
Winning Isn't Normal - jasonshen
http://www.jasonshen.com/2010/winning-isnt-normal/
======
knieveltech
Reminds me of a singular experience I had several years ago. I'd been driving
pizza delivery and in general coasting through life after dropping out of
college. I had wanted to be a programmer when I grew up but a personality
conflict between myself and the head of the CS department at school convinced
me to hit the bricks.

Anyway I was doing a delivery to a local apartment complex on a windy day and
on my way back to the car this little pink piece of paper blew across the
parking lot and fetched up next to my shoe. I picked it up and inspected it.
It was printed on both sides, one side had some kind of spam advertisement for
carpet cleaning or real estate or something, but the other side caught my eye.
All it said was "If you want something you've never had, you have to do
something you've never done".

While it would make a great narrative to say I went back and quit my dead end
job immediately and dedicated myself to getting my shit together, it was
another year before I started putting my life in order. But ever since that
day, whenever I felt like I was in a rut or whatever, I'd remember that little
piece of paper.

Eventually I got my shit together, educated myself on a couple of programming
languages and joined the workforce as a developer, married, bought a house.
While I don't think that piece of paper is solely responsible for my
successes, the idea "If you want something you've never had, you have to do
something you've never done" has been kicking around in my head ever since,
and I'm sure it's colored at least some of the choices I've made since that
day.

~~~
karlzt
what was that personality conflict that you had with the head of the CS
department?

~~~
knieveltech
That's a story for some other time. :)

------
oconnore
<http://imgur.com/9dMGz.png>

What is this crap? I'm running Fedora 14 with Opera 10.63. I guarantee you my
computer has no "malware". And if it does, you sure can't detect it from an
HTTP request.

Just a guess: I am on a university network shared by lots of humanities
majors, many of whom probably browse porn websites on unsecured Windows XP
boxes. The company that provides this "service" for Jason sees that many of
the computers on this network have been infected by a bot net, and then
decides that it's a great idea to block the whole sub net. Now over 5000
people can't read Jason's blog. Is this really effective security? If you want
to be really safe, I recommend you block 0.0.0.0/0.

~~~
jasonshen
Sorry - I signed up with cloudflare which promised a faster safer experience
for my readers. =( I'll talk to them.

~~~
jasonshen
Just following up on this - here's how Cloudflare replied. I'm going to set my
security levels to low.

Information about how the challenge pages appear can be found here:
<http://www.cloudflare.com/wiki/DataSources> The party could look up their IP
to see why the challenge is happening here:
<http://projecthoneypot.org/search_ip.php>

One thing that you can do is set your security settings to low on CloudFlare
so only the worst offenders get challenged (attackers, etc.). You can do this
by going to settings->CloudFlare settings->Security Level->Change to low.

There will be false positives with data, of course, but there are two options
available to challenged visitors: 1\. Pass the captcha to gain entry to your
site. 2\. The site admin can whitelist the ip address of the visitor in their
CloudFlare Threat Control Panel, which will (a) override CloudFlare's
behavior, and (b) help correct false positives.

------
Periodic
I like the point that "winning" requires abnormal behavior, but I don't like
the phrasing as "winning". Winning implies a competition, when many worth-
while things in life aren't a competition and often simply passing a personal
bar will suffice.

It is a good point that doing extraordinary things requires extraordinary
devotion, but the focus on overworking and beating an opposition bothers me.

I'd like to think that accomplishing extraordinary things requires an
extraordinary goals and extraordinary passion. You need to have a goal to
direct your energy towards, and you need the passion to pursue that goal even
when it feels like it might be out of reach.

I think the real message of this article is just that accomplishing
extraordinary things requires a lot of hard work, persistence, and patience. I
think it misses the love and passion that is required to do that long-term.

~~~
potatolicious
I think the missing (but important) point from the post is that life really
_is_ a zero sum game.

I've "won" at a large number of things throughout my life, some of which I
wholeheartedly value, others I consider to have been an unwise waste of time.
To win at something you must sacrifice another, and the bigger the win the
bigger the loss on the other end. When you see a huge win but no downside,
check your surroundings and tread carefully.

Unless you've invented ways to artifically extend your lifespan, or have
tripped into a time warp, time is the ultimate limiting factor in everything.

The author mentions that he often wished to have a "normal" childhood, but
then dismisses that (all too quickly, IMHO) given the scope of his
accomplishments. This is not to denigrate his achievements in the least, but
rather that in hindsight many of the things that I sacrificed and fought for
had hidden costs that didn't make themselves evident until much later on.

The advantage of leading at least a marginally "normal" childhood is your
ability to identify, internalize, and connect - something I dismissed in my
youth as being either irrelevant, or fixable later. It is definitely not the
former, and the latter gets exponentially harder as you get older.

All in all, this is not a discouragement from going nuts and working hard, but
rather a strong warning that one's time resources are _severely_ limited even
if you push your body to the limit, and that the price you pay for these
achievements is non-zero and often hidden.

