, it is worthwhile listening and learning from them. While avoiding the famous wrong-thinking like Linus Pauling.
I think the main value of contrarian thinking comes from building up better understanding of the world by being wrong a lot and then forcibly changing your mind through arguments.
If you are a contrarian throughout school and college and assumes most things they teach are wrong until you are sufficiently convinced you come out much better than someone who just accepted everything at face value simply because now you ingrained the difference between correct, uncertain and false deep into your mind. Just being a contrarian without doing all the work required to become a good contrarian wont get you any awards, you will just be wrong a lot.
You are looking too much into this. The more people act on contrarian business ideas, the more longshot potential unicorns VCs can invest in. The seminal YC example is Airbnb, letting strangers sleep on a mattress at your house. Sam and other VCs no doubt personally know many founders who face skepticism and self-doubt towards their startups, this is aimed at them.
But no one ever remembers. I've taken a stand on many an unpopular position that turned up good. Not only do people forget that you said anything but they manage to convince themselves that they knew all along. The time horizon of most people is far too short for this tactic to work.
You need to trade on it, ideally with money or productive goods, not words or status. Words and history gets rewritten. Ownership does not. Own something that most people think is useless and then prove to them that they desperately need to have it. Then you can sell it to them and use the money for other things.
I feel like the strength of being misunderstood is more like the strength of being correct.
Just because other people don't understand you doesn't mean you are correct.
If you aren't correct, this post will do nothing for you but make you bull-headed and closed off to criticism.
“Just because other people don't understand you doesn't mean you are correct.”
True. Also true that it doesn’t mean you aren’t. Though it does at minimum strongly suggest that your attempts to explain yourself to others have thus far sucked.
This makes me think of a fun Feynman essay, "What do you care what other people think?" I believe that the common response to that is to assume that it's meant to be snarky or something, but I view it as an honest question. Therefore I often find myself asking myself, "what do you care what other people think?" Sometimes the answer is "nothing really" and sometimes it's more like "well this group of other people have a higher level of expertise or experience than me so if they disagree I want to know why." Mostly though I am quite comfortable being outcome independent with respect to other people's opinions. It's nice if they like me or what I have to say, but mostly it really doesn't matter if they don't.
It's also an observably necessary trait for paradigm shifting scientific progress, since advancing a new paradigm requires defending the claim that every other subject matter expert is actually wrong, and human nature being what it is they will never react kindly to that assertion.
There are also cons to being hated, like losing your job. Doesn't even have to be anyone at work hating you, if enough people hate you they will fire you anyway due to outside pressure.
Sam echoes some of the things Paul said. For example, "[T]he best startup ideas seem at first like bad ideas. I've written about this before: if a good idea were obviously good, someone else would already have done it. So the most successful founders tend to work on ideas that few beside them realize are good. Which is not that far from a description of insanity, till you reach the point where you see results." -- http://www.paulgraham.com/swan.html
I was really hoping you were gonna have a quote from the religiously important Paul.
People have been saying proverbial (in the most literal sense of that word) crap for all of human history. Sure you can wrap extra words around simple concepts like "be determined", "communicate effectively" and "pick your battles" but most of this stuff is just the same few hundred takes on the same handful of attributes that make one successful in life being written time and time again but in the languages and with contemporary examples of whoever is doing the writing.
>But there are lots of other ways–the key observation is that as long as you are right, being misunderstood by most people is a strength not a weakness. You and a small group of rebels get the space to solve an important problem that might otherwise not get solved.
The ability to make that bet and be right (unless you just flipped a coin), took some skills or insight, and that likely took effort and time, but then that only bought you space which probably should have been granted in the first place. Even junior developers get some space to work.
Now you've done all that work just to be able to work on the problem and you now have to deliver, which may or may not be easier than the initial bet. If it's easier, you've just fought an unnecessary battle to be able to do something you know you can do.
How many other unnecessary battles are you going to have to fight?
This seems like it gets in the way of progress more than anything. I don't want to be misunderstood in this way. If they misunderstand, one or both of us has messed up. Maybe I need more or better proof, or maybe I need to explain it better, or maybe it's the other side who needs to do more work.
There's definitely a strength in being misunderstood, but it's not about moving ahead (getting space), it's about finding out who you shouldn't be working with. This is sometimes a very hard signal to get.
> ”the key observation is that as long as you are right, being misunderstood by most people is a strength not a weakness.”
