“we don’t have time” is only an argument for big gambles if they work. If ambition snowballs work better, then a lack of time is all the more reason not to waste time with vanity projects whose failures won’t even be educational.
I could steel man this as something of a lottery, where n% of people with way-too-big goals succeed and those successes are more valuable than the combined cost of the failures. I don’t think we’re in that world, because I think goals in the category I describe aren’t actually goals, they’re dreams, and by and large can’t succeed.
You could argue that’s defining myself into correctness and some big goals are genuinely goals even if they pattern match my criteria like “failure is uninformative” and “contemplating a smaller project is scary or their mind glances off the option (as opposed to being rejected for being too small)”. I think that’s very unlikely to be true for my exact critieria, but agree that in general overly broad definitions of fake ambition could do a lot of damage. I think creating a better definition people can use to evaluate their own goals/dreams is useful for that exact reason.
I also think that even if there are a few winning tickets in that lottery- people pushed into way-too-big projects that succeed- there aren’t enough of them to make a complete problem-solving ecosystem. The winning tickets still need staff officers to do the work they don’t have time for, or require skills inimical to swinging for the fences.
I should note that my target audience here is primarily “people attempting to engender ambition in others”, followed by “the people who are subject to those attempts”. I think engendering fake ambition is actively harmful, and the counterfactual isn’t “30 years in a suit”, it’s engendering ambition snowballs that lead to more real projects. I don’t think discouraging people who are naturally driven to do much-too-big projects is helpful.
I’d also speculate that if you tell a natural fence-swinger to start an ambition snowball, they end up at mind-bogglingly ambitious quickly, not necessarily slower than if you’d pushed them directly to dream big. Advice like “Do something that’s scary but at least 80% tractable” scales pretty well across natural ambition levels.
“we don’t have time” is only an argument for big gambles if they work. If ambition snowballs work better, then a lack of time is all the more reason not to waste time with vanity projects whose failures won’t even be educational.
I could steel man this as something of a lottery, where n% of people with way-too-big goals succeed and those successes are more valuable than the combined cost of the failures. I don’t think we’re in that world, because I think goals in the category I describe aren’t actually goals, they’re dreams, and by and large can’t succeed.
You could argue that’s defining myself into correctness and some big goals are genuinely goals even if they pattern match my criteria like “failure is uninformative” and “contemplating a smaller project is scary or their mind glances off the option (as opposed to being rejected for being too small)”. I think that’s very unlikely to be true for my exact critieria, but agree that in general overly broad definitions of fake ambition could do a lot of damage. I think creating a better definition people can use to evaluate their own goals/dreams is useful for that exact reason.
I also think that even if there are a few winning tickets in that lottery- people pushed into way-too-big projects that succeed- there aren’t enough of them to make a complete problem-solving ecosystem. The winning tickets still need staff officers to do the work they don’t have time for, or require skills inimical to swinging for the fences.
I should note that my target audience here is primarily “people attempting to engender ambition in others”, followed by “the people who are subject to those attempts”. I think engendering fake ambition is actively harmful, and the counterfactual isn’t “30 years in a suit”, it’s engendering ambition snowballs that lead to more real projects. I don’t think discouraging people who are naturally driven to do much-too-big projects is helpful.
I’d also speculate that if you tell a natural fence-swinger to start an ambition snowball, they end up at mind-bogglingly ambitious quickly, not necessarily slower than if you’d pushed them directly to dream big. Advice like “Do something that’s scary but at least 80% tractable” scales pretty well across natural ambition levels.