You don't need to fix every flaw to be a badass
Highly competent people use kludgy workarounds
I know some people who are astonishingly competent. Some run major government departments. Some have built billion-dollar companies. Some seem to be more thoughtful than me about literally everything.
But as I’ve got to know more of these people over the years, both inside and outside EA, I’ve been struck by how badly they suck at some stuff. However, these flaws are not obvious to the casual observer and they’re not tanking these people’s performance, because they use kludges: they patch over their weaknesses with workarounds.
A friend has a quant PhD from a top school and built a >$100m company. He can’t give feedback on people’s work in person. When he thinks that the work is bad, he is visibly self-conscious and anxious, he doesn’t know how to help the person in front of him, and everyone involved has a bad time. He now only gives feedback asynchronously.
Another friend has about the best education you could imagine for her field and runs a $10m/year non-profit. She’s a shocking speller, so her PA reads every email before it goes out.
A researcher I admire struggles to get his thoughts out without immediately shooting them down. When he sits down to write any document, he starts with a disclaimer along the lines of: ‘This might be rubbish, I don’t have to share it with anyone if I don’t want to, these are just hot takes I’m exploring’.
I feel surprised about cases like these. My intuition used to be that badass people would have worked on these weaknesses and resolved the underlying issue, or perhaps just been born without them in the first place. I now think that this intuition is wrong.
When I was failing to work on something useful in the morning, or overthinking an email, or fumbling small talk at family dinners, my intuition told me that this meant I couldn’t be one of those intimidatingly badass people who are able to do important things. These issues just don’t feel like the kind of things that those people would struggle with — so maybe a) I could never get there or b) I would need to somehow generally get to a higher level of Enlightenment and Self-Actualisation such that these things wouldn’t happen to me.
But as it turns out, there’s no need to fix everything: there’s a route to excellence through hacky workarounds.
