[raw note: spent ~15m writing it]
I noticed a tendency among people to feel guilty when they don’t follow advice - even when it isn’t working. First, they went and read a lot about how to achieve some goal — build a startup, for example — and then they guilt themselves whenever they aren’t following that advice as well as they want.
Like if you’re building a startup and you read all the YC advice, and then feel guilty you aren’t “just focused on coding and talking to users”, or you want to do things that scale instead of do things that don’t scale, or you tend to think more methodically through things instead of super fast and agile.
Any deviation from doing the things the way Elon or Zuck does them can feel like “oh no I have to do the thing”
A lot of pain seems to come from this guilt. I wonder why it happens. Some bets are
- it is a form of status anxiety - when they learn a lot from someone about a thing they put them higher than them in their head and so they feel pressure to do the things to be like them
- low self esteem - they don’t have a strong enough sense of self to do things the way they want, they don’t acknowledge their own needs
- fear of failure - they are so afraid if they don’t follow the advice maybe they will fail so they follow it, but I think at the root of it this comes from not trusting themselves enough
- overly simplified thinking in that this is “the way” to do things
- Tribalism- people don’t want to be told “told you so” if they ignore advice and fail they look dumb. Many cultures celebrate social conformity and less on venturing into unknown. If you do it may create a sense of envy out being out from the tribe.
Each of these things can be worked on but seem hard to do.
I think being aware that this behaviour stems from some reason like above is the starting point.
I welcome comments + discussion @ kylemorriscs@gmail.com - I prefer 1:1 so discourse is less mimetically influenced
thanks Connie li, for reviewing & sharing thoughts on this