The Right Kind of Stubborn

This is a great article on the difference between an obstinate person and a persistent person, but I'm not sure the general public perceives them the same way that Paul does.

What I've found is that many times, people like the perceived confidence that obstinacy can bring. For example, let's say that someone points out a flaw in a plan. Person A responds by saying "That's not a real problem. It doesn't matter." Person B says "Ok, that's interesting. Let's dig into it." Person A (the obstinate person who doesn't listen) usually comes across as more confident in this encounter, even though Person B (the persistent person who is engaging) may actually end up learning something new and getting a better result.

This is especially true in public forums. If you go up on a stage and do a debate, the obstinate person comes across as more confident to more people. This doesn't mean that their plan is any good. But people will vote for them, give them money, etc.

For the record, I agree with Paul's assessment that persistence is a great quality and obstinacy is not. However, it's hard to actually get this across to the public.

I like this article a lot.

I think a lot of the distinction between persistence and obstinance comes down to identity, attachment, and self esteem.

Almost everyone who is persistent or obstinant has something to prove. They have some deep-seated feeling that they need to demonstrate something to their community, a sense that maybe their value is in some ways conditional on what they provide. Content people who feel almost everyone already loves them rarely change the world. (That's no indictment of contentment, maybe changing the world is overrrated.)

The difference between persistence and obstinance is that obstinant people feel that every step on the path to solving the problem is a moment where they may be judged and found wanting. They are rigid because any misstep or dead end is perceived as a sign that they are a failure. It's not enough for them to solve the problem, they have to have been completely right at every step along the path.

Persistent people still have that need to prove themselves, but they hold it at a different granularity. They give themselves enough grace to make mistakes along the way, take in advice from others, and explore dead ends. As long as they are making progress overall and feel that they will eventually solve the problem, they are OK with themselves.

In other words, persistent people want to garner respect by giving the world a solution to the problem. Obstinant people want that respect by showing the world how flawlessly smart they are at every step, sometimes even if they never actually solve the problem.

Or put another way, persistent people have the patience to get esteem only after the problem is solved. Obstinant people need it every step of the way, which is another sign that obstinance has a connection to insecurity.

It's a delicate art to balance the drive to prove yourself with the self love to allow yourself to make mistakes, admit being wrong, and listen to others.

I often wonder into which of these two categories I fall with my epaper calendars.

On the one hand, I’ve been working on this product for four years, put every free minute into it, and it still doesn’t make enough money for me to quit my job.

On the other hand, the product keeps getting better as I work on it, and I have now sold 500 of them.

But sometimes I feel like I can’t keep going like this. Two jobs and a family is just too much.

I think I should either quit my job and properly focus on it, relying on savings until the sales can support me. Or put the project into maintenance mode (I will keep the lights on for at least 10 years, no matter what).

What would you advise me to do?

This is the product: https://shop.invisible-computers.com/products/invisible-cale...

I wonder if a simple test for "obstinacy" would be: how much does the person write/publish?

I used to work for a corporation that was legendary for their Quality (note the capital "Q" -I got used to denoting it that way). They have been making precision optical gear for over a hundred years, and fetch many thousands, for their consumer (really, professional) kit. Thousands of successful people have built their entire careers around this company's gear.

If you want to see "stubborn," look no further than their QA Division. In the US, there used to be a running joke, that if you had "Quality" in your job title, it meant your career was dead. At this company, it meant that you were headed for Executive Row. Many VPs and General Managers (a very powerful title, at this company), were former QA people.

And, boy, were they a pain to deal with. They would have 3,000-line Excel spreadsheets, and if even one of those lines was a red "X", the entire product line could get derailed. I had a project that we worked on, for 18 months, get nuked at the last minute, because they didn't like the Quality. I worked with an SV startup, that had a project canned, for pretty much exactly the same reason. The startup folks didn't seem to take the Quality seriously, which was basically a death sentence.

In that company, the kind of "stubborn" the QA people demonstrated, would be considered absolutely essential. I know that most folks around here, would not put up with it for a second.

