[Jodavaho.io] — Josh Vander Hook

I’ve had the pleasure of meeting, at all stages of my career/education, people much more intelligent than I am. I’ve also had the pleasure of meeting people more productive, industrious, capable, and learned than I am (not always the same!).

Being a human, probably descended from social animals, I have the same first instinct of insecurity or feelings of regret. “Why can’t I be X like Bob/Alice is?”. Over the years this attitude has done more harm than good, which of course it must, but now after 20 years I have real hard-won evidence of it in opportunities lost, respect lessened, and sharp words from others.¹

However, there is a useful side effect of this jealousy, which is worth keeping. Any system of people benefits from some healthy competition, and the better the competitors, the better the competition.

So, enough ado: Here is my hard-won advice for dealing with people better (in some way) than you are:

Recognize illusions

People in any competitive environment (and most multi-person environments are competitive in some way), will provide a convenient illusion of self. They either do this intentionally or accidentally, but even portraying yourself as someone who refuses to front is itself a decision to front. There is no escaping this game.²

So, immediately, you can ask yourself a useful question: Is this person presenting a prepared illusion and does the evidence support my perceived ranking of this illusion vs my total (but imperfect) remembrance of myself?

Two things happen with this reframing:

1. The recognition that you experience < 1% of their reality, and it’s likely the best 1% that they can muster

2. The recognition that you experience most of your own reality, and it’s likely the worst stuff that comes up during comparisons.³

This is an old trick! And (2) above is even worse because of the natural tendency to find evidence to support the framing of “this person is smarter than I am”. So avoid that narrative trap, and recognize the illusion for what it is, and the false comparison it triggers.

• Concrete actions: When you encounter a person immeasurably better than you, humanize them, talk with them, see if the illusion is dispelled. If not, you may just make a friend anyway.

Recognize choices

Hang on, is that person smarter than you are? Maybe during a whiteboard session they presented some intuitive solution to a hard problem that nobody considered. Intelligence would be supported if they made that connection on the spot, but was it intelligence after all?

Feynman himself, in “Surely you’re joking” had this story to tell:⁴

That book also showed how to differentiate parameters under the integral sign

• it’s a certain operation. It turns out that’s not taught very much in the universities; they don’t emphasize it. But I caught on how to use that method, and I used that one damn tool again and again. […] So I got a great reputation for doing integrals, only because my box of tools was different from everybody else’s, and they had tried all their tools on it before giving the problem to me.

Feynman was definitely an intelligent person, but was he also borrowing a little niche experience and using that to solve problems seemingly magically?

It’s important to recognize experience, and choices in the path to success, and a person’s set of choices are probably very different than yours. And you can leverage your own unique insights all the time, probably without knowing it.

• Concrete action: When someone has a unique insight, attribute it to experience, and (folding into prior) ask them for background and insights so that you can do this yourself!
• Concrete action: When you have an insight into a problem, think about why you made that leap - was it prior experience? Do you deflate the value of your own experience (“I just saw that before”), while discounting the effect of experience on others’ success (“They are uniquely smart regardless of experience”).

Why reframe this way? There is immense danger (to self worth) in attributing others’ successes to immutable qualities of others,⁵ and ascribing your own inadequacy to your own immutable qualities. Once you have decided that you are inadequate / lesser, and simultaneously decided that you are supposed to be better at indicating immutable superiority (see next point), you have gone down a dark, self-limiting path.⁶

Recognize opportunity

Maybe that person isn’t immutably superior. Maybe they have tricks that help them succeed.

Now here’s the opportunity: Learn from them.

OK, I hear you recoiling. This is Machiavellian. It’s inhuman to use people this way. Surely you cannot just attach yourself to a person for the purposes of bettering yourself.

Yes, you can! You just can’t be surreptitious or Machiavellian about it. If your goal here is to prop yourself up to appear superior - you are the problem, not this advice. But if your goal is to better yourself, to pick up skills and tricks, and possibly to make a lifelong friend from a capable coworker, then nobody can fault you for that! That’s why humans come together to work side by side on hard things. It’s our way of improving the lot of life.

• Concrete action: allow others to better you, and be intentional about it.

There are certainly environments like Academic research, or curve-graded courses, or limited-headcount government labs that are closer to “zero sum”.

That means that in these environments much can be gained by pulling down the best, because it is a “winner take more” environment.⁷ That’s the Machiavellian angle. It’s tempting to consider a smarter person to be in competition with you for a limited reward pool. Better grades, better pay, better glory, etc.

But …

Recognize false scarcity

Even in seemingly zero-sum environments, like those above, life is never actually zero sum. It can be falsely arranged to appear so, in individual circumstances, but it’s never the case in actuality, because life proceeds over multiple dimensions, and with strange payouts.

But let’s attack the math directly: Well, consider the classic prisoners' dilemma. In this game you have two options: Tear down your colleague, or build them up. But they make the same decision about you.

The outcomes are:

• Both build up - moderate reward for both
• Both tear down - moderate loss for both
• One builds, other tears - best payout for the tear-downer, at the expense of the build-upper.

Play it out and you get the strategy of betrayal.⁸

But play it out again and again, where the cumulative gains /losses are the score, and a trust-based strategy dominates. In particular, you have to lead with trust to get the best outcomes.⁹ (There’s actually a stronger result here: when scarcity is introduced and the players consider each other to be ruthless logicians, the strategy flips at the end. After a long cooperation sequence, when the end of the game is announced and near, the player strategies switch to betrayal pretty quickly. But this falls down very quickly even with repeated games. The lesson here might be to carefully avoid people and environments that are predisposed to ruthless betrayal-based payoffs! I’m reminded of this story: ¹⁰ of the wife who, diagnosed with terminal cancer, decided divorce + flings was the right move. Calling this a “defection” might be a stretch, but being near the end clearly changed the calculus for her… but back to everyday reality ….)

Axelrod’s first rule for players in the winning strategy is literally “don’t be envious.” The math arrives at the same advice we’re stating right now! There’s another, more entertaining lesson about false scarcity: Pirates! ¹¹ Stateless, greedy, anarchistic pirate crews had a strong sense of collaboration in their creed.

And note again, the cold, mathematical result for pirates (most senior pirate takes 98% of all proceeds) completely contradicts reality, just like prisoner’s dilemma! Real life favors group results that are cooperative.

After 20 years, both of these cooperative examples feel more real to me, and the best benefit I’ve had long term comes from learning from (and even elevating) those people who are most capable. It’s worth it to be on a team of high achievers. There’s plenty of good to go around. This is especially true in industry - a better widget should benefit everyone, especially the people making the widget.

(note: this is only true in competitive marketplaces. read socialist manifesto for the dystopian case of non-competitive markets and imagine how the above collaborative advice might change)¹²

Recognize negativity

Despite the advice above, there will be people who are genuinely darkly competitive, adversarial, prideful, etc. They will be threatened by you, just as you are tempted to feel threatened by others.

Along the road of working on oneself, you’ll quickly start to recognize people who you just wish would walk the same path you are. You’ll recognize your past insecurities and past delusions / illusions that prevented you from reaching your happiest most productive and collaborative self. As much as it is (it will be!) a struggle to fix that in yourself, you must recognize that you can only show the way. It is nearly impossible to truly change others.

• Concrete action: If a person is truly darkly narcissistic or adversarial, just avoid playing their game. They are running the scarcity mindset and that will haunt them long term.
• Concrete non-action: Do not try to change others. If you simply must get some advice to them, do it by example, or worst case, a blog post.