Be Persistent, Not Stubborn | 5Y View

Successful founders all share one trait: persistence. But persistence comes in good and bad forms. The good kind is called perseverance; the bad kind is called stubbornness.

Stubbornness isn't hard — animals have it. But perseverance has a remarkably complex internal structure. It requires energy, imagination, resilience, good judgment, and focus on a goal. People who have all five are rare. But when you do find them, the results are magical. Today's share comes from an essay by Paul Graham — hope it gives you something to think about :)

Author: Paul Graham

Translated by boxi

Originally published on 36Kr's "Divine Translation Bureau"

Successful people tend to be persistent. New ideas usually don't work at first, but they don't get discouraged. They keep trying until they find something that does.

But stubbornness, by contrast, leads to failure. Stubborn people are annoying. They won't listen to others. They won't change course even when it's clearly not working.

But is there really a difference between perseverance and stubbornness? Do they actually behave differently? Or are they really doing the same thing, and we just label them differently after the fact based on how things turned out?

If that were the only difference, there'd be nothing to learn from distinguishing perseverance from stubbornness. Telling someone to be persistent rather than stubborn would be like telling them to succeed rather than fail — they already know that. But if perseverance and stubbornness are actually different behaviors, then it's worth teasing the two apart.

I've talked to many determined people, and I think they behave quite differently. By the end of a conversation, I'll have the impression "wow, this person is really persistent" or "damn, this person is really stubborn." I don't think I'm just reacting to whether they seem to be on the right track. Whether they seem right is part of it, but not all of it.

Stubborn people are somewhat unpleasant, and not just because they're wrong. They won't listen. But determined people aren't like that. I can't think of anyone more determined than the Collison brothers (founders of Stripe), but when you point out a problem to them, they don't just listen — they listen with a focus that's almost predatory. Is there a hole in their hull? Maybe not, but if there is, they want to know.

Most successful people are like this. They're most interested in what you disagree with. Stubborn people don't want to hear from you. When you point out problems, their eyes glaze over. Their responses sound like ideologues talking doctrine.

Perseverance and stubbornness look similar because both are hard to stop. But the difficulty differs. Perseverance is like a ship that can't slow down; stubbornness is like a ship that can't turn.

In degenerate cases, the two are hard to tell apart: when there's only one way to solve a problem, your only choice is whether to give up, and both the perseverant and the stubborn will say no. This is probably why the two are so often conflated in popular culture. The assumption is that problems are simple. But as problems get more complex, we can see the difference. Perseverance focuses on higher points in the decision tree rather than lower ones, while stubbornness indiscriminately sprays "don't give up" over the whole tree.

The perseverant are stubborn about the goal; the stubborn are stubborn about the route.

Worse, this means they tend to become attached to their initial ideas about how to solve the problem — ideas that often have little to do with actual experience solving it. So stubborn people aren't just stubborn about details; they're very likely stubborn about the wrong details.

Why are they like this? Why are stubborn people so stubborn? One possibility is that they're overwhelmed. They're not capable. They're facing a hard problem. They're in over their heads. So they cling to ideas like a drowning person clings to a straw.

This was my initial theory, but it doesn't hold up. If stubbornness were just a product of being in over your head, then giving perseverant people harder problems would make them stubborn. But it doesn't. If you give the Collison brothers an extremely hard problem, they don't become stubborn. On the contrary, they become less stubborn. They know they have to be open to anything.

Similarly, if stubbornness were caused by circumstances, then stubborn people wouldn't be stubborn with easy problems. But they are. If stubbornness isn't caused by circumstances, it must be something about the person — a personality trait.

Stubbornness is an instinctive resistance to changing yourself. It's not the same as stupidity, but the two are closely related. As contrary evidence accumulates, instinctively resisting changing your mind becomes a kind of induced stupidity. This form of not giving up is easily adopted by stupid people. You don't have to think about complex tradeoffs; you just keep going. And to some extent, it even works.

The clue that stubbornness works for simple problems is important. Perseverance and stubbornness aren't opposites. Their relationship is more like the two ways we have of breathing: aerobic respiration, and the anaerobic kind we inherited from our most distant ancestors. Anaerobic respiration is more primitive, but it has its uses. When you need to escape a threat immediately, that's what you use.

The optimal amount of stubbornness isn't zero. If your first reaction to a setback is an unthinking "never give up," that might be a good thing, because it helps prevent panic. But that's all the unconscious can do for you. The further someone goes down the road of stubbornness, the less likely they are to succeed at solving hard problems.

Stubbornness isn't hard. Animals have it. But perseverance has a remarkably complex internal structure.

One striking thing about perseverant people is their energy. They persist rather than merely resist. They keep trying. And this means perseverant people must also be imaginative. To keep trying, you have to keep thinking of things to try.

Energy and imagination are a powerful combination. They reinforce each other. Energy creates demand for the ideas imagination produces, which produces more ideas, while imagination gives energy somewhere to go.

Having both energy and imagination is already quite rare. But to solve hard problems, you need three more qualities: resilience, good judgment, and focus on some kind of goal.

Resilience means not letting setbacks destroy your morale. Beyond a certain point, setbacks are inevitable, so if you can't recover from them, you're limited to working on a small scale. But resilience isn't the same as stubbornness. Resilience means setbacks don't affect your morale, not that you refuse to change your mind.

In fact, perseverance often requires changing your mind. This is where good judgment comes in. Perseverant people are very rational. They care about expected value. It's this, not recklessness, that allows them to commit to things unlikely to succeed.

At the very top of the decision tree, though, perseverant people tend to be irrational. When choosing between two problems with roughly equal expected value, the choice usually depends on personal preference. In fact, they often deliberately sort projects into broad expected-value buckets to ensure that the projects they want to work on still qualify.

In practice, this doesn't seem to be a problem. Being irrational at the top of the decision tree is fine. One reason is that humans work harder on problems they like. But another factor is more subtle: our preferences for problems aren't random. When we like a problem that others don't, it's usually because we've unconsciously noticed something important about it that others haven't.

This leads to the fifth quality: having an overarching goal. If you're like me, you grew up wanting to do something great. In theory, this should be the most powerful motivation, because greatness encompasses everything that can be accomplished. But in practice, it's not very useful, precisely because it's too general — it doesn't tell you what to do right now.

So in practice, your energy, imagination, resilience, and good judgment must be directed at something fairly specific. Not so specific that you might miss great discoveries related to what you're looking for, but not so general that it can't motivate you.

Looking at the internal structure of perseverance, you can see it's completely different from stubbornness. Perseverance is much more complex. Energy, imagination, resilience, good judgment, and focus on a goal — these five distinct qualities combine to produce something that looks a bit like stubbornness, because it keeps you from giving up. But the way it keeps you from giving up is completely different. You're not simply resisting change; you're using energy and resilience to push forward, using imagination to discover paths and judgment to optimize them. If the expected value at any point down the decision tree drops low enough, you'll abandon that path, but energy and resilience keep pushing you toward the higher point you've chosen.

Given its composition, it's no surprise that perseverance is much rarer than stubbornness, and produces much better results. Anyone can be stubborn. In fact, children, drunks, and fools are the most stubborn of all. But people with all five qualities of perseverance are rare — and when you do find them, the results are magical.

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