{"id":11208,"date":"2016-12-10T17:41:49","date_gmt":"2016-12-10T09:41:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/blog\/?p=11208"},"modified":"2016-12-10T17:41:49","modified_gmt":"2016-12-10T09:41:49","slug":"the-folly-of-the-plunge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/2016\/12\/10\/the-folly-of-the-plunge\/","title":{"rendered":"The Folly Of The Plunge"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>There&#8217;s an overly romanticized idea in both business and romance (and probably in many other fields as well) &#8211; that success happens after you take some sort of gravity-defying leap, compelled by courage and inspiration. (<a href=\"https:\/\/news.ycombinator.com\/item?id=7058057\">Relevant HN thread<\/a>)<\/p>\n<p>Cal Newport talks about why this is a bad idea in <em>So Good They Can&#8217;t Ignore You<\/em>. He points out that Steve Jobs gave an inspiring speech at Harvard about following your dreams, staying hungry and foolish \u2013 but his actual behavior was much more opportunistic. (<em>This needs some elaboration.)<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Consider Scott Adams&#8217; <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.dilbert.com\/post\/102892840346\/systems#_=_\">Goals Vs Systems<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>There are occasional plunge-taking stories, like the one about the FedEx\u00a0founder being so desperate and broke that he bet all his money at a casino \u2013 then made enough to go on. But that&#8217;s somebody driven to desperation. If you&#8217;re already on the verge of death, it makes sense to take risks since you&#8217;re going to die anyway.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s also a generally bad idea when it comes to romantic relationships. Over and over again I hear from young men who think that they should &#8220;confess their love&#8221; to a\u00a0woman. They do it, and it almost never works out well. Why? It puts them on the spot. It corners them. If they say yes, there&#8217;s a lot of pressure to now &#8220;be something&#8221; \u2013 which is scary. They almost always say no (unless they were already very attracted to you \u2013 this is something you should be able to infer!).<\/p>\n<p><em>To be updated.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There&#8217;s an overly romanticized idea in both business and romance (and probably in many other fields as well) &#8211; that success happens after you take some sort of gravity-defying leap, compelled by courage and inspiration. (Relevant HN thread) Cal Newport talks about why this is a bad idea in So&hellip; <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11783,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[575,576],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11208","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-letters","category-self-repair"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/dive-plunge.jpg?fit=580%2C354&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5gxNz-2UM","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11208"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11208\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11783"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}