Succeed by being an Incrementalist

If you haven’t read it, Josh Waitzkin’s “The Art of Learning” (affiliate link) is a great book. Josh Waitzkin is an interesting guy: He was a famously successful chess player as a kid (even having a movie made about him). Growing up, he decided to refocus his energies on Martial Arts, and went on to win 4 Push Hands competitions in Tai Chi Chuan. The Art of Learning is his autobiography. He talks about the life of a professional athlete in a fascinating way, digging into both the physical and the mental aspects of martial arts competitions.

I took a lot of ideas from this book, but the most important idea was the two ways people approach learning: entity learning and incremental learning.

Children who are “entity theorists” – that is, kids who have been influenced by their parents and teachers to think in this manner – are prone to use language like “I am smart at this” and to attribute their success or failure to an ingrained and unalterable level of ability. They see their overall intelligence or skill level at a certain discipline to be a fixed entity, a thing that cannot evolve. Incremental theorists, who have picked up a different modality of learning [..] are more prone to describe their results with sentences like “I got it because I worked very hard at it” or “I should have tried harder”.

Entity theorists believe that certain people are inherently better at things. Incremental theorists believe that anyone can learn anything, even if it takes a lot of work. Surprisingly, as this quote demonstrates, people’s underlying beliefs about this tend to stem, not from the feedback of their parents/peers, but of the specific wording and the sentiment of that feedback.

I am a member of the incrementalist camp. Anything can be learned, and incrementalism is a much better mindset to have when faced with problems. In fact, I doubt it’s possible to succeed at creating a startup without it. The number of new things you have to learn, combined with the fact that you’re certain to be making mistakes daily, make it a terrible position to be in if you believe being good at something is a “binary” matter.

Unfortunately, a lot of programmers tend to fall into the trap mentioned by Max Klein in his article “Your high IQ will kill your startup“:

People who are born intelligent start off life with everything easy for them. They don’t have to work hard to get good grades, they never really have to do much to get ahead. The major challenge of early life is school – and school is designed for average people. So intelligent people just breeze through.

But there is a point where every intelligent person faces something that requires more than intelligence. It requires hard work, it requires the ability to fail, it requires being able to do tough tasks, boring tasks. For the first time in their life, in spite of their intelligence, these intelligent people are challenged, and they start failing. Like when they first attempt to create a startup.

Most programmers are above-average in intelligence. To make matters worse, a lot of the best hackers started off at a very young age, giving them the impression that they’re “naturally talented” at programming. They probably are, but no one knows everything at first; they certainly made many mistakes and learned a lot along the way.

The problem is, these programmers let their success with computers lull them into one field for the rest of their life, because that’s the only place they feel safe. Even worse, when they finally do decide to venture into new areas, their immediate failures send them right back to writing code. That’s not necessarily bad, since many people enjoy spending most of their time programming. It’s only bad when it’s because they feel that’s all they’ll ever be good at.

Evey once in a while, I run into someone who very patiently explains to me that I’m wrong. “I just don’t have any artistic talent”, they say, or “I’m just no good at sports”. And they’re probably right. But behind every story of a “gifted” artist, there usually lurks the truth: they had some talent to start with, sure, but they worked very hard to get to where they are now. I regularly throw myself into learning things I’m bad at, because it’s fun, but also because I want to prove to myself that I can. I’m certainly a better programmer than I am anything else, but it’s nice to know that I can learn new fields if I really try.

I’ll finish with another great annecdote from Josh Waitzkin, showing the importance of the incrementalist mindset for success:

In one wonderfully revealing study, a group of children was interviewed and then each child was noted as having either an entity or learning theory of intelligence. All the children were then given a series of easy math problems, which they all solved correctly. Then, all the children were given some very hard problems to solve – problems that were too difficult for them. It was clear that the learning theorists were excited by the challenge, while the entity theorists were dismayed. Comments would range from “Oh boy, now I’m really gonna have to try hard” to “I”m not smart enough for this.” Everyone got these problems wrong – but evidently the experience of being challenged had very different effects. What is most interesting is the third stage of this experiment: all the children were once again given easy problems to solve. Nearly all of the learning theorists breezed right through the easy material, but the entity theorists had been so dispirited by the inability to solve the hard problems that many of them foundered through the easy stuff. Their self-confidence had been destroyed.