
Why Intelligent People Fail - gibsonf1
http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/works/intelligentfailure.htm
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philk
Some of these are so general as to be useless:

* Giving up too easily or not giving up to easily

* Too little confidence or too much confidence

* Spreading oneself too thin or thick

* Taking too much blame or not taking too much blame

The problem being that there's no way to know (for example) if you're being
too confident or not confident enough.

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Ardit20
Just because they are general they are not useless.

Where the article fails I think is that it takes intelligence to know whether
you are giving up too early or not giving up too early. Also, an intelligent
person would know or realise at some point whether they are spreading
themselves too thin or thick, and do something about it. That is afteral what
intelligence is for. Others however might not.Thus the people the article is
speaking of seem to be perhaps not that intelligence. Thus "intelligent
people" should be taken off the title as it applies more to all people.

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petercooper
You could as easily call this _Why People Fail_. None of the points are
limited or directly related to intelligent people.

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lkozma
I think the assumption is that these are possible reasons for failure after
you discarded "not intelligent enough", which indeed could be a pretty valid
reason.

The article refers to the remaining branches, thus the title.

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petercooper
So you could remove the first item and retitle it _Why Motivated People Fail_?
Or the 17th and _Why Patient People Fail_. Hmm.. I could sell this idea to
Mahalo ;-)

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pan69
I quickly read through the list. Not sure if this is in there but I call it
"Insight by progress". What I mean by it that you start on something and than
halfway through you realize you should have done it differently and rather
than sticking with it you start over, again and again...

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kqueue
The main reason imho is that they don't understand people, they think everyone
is as smart as they are, and this results in trying to create a perfect
product which is impossible, and hence, they lose motivation to complete it.

What smart people need to realize is that the rest of the people are not that
smart. Proof? They buy virtual goods.

Never assume people will not use your product, this is too big of an
assumption. Let them decide because they don't think like you.

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wturner
One more: Over analyzing. :)

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ComputerGuru
That largely fits under "unable to see the forest for the trees"

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sliverstorm
I think it was intended as a jab at the author :)

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lincolnq
I'm doing an exercise where I go through each of these and attempt to discover
whether I have this flaw.

Of course, I'm probably susceptible to the ego / dunning-kruger effect, where
I will think I'm less prone to certain flaws than I really am. I'm looking for
ways to mitigate this effect. Any ideas?

My first attempt is to try to name someone I respect who has this flaw. The
idea is the sucker theory, from poker -- if you can't see the sucker at the
table, it's you. If I can't find someone with a particular flaw, I may have
that flaw.

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angrycoder
The most obvious reason:

They are not stupid enough to think they will succeed.

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JoeAltmaier
The same reason anyone fails: lack of conscientionness. This is the #1
attribute that is needed for success at anything. Most of the list falls into
this category.

