ScottStevenson

Fair point, but it correlates more with Neuroticism. Conscientious people could be agreeable because they tend to believe "what's in the water", or the dogma of the place and time. This could cause them to be disagreeable with those outside their tribe.

Desktop?

IMHO the immaturity you're speaking of stems from High Conscientiousness. When conscientiousness becomes obsessive, we worship The Right Way, The Right Tools, The Right Culture. We believe in tools and methods like they have some magical power. We get more concerned about the "how" than the "what" we output. Dogmatism creates immature thinking and debate.

"Woodworking Mindset" is one antidote: https://scottstevenson.substack.com/p/lego-mindset-vs-woodwo...

A lot of the time being too high in conscientiousness actually makes it super hard to be creative: https://scottstevenson.substack.com/p/how-to-finally-make-so...

Great article on this, advocating for 40+ hours a week of real work:

http://bookofhook.blogspot.com/2013/03/smart-guy-productivit...

I used the word game because game implies a sort of "formal structure" or "submission" to a set of rules and constraints. This kind of structure relieves us of the anxiety of choice. It's so powerful it can be euphoric, that's why people pay for others to dominate them . I think it's also why we get into drug habits and a lot of other vices that add structure to our lives.

It's fine in moderation but tackling ambiguity regularly makes magic happen.

>Why does this happen?

I wrote about a hypothesis here: https://medium.com/@scott.stevenson/how-to-finally-make-some...

Most of us are scared by the ambiguity of actual creative work, so unless we are under the threat of deadline, we seek out "structured games" to play so that we can put off the anxiety of freeform work. These games are:

(1) Tool Game: Researching and setting up tools (2) Learning Game: Books, podcasts, courses (3) Maintenance Game: Cleaning up our desktop, desk, house, etc. (4) Process Game: Setting up new processes and following them

The knowledge that things are actually easy and straightforward means we actually need to do the creative part of the work--many people are not ready to face that knowledge.

We dropped GPT-3 into Word and found it shockingly effective for contract drafting. Today we launched a demo and early access waitlist signups!

Would love to hear any feedback from the HN community.

This is basically the Sirlin article (https://www.sirlin.net/articles/playing-to-win) applied to sports and business.

It applies to product development too. Obsessing over "doing the things the right way", "using the right tools", "100% test coverage" is not enough to create a winning product. It is very easy for engineering teams to get caught up in those intermediate goals rather than the actual goal. I'd say it's one of the most common reasons technical founders fail.

Then you have hackers like Pieter Levels making millions/year with a single gigantic PHP file on a single server.

I wrote a bit about this and my startup journey here: https://medium.com/@scott.stevenson/how-to-finally-make-some...