A fatal flaw in the "be really hard on yourself as the mechanism to achieve" plan is that even when you achieve you absolutely cannot believe it, because you've really overtrained being hard on yourself. You see a systematic undervaluing that robs you of true information about your work.
So, one of the hallmarks of maladaptive high achievement I look for, as a psychologist studying productivity, is inability to really celebrate.
A lot of people believe, basically, any kind of achievement is good because you got there in the end. But in fact maladaptive achievement is a whole cycle that leads to long-term breakdown, and it's a breakdown we have measured in learning science a lot.
I think there is a lot here that could be learned about how certain software teams function. In our Developer Thriving work, we focused on factors that predict *sustainable* achievement for this reason: flexible, celebratory, human centered.
This is a topic I'm interested in.
We see it commonly with graduate students. I've often described it as toxic perfectionism.
It often plays out in the 2nd or 3rd year around qualifiers or writing a fellowship or designing the first big experiment. The student just gets crippled by not being perfect and starts spiraling,
I'd be interested to know if there are evidence-based approaches a department can use (short of sending them to counseling) to prevent this phenomenon.
@grimalkina I wonder whether the taboo on mentioning ambition (at least in some circles) and the difficulty of getting reliable skill assessment is connected to the achievement issue you've described.
https://www.harihareswara.net/posts/2018/the-ambition-taboo-as-dark-matter/
PyCon just rejected my talk submission,* so I'll try to finish and post this draft that I've been tapping at for ages. My current half-baked theory is that programmers who want any public recognition from … | Cogito, Ergo Sumana | Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
@brainwane oh my goodness, completely. I have so many thoughts about this. To me this also connects very deeply with strong cultural norms we employ as groups to keep people "in their place" in power structures -- that's a more sociological complement to my original post here which focuses on the individual cognition.
The idea that "true craft" never talks about itself is really interesting and to me, quite rooted in field specific beliefs that success = brilliance and brilliance = obvious
@thatandromeda
The nice thing about problems of over-concern is that you can redirect the concern to that problem. So since I had a good relationship with the team, the first thing I did was just to be frank that I thought they had a big problem with negativity. That got them to start directing some of the critical energy to their self criticism.
From there I tried to inject more positive reflection. What went right? What worked well this week? What's a strong point of the team? How can we get more of that? Some of which I think I borrowed from the Thin Book of Appreciative Inquiry.
I also had them try retrospective exercises that force balance, like SAMOLE: https://retromat.org/en/?id=17
Is that helpful?
@jeremy_data ❤️!! I'm working on it!!
Following me counts as your pre-order :)). But honestly though, post this sentiment publicly on LinkedIn and tag me or my research lab, every bit of out loud industry affirmation of the value of our research really does help unlock the time and space we need for writing all this stuff up!!
@Geoffberner imo, you are fundamentally in a relationship with yourself, for your whole life. Have you really listened to yourself, because is there a part of you that knows already when you're kicking off this cycle?
I personally also find a ton of comfort in knowing the research on this. People really genuinely are more productive over their lives when they work within what human beings enjoy, need, and want. We're more creative and our solutions are far more lasting.
I'm not a pro, so this may be bullshit. But maybe not, maybe the following exercise is helpful. Judge yourself.
Get out a piece of paper and list five aspects of life where you are at peace with yourself if you achieve a low performance, somewhere between mediocre and average.
For most performance indicators, roughly half of the people rank below average. Where don't you mind belonging to that half?
@grimalkina Woof. You got me.
And TBH, I do this to myself *less* with work compared to the rest of my life.
@grimalkina This ties in to the rockstar developer mindset, which is really negative almost all the time. I'm a pretty good embedded systems developer after 40 years, but I work hard to be open to other input, to learn what the cool kids are doing, and to share my vulnerability and mistakes.
Mary and Tom Poppendieck have a great article on compensation - it's at least 20 years old - their site isn't pretty but it's useful 🙂
Ouch. Seriously ouch.
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