They wouldn't be wrong. Making superb-Quality stuff is not a big moneymaker. You want lots of money, make lots of cheap, crappy things, and sell them at a small margin. The market is a lot bigger, and most people have much higher tolerance for crap than this company's customers.

As is the case with almost anything in life, "it depends." There's really no one-size-fits-all, "magic elixir." Every end may be reached by a different path.

I wish this article hit on an important point: when should the persistent quit? We all know we should know when to hold and when to fold, but in practice that's a hard decision to make especially when we're invested. And someone who is "persistent" vs "obstinate" should be able to do this: quit when it's right to do so.

The closest thing he mentions is this, "persistence often requires that one change one's mind. That's where good judgement comes in. The persistent are quite rational. They focus on expected value."

Following that, if I'm working on x thing, and the expected value is < some other big thing, I should quit and start the other thing.

But there should be a "grass is always greener on the other side" counter weight - some other thing may LOOK like higher expected value, but that's because you don't know the shit under the hood.

I would've liked him to have touched on this, as I don't think you can truly call someone persistent but not obstinate unless they can actually walk away from something if necessary.

My takeaway: PG sees successful people as stubborn but teachable and open to feedback/discussion/pushback.

I like his articles, but the artificial constructs sometimes drive me up the wall. After reading through a fairly rudimentary strawman about outcomes defining the difference between obstinacy and persistence, we reach the last paragraph that trades a poorly defined word (persistence) for five poorly defined words (imagination, focus, energy, judgement, resilience)

persistence is also defined by flexibility in thinking, appetite for risk/comfort with uncertainty, low ego. equally useless

(I still love you PG, despite my dyspepsia)

Within the context of persistent people at the top of the decision tree, how often are persistent people labeled obstinate because they disagree with another persistent person (likely their boss) on a decision that will likely lead to 2 separate but nearly successful outcomes?

People often ignore evolutionary psychology. You should ask the question why do humans have these bad traits and tendencies? Because these traits helped us dominate in the game of the survival of the fittest.

Yes Grahams two cents here makes sense, but always talk about why the trait from an evolutionary perspective even exists. It exists because it worked for a certain context and was good for millions of years. Explain why it doesn't work for this new context.

Instead all I hear is people calling certain traits bad and explaining how we should live life like suppressing all these traits that took millions of years to evolve.

I once inherited a very thorny performance problem with a service. Thorny as in, the previous engineer was ordered to give up and move on because our boss was worried it was adversely affecting their mental health and their performance on other tasks.

I quickly learned that every person who found out I was working on this problem was eager to share the same three or four ideas on how to fix it. All of these ideas were early on the list of ideas that the previous engineer had ruled out multiple times in multiple ways. For the sake of thoroughness, I also tried them and ruled them out. But of course each person who wanted to share ideas didn't know they were saying the same thing I had heard a hundred times before, so the suggestions kept repeating.

Over time, dealing with the same suggestions over and over again, I learned an important lesson: when someone suggested an idea, it didn't do any good to explain that multiple people had tried it and ruled it out in multiple ways. That made people perceive me as close-minded, stupid, and inflexible. Instead I just nodded and said, interesting, that's worth checking out, thanks, or, hmm, I wonder how I could measure that.

At first I was afraid that if I acted intrigued about a very basic obvious idea, people would think we were idiots for not trying it long ago, but that turned out not to be the dominant dynamic at work. The dominant dynamic was that people think you're smart if you are receptive to your advice, and and they think you are stupid if you are not receptive to their advice. This only stops being true when you work with someone closely or consistently over time.

I don't really agree with any of this.

Thinking there's a way to distinguish the two in the moment without you yourself being the more competent one is to believe in crystal balls. You only know for sure who was right in hindsight when everything else that could have been decided is also known.

It's a categorical error to attribute success to personality and behavioral traits. There are just as many benevolent geniuses as there are assholes at every level.

"The persistent are attached to the goal. The obstinate are attached to their ideas about how to reach it."

I didn't know what the word "obstinate" meant so here you go: "stubbornly adhering to an opinion, purpose, or course in spite of reason, arguments, or persuasion."