~~~
lotharbot
> _"To win at something you must sacrifice another, and the bigger the win the
> bigger the loss on the other end."_

My wife was a pretty big win, and she was worth the opportunity cost of
anything else I could've spent the time and effort for. My son, too. It's not
really zero-sum unless you're using a strange metric.

~~~
potatolicious
The opportunity costs are still there - maybe you can't do reckless things
like climb Mt. Everest now, or maybe you can't risk your family in extremely
risky startups, or... etc etc.

It's not zero-sum in happiness, but it _is_ zero-sum in _time_ and
_possibilities_. You certainly sound like you've found a good solution to the
problem (i.e., maximizing happiness, avoiding sinking valuable time into
things that don't)

I don't think my original post was that well-written actually, and the point I
was trying to get across is probably better communicated as:

\- Every hour you spend doing something is an hour you're not doing something
else.

\- What you do contributes directly to your happiness. It is non-obvious,
especially when young, what contributes to happiness in the long run, and what
doesn't. Hermit'ing up and writing code like a madman for a week, for example,
will improve your programming skills, but will also exact a toll on your
personal relationships. One gives a larger short-term rush on accomplishment
and accolades, the other is a better bet at long-term satisfaction.

\- It is also sometimes non-obvious (especially when young) of just _how much_
you're missing out on or damaging in your unrelenting pursuit of "winning".
Your obsession with winning can also blind you as to just how good the reward
is.

It's more or less a generalized form of something I've thought about over the
last couple of years - human relationships matter above _any_ material
achievement. All the trophies, medals, and awards in the world pale in
comparison to good relationships. And there are no easy hacks for
relationships, they take a great deal of time and effort - and running an
extreme "achiever" lifestyle poses an extreme risk to that.

I fucked that up in high school, and some of college, and it took meeting
someone with a far better grok on life than I do to set me straight. I'm
hoping fewer people fall into that trap.

~~~
DLWormwood
> I fucked that up in high school, and some of college, and it took meeting
> someone with a far better grok on life than I do to set me straight. I'm
> hoping fewer people fall into that trap.

I wish I could vote you up 100 times. I only am learning this lesson in middle
age, and I’m coming to regret having shut myself off to others in high school
and college. (Though it wasn’t just career; I also had fundamentalist baggage
to jettison.)

------
gfodor
This article also underscores how important that you choose wisely what it is
you want to win at, since if you even want a chance of it you'll likely have
it consume your life.

------
ibagrak
Although I greatly admire the author's personal accomplishments, I feel like
some arguments in this write up are based on false premises.

Here is an example: "winners will do what losers won't"

What about the guy who gets the second place? the third? Surely, he did a lot
of things that losers didn't but isn't he also a loser? This quickly grows
absurd when you talk about competitive sports, but perhaps the line between
winners and losers and what they do to become who they are is not as well-
defined.

Framing everything in terms of winning and losing ends up producing cultural
constructs that are by and large unsupportable with real-world evidence and
experience. I know this probably sounds like sour grapes or one loser's
whining, but reading between the lines of the original post it doesn't sound
like author was particularly happy "living" that categorization himself.
Perhaps, I am imagining things though.

I also think competitive sports are exceptional in how strongly work
correlates with achievement. When I look at winners in business, for the life
of me I don't think their accomplishments correlate with "work". Work is but
one aspect, but there is also talent, intelligence, luck, and background. All
of those matter too.

------
matwood
Good post, and exactly right. Look at anyone who 'wins' and you'll often see
extreme habits. Athletes are easy examples to look at because they compete so
directly and much is written about them. If you look at a Michael Jordan or a
Tiger Woods you'll of course find talent, but also an unrelenting competitive
drive that made them practice for hours and hours a day. Their practice
schedules were/are not normal even for the professional athlete level.

There is a good quote from a forgettable rap song:

 _Losers make excuses, winners make it happen_

The author of the blog post made it happen even if he wasn't aware of doing it
at the time.

~~~
snikolov
As much as I support making it happen over making excuses, I sometimes find it
a difficult distinction to make.

Jason's story hits home for me in many ways. I was also an overachiever in
high school who came home at 10pm from gymnastics, did homework, slept 4 hours
and did it all over again. I went to a super-competitive high school, stressed
over my GPA to two decimal places, got into the top schools etc.

Looking back, I did it out of something that I can only describe as pure
competitive drive. I did it because I had to do well. I was concerned far more
often about being a winner than about identifying and achieving a particular
thing that I really care about.

But winning felt good!

I seem to have forgotten that since I came to college. My mindset for the past
three or so years has been "I don't compete with others. I'll figure out
what's really important to _me_ and I'll work hard to achieve that." The
result? I haven't figured out what's important to me. I don't feel like I've
been a winner in many things because I've allowed myself to think I don't care
about winning at those things. For example, I have allowed myself to say "I
don't really care about algorithms" and gotten Bs and Cs in algorithms.

I tell myself that blindly winning at the wrong thing for the sake of winning
could make me unhappy in the long run, that I should slow down and explore and
figure out some real goals first. Yet it sounds a lot like a lame excuse, and
it's even more difficult to do when one feels that one is "falling behind"
compared to one's peers.

My conclusion is still that simply making it happen may be too superficial. It
was for me. A substantial question is _what_ you want to make happen and why.

~~~
mbm
I faced this my senior year of college too. What drove me out of the rough was
Dweck's _Mindset_. Get your hands on a copy if you haven't read it yet. The
take-away for me was that the apathy I sometimes felt was a kind of scapegoat
for avoiding situations where I could fail. Instead of increasing my effort
when I was faced with the hardest problems, I decreased it by avoiding them.
This reduces the probability of failure but also ironically of success as
well, which tends to sting in the long run if you don't catch it.

~~~
snikolov
Thanks a lot for the suggestion!

You've got a point apathy being a mechanism to avoid, or even rationalize
failure.

I realized something else: _that winning gives you ownership and confidence._

To use my previous example, If I had diregarded "interest" in algorithms and
gotten stellar grades in algorithms classes just for the sake of "winning", I
would come to be proud of how good I am at algorithms. I would become
empowered, I would like the feeling, and I would like algorithms.

------
chegra
I see systems that are design for his success. Take away his systems, I think
his probability of success would drastically decrease. His systems set his
expectation. I'm sure his school consistently produce high calibre people like
him and even the gym that he went to after school. I'm pretty sure if he had
siblings, they would also go to a top tier school. I say that to say that the
take away from this is not about doing abnormal things but being in a system
that expect superior performance.

I think the goal is to seek out these systems and become apart of them for our
given endeavors.

~~~
jasonshen
You're certainly right. I'm not trying to pretend like I'm some kind of super-
person. We had advantages: my mom was a gymnastics coach, I was in a great
school system, high expectations were placed on me. We had disadvantages: we
were immigrants, lower middle class growing up and neither parent had any
experience with the US college application process.

I think Warren Buffet says it best: "Take me as an example. I happen to have a
talent for allocating capital. But my ability to use that talent is completely
dependent on the society I was born into. If I'd been born into a tribe of
hunters, this talent of mine would be pretty worthless. I can't run very fast.
I'm not particularly strong. I'd probably end up as some wild animal's
dinner."

------
adovenmuehle
I think the word "successful" makes more sense to me in this context. He was
successful at prioritizing activities to achieve goals he wanted to
accomplish, but what was won?

I congratulate the author on having the discipline to accomplish these things.

Either way, I think it's a good example of using discipline to accomplish ones
goals.

~~~
timwiseman
What was won? The goals he set are achieved.

Now, you may question whether he set the right goals, but that is a different
question.

------
paganel
Maybe it's a cultural thing (I'm an East-European who's never been to the
States), but what's with this obsession about "winning", "not being a loser"
etc?

~~~
nihilocrat
It's a cultural thing, definitely. Some Americans take it too far, but even
those who don't (many), who don't think everything in life is about winning a
competition, still interpret most things as competitions even if they aren't
officially so. We've got tons of sayings that subconsciously make us a
winners-only culture: "Winners don't do drugs", "Quitters never win", etc.

As a teenager I was totally disillusioned with it, so I mistakenly thought
winning of any form and encouraging others to try to win made you an
intellectually bankrupt tool. Probably made me happier, but had the adverse
effect that I feel a lot lazier than other people I know because I'm more
prepared to do "good enough" rather than try to outperform my peers. Being
American-born, I feel like I could be seen as a poor performer by my superiors
simply because I'm not doing better than my peers.

~~~
philwelch
As far as cultural things go, I'll take it over "tall poppy syndrome" anytime.
I'd rather be looked down upon for doing poorly than be looked down upon for
doing well.

------
sharms
I enjoyed reading the post, and agree with it. It would be nice to read a
follow-up post on balancing life -- does being a winner mean not having a
family, watching a movie with friends etc?

~~~
jasonshen
I'll see what I can do there! Certainly the post comes off as a little extreme
but I was trying to make a point about what it takes to be successful. It's
important to have down time and rejuvenation periods as well.

------
forgotAgain
Winning is normal. If it wasn't we would have been extinct as a species a long
time ago. What isn't normal is devoting your life to something not related to
survival. At the individual level winning is important if it provides a
benefit to the species as a whole. Otherwise it is transitory and unimportant.

