Gary Story-Raising Exceptional | The High-Achiever Psychology Series
In the early days of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg ran his engineering teams under a four-word principle that became one of the most quoted and most misunderstood ideas in the history of Silicon Valley.
Move fast and break things.
The people who understood it knew it was a statement about the limits of analysis. You cannot know what works until it exists in the world. The information you need to make good decisions is only available after you have built the thing, not before. Waiting until you are certain is itself a form of failure — the most invisible kind, the kind that never shows up in the bug reports because the thing you were too careful to build never existed to break.
I think about this principle often when I am working with students on their college application essays.
Tim Story-Raising Exceptional | The High-Achiever Psychology Series
The first thing Tim’s mother said, when she sat down in my office, was that her son was lazy.
She said it the way people say things they have been thinking for a long time — not with anger, exactly, but with the particular weariness of someone who has arrived at a conclusion through years of accumulating evidence and is now simply reporting it. Her son was lazy. She had watched him work for hours on problems that should have taken twenty minutes. She had watched him erase and redo and erase again. She had watched him miss deadlines not because he hadn’t started but because he couldn’t finish — couldn’t release the thing, couldn’t declare it done, couldn’t let go.
She was a physics professor. She knew what diligence looked like, and she knew what her son was doing was not diligence. It was something else. She just didn’t have a name for it.
I had a name for it.