While PG's quote suggests a clear distinction, it's overly simplistic. Persistence and obstinacy often overlap in practice, sharing traits like energy, imagination, resilience, good judgment, focus on a goal, and listening intently. The issue is that "reason" can be subjective. For example, Copernicus and Galileo were considered obstinate for his heliocentric theory, but history proved him right. This shows that the line between persistence and obstinacy is often drawn in hindsight.

Referencing the Collison brothers highlights a bias towards successful YC alumni. It would be more telling to classify current batch founders as obstinate or persistent and revisit their success in a decade.

This seems timely in regards to the US Presidential race.

Don't really have much to add other that this is the best PG essay I've read in years, and it feels like a return to form.

Considering how many founders he's come into contact with, I'm curious why PG chose the Collison Brothers as the exemplary persistent entrepreneurs. Perhaps it's their inclination to tackle complex and unwieldy regulatory challenges that most tech founders shy away from?

I'm sorry, I find this simplistic.

I often am impatient with people not because I am obstinate or stubborn or persistent, but because some new ideas require a new mindset. For example, let us suppose - just for argument - that the great failing of the internet is that it prevents community. I'm just saying suppose.

If one then foolishly tried to discuss this, one would be inundated with comments about Facebook, X (or is it Y?) and on and on. None of this is helpful or even interesting because the context/mind set is wrong.

Once we decide the world is not flat (even if just for the sake of argument) a discussion of where you will fall off and what will happen to you when you fall off, is not interesting. Or helpful.

To my mind then, the issue of stubborn or obstinate people is not innovators - it is the inability to examine or even imagine a new mindset. Which is too bad because that is the fun part.

to me,

* obstinate: same responses/approach even when presented with new information

* persistent: updated responses/approach when presented with new information

I can't be the only person who doesn't want to be a successful person. Most problems worth solving won't be solved in a way that benefits individuals in the manner described. Optimizing for self-gain just leads to more investors and fewer problems getting solved.

TLDR:

You need "energy, imagination, resilience, good judgement, and focus on a goal" to go places.

Funnily enough, every very successful person seems to arrive at the conclusion that "focus" is a differentiator.

"The persistent are attached to the goal. The obstinate are attached to their ideas about how to reach it. Worse still, that means they'll tend to be attached to their first ideas..."

So obstinate people expect the desired outcome to depend on their expertise at some point(s) in the past. Is the difference between the two just humility?

PG's distinction between persistent and obstinate is pretty much captured by the ideas of growth mindset and fixed mindset in psychology.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/growth-mindset

My question is always, how do you get someone with a more fixed mindset attitude to adopt a growth mindset way of relating to the world? It's so hard, but it makes such a difference.

I suspect that obstinance this is rooted in strong black/white thinking. I don't really know how this works for these people and can't experience it myself because I have just one brain. While I am flawed in many ways, I am not flawed in that particular way. I don't really understand how this works.

I find that inability to understand qualified language is a decent marker. Note I said "I suspect that often", and not "I know this is always". Black/white thinkers will reply with something like "no, that's not true, here's an example where that's not the case: [..]" Well, okay ... that's what "often" means, further weakened by the "I suspect". But for black/white thinkers it's Highlander time: there can only be one (explanation).

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Bit of a related aside:

For the last year or so I've been using an extension to completely block people from Hacker News. The way this works is that I have two buttons: "bozo" to merely mark a post, and a list of marked posts in shown on the profile. And "block" to completely block them. Everyone has bad days, myself included, and I don't want to write people off for the occasional bad day.

But some people have a lot of bad days. And by "marking" people's posts some interesting patterns emerge. I mark a post for extreme black/white views on something like Israel and being pretty obstinate about it, and then 2 months later I see the same person with extreme black/white views on databases and being pretty obstinate about that. Are these two topics related? Not at all. But the same type of thinking is used: extremely simplistic black/white thinking with almost no room for nuance or "it depends".

Another person posted that thieves should be executed, "but if that is too extreme the chopping off of hands is also acceptable" (true story), and also rants about programming languages like they're 13, and rants about "wokeness".

