<story><title>The Curse of Smart People (2014)</title><url>http://apenwarr.ca/log/?m=201407#01</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>WalterBright</author><text>&amp;gt; very easy to describe all your successes (project not canceled) in terms of your team&amp;#x27;s greatness, and all your failures (project canceled) in terms of other people&amp;#x27;s capriciousness.&lt;p&gt;I see this belief in probably about 80% of people I encounter, and it has little correlation with how smart one is.&lt;p&gt;I like to hang out with people who take responsibility for their failures rather than complaining about how circumstance, &amp;quot;The Man&amp;quot;, or other people have it in for them. Such people are far more interesting. Unsurprisingly, they&amp;#x27;re also far more successful.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cryptica</author><text>This is an inversion of cause an effect.&lt;p&gt;Successful people are emotionally invested in the idea that there is a strong correlation between personal behaviours and outcomes - On the other hand, unsuccessful people are more likely to believe that there is little correlation between the two; that it&amp;#x27;s mostly random and that skill only plays a tiny role.&lt;p&gt;Successful people will often try to argue that unsuccessful people who believe in luck don&amp;#x27;t succeed because their feeling of helplessness inhibits their actions (e.g. makes them lazy). From my personal experience, I think that this is not the case at all - In fact, I know many serial-failures who keep working very hard and are extremely driven in sprite of the terrible odds (and their keen awareness&amp;#x2F;first-hand-experience of those odds)... In fact, I find that serial-failures tend to work harder and smarter (have better critical thinking skills) than people who were successful at some point in the past (probably because unsuccessful people are more hungry for achievements and because they are more likely to identify and acknowledge flaws in their own plans).&lt;p&gt;Humans are hard-wired to gamble and accept terrible odds. People know that it&amp;#x27;s almost impossible to win the lottery and yet so many of them keep buying tickets every week - Terrible odds don&amp;#x27;t inhibit behaviour; especially if the media keeps priming us with the idea that we have full control over our destiny... That&amp;#x27;s pretty much the basis for all the superhero movies which are so popular these days.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Curse of Smart People (2014)</title><url>http://apenwarr.ca/log/?m=201407#01</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>WalterBright</author><text>&amp;gt; very easy to describe all your successes (project not canceled) in terms of your team&amp;#x27;s greatness, and all your failures (project canceled) in terms of other people&amp;#x27;s capriciousness.&lt;p&gt;I see this belief in probably about 80% of people I encounter, and it has little correlation with how smart one is.&lt;p&gt;I like to hang out with people who take responsibility for their failures rather than complaining about how circumstance, &amp;quot;The Man&amp;quot;, or other people have it in for them. Such people are far more interesting. Unsurprisingly, they&amp;#x27;re also far more successful.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>arjie</author><text>In psychology, they call this having an internal locus of control: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Locus_of_control&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Locus_of_control&lt;/a&gt;. Just in case someone&amp;#x27;s interested in related work.</text></comment>