------
Alex3917
"The Olympian stands alone." --John Biglow

------
Seth_Kriticos
In my personal opinion, winning is getting the feeling at the end of the day
that it was spent well.

Most of us of course define this as achieving something, like completing some
new program module or getting a good contract.

The important part is that you are confident with the day, with your life.

Now I'm not sure if this guy in the article is winning or not, he forgot to
state that. He just said that he was the best in a competition and got a very
high score on a test. I guess he felt good those days, otherwise he would not
post about it, I hope.

This is of course a subjective view, the concept is.

~~~
tomjen3
That is one way to look at it. Personally I do not believe winning is
subjective, you either get what you initially wanted or you didn't - that has
got to be pretty objective.

The goal you move towards on the other hand is obviously something that should
be chosen by the individual who is trying to win and I will argue that all
goal that really matter or bring happiness are chosen by the person who is
trying to achieve it rather than by society at large.

------
noidi
This blog post reminded me of Alan Watts' Music and Life, which is great food
for thought when pondering your goals in life:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERbvKrH-GC4>

------
lwhi
I like this article.

Our society places too much emphasis on superlatives. This emphasis creates a
world that idolises extremes and pushes us further towards (ab)normal ideals.

The journey we take towards our goals is where lessons are learnt.

~~~
tomjen3
I agree,about our society, being too full of extremes, but the article doesn't
change this at all. It's just more honest about what it takes to make it all
the way to be a winner in - a lot of hard work and persistence and a
willingness to ignore what everybody else tells you to do. It's not a new view
of the way to success, but it is a great message which we have to be reminded
of from time to time lest we forget it.

~~~
lwhi
Hmm.. well, maybe it challenges the notion slightly, by highlighting the fact
that winning is abnormal.

But then again, 'normal' is such a loaded term.

------
enra
Winning isn't normal, but also I don't like to think grinding yourself through
life is winning or normal either.

The author describes a one strategy to win in a simple environment with clear
rules and way of progress (school, sports). I admire the discipline but I
would like to see that energy to be channeled to building something valuable.

What I like think is a life where you think hard about things that are worth
doing, and not mix motion(doing something) with action(getting tanglible
results).

------
jamesbritt
A corollary is that losing is normal. Or, maybe more precisely, not winning is
normal. But in order to win you need to be willing to try, and if you try
there's a chance you'll lose, or fail, or look foolish, or whatever.

A first step in being a winner it getting comfortable with being a loser.

<http://creatingminds.org/quotes/failure.htm>

------
sayemm
"Intensity is the price of excellence." - Warren Buffett, page 293 of "The
Snowball"

------
mrchess
After reading the blurb about gymnastics I realized that this was the Jason
used to compete with me back in high school over on the East Coast. Times like
this reminds me how small the world is!

------
ZoFreX
Reminds me of a quote:

> C'est en faisant n'importe quoi, qu'on devient n'importe qui !

Which (really badly) translated goes something like "It is by doing nothing
important, that one becomes noONE important"

------
InfinityX0
Like it, but wish the author had done this without so much braggadocio. It
could have been done the same way without so much self-reference and would
have come off better, IMO.

~~~
lionhearted
> Like it, but wish the author had done this without so much braggadocio. It
> could have been done the same way without so much self-reference and would
> have come off better, IMO.

You know I see this sometimes and I'm not sure it's a good thing - a person
describes their achievements tangibly and concrete, and then someone says,
"You're bragging!"

I got three thoughts on that -

1\. It's a damn shame that people can't talk about their achievements in
tangible, concrete terms without somebody whipping out the b-label. I mean,
the author just posted his schedule and how much he sacrificed, and shared
some encouragement for people wondering if they're not normal, and shared a
good quote and a video. That's not empty braggadocio, no way.

2\. This creates a strange sort of culture where the high status thing to do
is to be all nonchalant and indifferent, and it's impossible to tell who is
full of shit and who isn't. Earlier today, there was the "dealing with hostile
lawyers" post, and a bunch of people said, "Who is this joker? Don't take his
advice." But that joker happens to be a self-made millionaire with a crazy-
good track record. But if he mentions "My win-loss record is literally 100% in
this area" he'd get hit with the brag label again.

3\. When someone says, "you're bragging!" - I think that reflects more on the
person saying it than the original author. C'mon guys, celebrate when someone
wins. Winning is good. Sheesh.

~~~
nostrademons
Reminds me of the world in The Giver, where bringing up anything outside of
Sameness was socially taboo, and even compliments were frowned upon because
they might make someone uncomfortable.

------
juiceandjuice
Congratulations you've done everything the world told you that you need to do
in order to become a "winner"

It's a shame you've never seen the prize though.

------
warmfuzzykitten
Great blog post! Winning is hard, sustained work.