The same person where a substantial number of their posts are rants about what inferior languages Go and Ruby are, also literally wishes death on politicians they disagree with, and claims "McCarthy was absolutely right" (which is a complete bollocks historical revisionism pushed by some people who are unable to understand "yes, turned out there were real Soviet spies in US gov't during the 50s, but there was zero overlap with the people McCarthy accused and he was just an unhinged nutjob who operated without any evidence against random people").

etc. etc.

What I learned from this is that by and large this kind of obstinance is not a "strong feelings about issue X"-problem, but rather a "brain just works in that way"-problem, whether that's due to black/white thinking, or something else.

There's an old joke: "A 9/11 truther, anti-vaxxer, sovereign citizen, and homeopath walk in to a bar. He orders a beer." Sometimes people are just misinformed on these issues and believe maybe one or two of them, but especially when they're knee-deep in nuttery it's just a thinking error.

I am still undecided if these people really are incapable of thinking in another way, or are just unwilling to do so. Or maybe there isn't actually any difference.

But is there any real difference between these two cases? Are persistent and obstinate people actually behaving differently? Or are they doing the same thing, and we just label them later as persistent or obstinate depending on whether they turned out to be right or not?

I actually think this turns out to be the case most of the time. Look at Linus Pauling. Two Nobel prizes and then he fixated on Vitamin C. Did he all of a sudden forget how to be persistent and became obstinate?

TLDR persistent people knowingly take risks while stubborn ones don’t want to know that there are risks. But you have to take risks to be successful.

Excellent article that really delivers on the difference between obstinacy and persistence. However, I think its thesis uncovers a hidden IQ correlation.

Some obstinate people may not be stupid in the Forrest Gump sense. They may just be operating at their information processing capacity. Facing a hard choice, the first step is shedding the willingness to argue the foundations of the castle they built.

The psychological ramifications vary. Their predicament may even induce them to be unwilling to argue at all levels as a way to conceal it, leading to full incorrigible stubbornness.

I'm sure I'm a mix of both. I'm stubborn when it comes to things I care about but don't understand how to navigate. I'm persistent about problems I'm confident I can navigate even when they are hard. But I can also give up on either problem when I run out of either joy or necessity.

Who wouldn't kill for a foolproof way to generate Collison brothers on cue, from cheap inputs. Now that we've heard the arguments for talent recognition, what are some prospects for talent development?

It's interesting to use these guidelines to evaluate dating prospects. Is this guy a persistent catch, or a stubborn creep? Don't know why, but "stubborn catch" and "persistent creep" sound like better matchups, because you'd be okay with using the word "stubborn" on yourself?

I'm a day late to the comments, but...

I like the lens of the Big Five model of personality. I think what's at play here is

(1) Low neuroticism = resilient and confident

(2) Low agreeableness = willing to go against the prevailing tide

and then you need

(3) high openness = inventive/curious

The first two personality traits without the third = stubborn

Add the third = persistent

(some people don't even need #2 to be stubborn, when they consider their tribe to be correct even if it goes against prevailing thought in the broader world)

Article is trying to discern a cause and effect.

The fact is people are involved and success and failure can be determined by any number of reasons beyond the control of the obstinate.

You can control the effort but not the outcome. Judgement will come regardless.

Good article. Five qualities of persistence:

Energy, imagination, resilience, good judgement, and focus on a goal

It's nice to frame it that way so we can know what to focus on.

Personally, I'm strong in terms of energy, imagination and resilience.

I'm probably a bit weaker in terms of judgment and focus on a goal. I think my approach to the latter 2 has something to do with my environment.

Good judgement is actually harder to achieve than it seems. I think my issue is that I was conflating 'good judgment' with 'common sense'. But it's not the same. We're humans and things can be complex for irrational, artificial reasons. Good judgement these days often entails adapting to the subtle irrationalities of the environment and learning to exploit them. That lesson has been really tough for me.

In terms of 'Focusing on a goal', my issue is that I chose a huge audacious goal with small milestones along the way. While I managed to achieve all of the milestones, they don't bear any financial rewards; their utility was just a risk mitigation strategy so that I could easily pivot to other, less ambitious goals if the big audacious goal didn't pan out.