This is (implicitly) only applicable to competitive/adversarial endeavors and not collaborative endeavors. Eg: Say you’re worried about climate change. If your plan is to build a safe harbor and charge people when D-day hits, then the quoted strategy might work. However, if you want to get people organized to face the oncoming challenge, it is very very important to seek to understand he understood (to paraphrase Stephen Covey).
Point being, this might not always be the right approach to solve a problem. The same holds, for Eg. if you are trying to get people to adopt your platform.
This article does not go deep enough, but it is in the right way. What matters is doing the right thing. Even the history books don't matter, even your long term 'status' doesn't matter, nor what people think, in principle. If you really did the right thing overall, and are seen as a monster... well, so be it.
In practice, however, things are more complicated. You have to be really certain of what you're doing to go so much out there. If you're misunderstood, things will become more difficult -- less funding chances perhaps, less people to talk with and exchange ideas, less people who understand and check your decisions -- it has to be sufficiently important and certain to overcome those problems.
The central issue however is learning. We want future (and current) generations to learn from our mistakes and non-mistakes. We want to share our insight with others. If we are misrepresented, this learning gets sacrificed, as well as your communication of ideas to peers, by definition. That's a small tragedy.
You still have to do what you have to do, so to speak, if you must. The ultimate judge is not history, not the newspapers or peers, but your impact on the world, on the people (including yourself) -- not only now of course, but into the future as well.
If I could change the article's title, to reduce ambiguity, it would be, "The BUSINESS Strength of Being Misunderstood".
It's ambiguity that I wish Sam would have anticipated, and adjusted for, but the content is nevertheless good advice, once you contextualize where Sam is coming from (a VC spotting market opportunities):
In a certain context, misunderstanding IS a strategic advantage, if you're spotting a market opportunity, and have the resources to exploit the mismatch. You keep a window of opportunity open as long as the misunderstanding persists among those with resources who would otherwise compete.
In another context, interpersonal communication, misunderstanding is NOT a strength, if your goal was to convince people to be on your side. It means you need work on your communication skills. The title is a poor personal maxim to live by, and I hope not the takeaway people had.
So many people especially students these days are so afraid of asking what does that mean or questions in general... It's quite sad and painful when the professor asks if everything is understood and then it's dead silence but a few minutes later you get classmates sending you messages with questions... I think people are too scared of being wrong or just appearing clueless to the society, even though I've quite often told them that you have to fail if you want to succeed and each failure gets you closer to success. But I guess they didn't understand what I meant and they didn't ask for explanation...
[1] In the memorable words of Coco Chanel, “I don’t care what you think about me. I don’t think about you at all.”
This.
The thing that makes me the most crazy about the internet is the number of people who pay an excessive amount of attention to me and remember ridiculous stuff about things I said years ago or whatever and are just wrapped around the axle about how I am not entitled to my stupid opinion or something.
And I just always feel like "If you think I'm so dumb or something, why in the hell do you clearly and obviously invest so very much of your time, effort and memory in tracking details about me and my life? Good lord."
If you're bringing something new, people will misinterpret and take it in worst possible meaning. If they understand the value of it. Congrats, you've now got competitors!
There.
Now, I wouldn't conflate being successful and being loved by people.
If you're bringing something new, people will misinterpret and take it in worst possible meaning.
If you are doing something new, how do you even express it effectively?
Let's say you invent a new form of housing and all the words that currently exist for various forms of housing don't really describe what you do? You basically have to make up new language entirely for a scenario like that.
Which would be fine except that history gets written by the winners. So the fact that the history books say you're a winner is not the indicator of success that Altman thinks it is.
More like "sticking to your guns when you are being perceived as wrong and waiting to be proven right when you are sure the objective evidence is on your side, never mind what other people are currently saying."
This strongly feels like the story someone tells themselves when they're doing something wrong. Just you wait! One of these days I'm gonna show you! What this post sort of assumes (in typical silicon valley style) is that you're a misunderstood genius, so even if people are pointing out your links to genocide in Myanmar, it's just their time frame isn't long enough.
What you should be concerned about is a different 2 degrees of freedom- who you care about, and whether they're right.
Being understood is impossible (an illusion). There is nothing to understand. Following social conventions is possible. But life is not (necessarily) about following social conventions. Nor is it about not following social conventions.
I only half joke, because becoming a super-idiot liberated me from the perfectionism and the addiction to approval that caused a stultifying and primal narcissistic fear of criticism.
If you are struggling with this, take it from someone on the other side of it: It's ok, you're an idiot.