I recently came across with a list of 20 points called Why Intelligent People Fail, here in Michael Anissimov's webpage, apparently taken from a book called In Search of the Human Mind, by Sternberg, R. I'm not going to transcribe it to here because it is a bit long but I wanted to make a quick comment.
The list shouldn't be taken religiously but it is a good attempt at summarizing the most common pitfalls everyone usually tries to avoid in their line of work. It shows that there is much more besides talent and talent itself is not enough to be successful. I don't believe one can avoid all 20 points but it is good to have a reference to remember from time to time.
7. Inability to complete tasks. For some people nothing ever draws to a close. Perhaps it’s fear of what they would do next or fear of becoming hopelessly enmeshed in detail.
Between others, I confess I suffer from this one but in a different way. I feel some resistance when finishing documents because it is very stressful to think that those words will be definitive and you will be evaluated by what you wrote for the rest of your life. Therefore, to get the fairest and most precise image of you out of those documents, you must squeeze all your value inside those sentences, in a reasonable time frame. That, for me, is a bit violent. The only way I can keep going while writing is labelling everything as work in progress or else I would be paralysed by fear. Closing it is always painful.
Comments (0)
Leave a comment...