My goal over the past 10 years was to create a platform that would make it much easier easy to build fast, secure, bug-free, highly maintainable software. That's a really difficult goal especially on the sales side as it is a highly competitive space. I managed to build a platform which achieves that. See https://saasufy.com/

But unfortunately, I'm realizing that my goal is too big. I'd be competing against many big tech platforms and also against existing software development paradigms (which is even harder!). So now I'm shifting my strategy towards using my platform Saasufy.com just for myself and my friends to build more niche products like this HR/Recruitment platform: https://insnare.net/

I'm thinking I may have to even re-imagine what 'niche' means.

The persistent are quite rational. They focus on expected value.

Maybe there should be a footnote here? I’m not sure what “rational” means in this context, or whether it’s reasonable to focus on expected value. Buying insurance usually has negative expected value, if you measure it in dollars.

We mostly don’t do the math, though. If we assume Graham is just using math metaphorically, there are lots of ways you could interpret “expected value.”

Persistence vs obstinate are just perceptions of the observer and are based on their soft skills more than them being right or wrong.

I have a shorthand: I respect people who are looking for the right answer, rather than trying to be right. Ignores intelligence etc.

A confident person who is trying to be right. Like kryptonite for your company.

I try to build up my confidence from experience and data. Always happy to change tack but the incoming input needs to be more credible than what I’ve gone through. Vs my (excellent) ex boss who was confident always, but if you wanted to convince him you needed to do it quietly out of earshot so no egos were harmed. I proposed and we agreed it was a good version of “strong opinions weakly held”, but I’d have appreciated a little more openness without all the dancing. And he was streets ahead of a feral exec who was seemingly confident, defensive and who would rather burn the building down than change his mind.

I would say the difference is that there’s no new evidence that would change an obstinate person’s mind, whereas a persistent person knows what evidence it would take to change their mind, sees it’s not happening, and maintains confidence in their position.

I think the term tenacious fits better than persistent here.

Another thing that I think distinguishes a tenacious person from a stubborn one is that when two tenacious people collaborate, magic happens. When two stubborn people meet, they cancel out.

Obstinate people are stubborn about the approach to solving a problem, Persistent people are flexible in how they solve a problem.

Both don't give up solving the problem. The latter solves them better because of they learn, adjust, and adapt.

There, now you don't have to read the article.

A few things.

I don't think you can argue against being obstinate without understanding it. I suspect being obstinate has value. It is basically the whole chesterson's fence kind of thing.

Sort of like "electric cars are impractical!"

That said, persistence is how the future is created. But sometimes it doesn't work.

I'm also reminded of "Often wrong, never in doubt". Unfortunately this seems to work well in society, but it takes people with experience to argue against it.

Sort of obvious, but he expertly made the distinction very clear and maybe even made it look easy. The extreme of obstinate is insanity: "The definition of insanity is -- doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result."

Montaigne, in 'on the education of children' agrees:

Let him be taught to be curious in the election and choice of his reasons, to abominate impertinence, and, consequently, to affect brevity; but, above all, let him be lessoned to acquiesce and submit to truth so soon as ever he shall discover it, whether in his opponent's argument, or upon better consideration of his own;

This is an extreme oversimplification based probably on the author's surroundings. I've met people recently who are extremely successful and good at persistently hacking away at a problem from different angles, but turns out are horrible listeners. In some of them however I've noticed they also have a tendency to stick to their initial solution, although not always. Simultaneously I am a pretty good listener, but noticed recently I stick to my plan more, sometimes too long, which is the opposite of my younger self that also hacked away at problems pretty persistently until they were solved. This potentially has something to do with a general loss of interest in solving some problems or types of problems (e.g. I'd done it in some form a dozen times).

People are a lot more complex, have their own quirks, traits and decades of reasons in their surroundings why they turned out that way, and continue to change all the time. A lot more complex than this simplistic, caricature, cardboard cutout view of people presented in the article.

Funnily enough, 'obstinate' was one of the first words I picked up in ESL, fresh off the boat. I loved throwing it into conversations just to practice and feel smart... And here I am, years later, reflecting on that word.

Russell conjugation: "I am firm, you are obstinate, he is a pig-headed fool."

I think there maybe more than the five qualities that comprise persistence. But those five make a lot of sense and I like how he shows their interplay. Good read!

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

A surprising amount of wildly successful people disregard evidence that conflicts with their worldview. This essay suggests that they are wrong kind of stubborn, but real world outcomes suggest otherwise.

Steve Jobs famously decided he no longer needed to shower because he only ate fruit. Unsurprisingly, he reeked. If this isn't obstinacy, I don't know what is. For a decade he denied his child was his, in the face of overwhelming evidence. And yet he is lauded for having the right energy, imagination, resilience, and excellent judgement.

You can make similar observations about Ray Dalio, Noam Chomsky, Nassim Taleb, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk. I think their persistence has veered into suboptimal obstinance at times. But would they be any more successful without their character flaws?

This essay would have been stronger had pg looked for counterexamples to his theory, because there are many.

Interesting article.

It does remind me of an old joke about English conjugation rules. For example:

I/we are persistent.

You are obstinant.

He/she/they are pig-headed.

This sounds wishy washy to me. So the difference between persistent and obstinate is up to the individual? Or consensus? In other words, what would be an example of someone who was persistent and not obstinate but didn’t succeed?

Paging Joseph Robinette Biden

"Confidence is belief in yourself. Certainty is belief in your beliefs. Confidence is a bridge. Certainty is a barricade." - Kevin Ashton, "How To Fly A Horse"

As I recall that book used the example of Franz Reichelt, who "is remembered for jumping to his death from the Eiffel Tower while testing a wearable parachute of his own design" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Reichelt

  If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There's no point in being a damn fool about it.

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/08/11/try-again/

"Five distinct qualities — energy, imagination, resilience, good judgement, and focus on a goal" are what make Paul Graham's ideal of persistence.

I love personality theory so I just wanted to dig into what that would mean using those terms.

Energy + Resilience would probably fit best under - Extraverted Sensing.

Imagination, good judgment and focus on goal - Introverted Intuition.

Let’s try some real world examples: are the two current presidential candidates obstinate or persistent?

When you point out problems, their eyes glaze over, and their replies sound like ideologues talking about matters of doctrine

I feel this post needs a counterpart "The Right Kind of Naysayer", which distinguishes between good and bad ways of pointing out problems.

I believe the environment matters (did I learned around people who made valid points, or around sophist ideologues?). If you're around obstinate stubborns, you're likely to become more like one, specially if they are rewarded by their obstinance.

Of course, all of this is ultimately anectodal. We can't seriously put people in boxes like this. It is good food for thought though.

Reminds me of http://www.foundersatwork.com/blog/what-goes-wrong by Jessica Livingston

I liked PG's essays better when they were more concretely rooted in the details of his work his work at his startup and at YC. This one feels like a sort of non-specific variant of Bulverism - diagnose a bunch of people without presenting evidence, then start psychoanalysing them (also without evidence).

Jesus, people, read a philosophy book instead of this claptrap. Open your eyes:

https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm

He put it very nicely that stubborn people are like a boat under full throttle (will take a while to slow down), and obstinate people are like a boat that has no rudder (unwilling or unable to change direction).

It is a nice distinction coming from someone who is habitually stubborn and can border on obstinate if not checked.

One world that should be in capital letters at the top is hidden in the footnotes at the bottom, luck. A much simpler theory is, the difference between stubbornness and persistence is that losers are labeled as stubborn and winners are labeled as persistent, simply as a post-hoc rationalization based on outcome rather than any grandiose internal differences.

Fame plays also a big role in this, in that some people are simply rewarded by others for their stubbornness or even stupidity while most are not, the infamous "reality distortion field" effect when some people have amassed so much clout their mistakes don't even register and they can even bring stubbornly bad ideas into reality.

"The persistent are attached to the goal. The obstinate are attached to their ideas about how to reach it.

...

Obstinacy is a reflexive resistance to changing one's ideas. This is not identical with stupidity, but they're closely related."

IMO you see this rear its head all the time in the form of language wars. Many people who are entrenched in the belief that $LANG is the best way to build software well beyond the point where it is reasonable to do so. And it's kind of funny because a lot of them quote PG in their reasoning.