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Smart People Choke Under Pressure
People perceived as the most likely to succeed might also be the most likely to crumble under pressure.
A new study finds that individuals with high working-memory capacity, which normally allows them to excel, crack under pressure and do worse on simple exams than when allowed to work with no constraints. Those with less capacity score low, too, but they tend not to be affected by pressure.
This comes as a surprise? People with a higher IQ tend to find that things come easier to them. Thus they do not deal with stress on a regular basis. When stress levels rise beyond what they are accustomed to (self induced stress caused from perfectionism) It's circuit overload. "Normal" people have to deal with stress regularly to accomplish a task. Thus they are more accustomed to it and can readily adapt.
Smart people are expected not to make mistakes and not to fail. We are all (even some of the smartest people) nothing but human, therefore we do make mistakes and sometimes fail. But, since you are smart people are likely to expect more from you.
"Let's see you get out of this.."
"You are so smart, why can't you..."
What people need to understand is that sometimes even the best of us make the wrong judgement. This things happen.
So the article says that lower-pressure tests should be incorporated into the MCAT or GMAT... because of course that's what you want in your doctor or manager: someone who cracks under pressure and can't remember what he was taught.
Intelligence, like good science, is useless if it's not applied properly or at all. The same can be said for this article...
I don't know how to feel about this...
I'm most certainly a 'geek', by all measures. I can't help but become totally immersed in whatever I find interesting...in depth and breadth.
However, I've always been noted for my ability to work best under pressure--without the pressure I either get nothing accomplished or I 'wander aimlessly forever'...I'm sure many of you can identify.
However, I'm an 'undercover.' Nobody I meet ever suspects that I have held engineer positions, owned my own business or spent multiple hours a day researching (anything of interest) in painful depth.
To sum it up, I think (without RTFA, admittedly) I think that it's far to dynamic of a subject to boil down to black-n-whites such as this.
But then again, perhaps I'm just not 'one of those'..."those" being the majority of geekdom.
colour me skeptical.
-Dan
I suspect that you are one of those people that I meet far too often who love to complain about the fact the world just doesn't know the "correct" way to see how smart they really are. I suspect that you are one of those people I meet far too often who constantly espouse the firm belief that they have these great genius level ideas, but that nobody recognizes it.
I would like to take this opportunity to call bullsh*t on you.
Thanks!
This study means that (assuming I'm a smart person, anyway) my apathetic, don't-give-a-shit "bad attitude" is actually an advantage. If I don't give a shit, I'm not pressured and therefore have more room in my working memory for task-related information, and I therefore do better.
So boss, don't take it personally when I appear to not care about the task at hand. It's not because I realize there's no reward in it for me if I do well, nor because in the back of my mind part of me would like to see the commissioned sales staff humiliated at the demo. It's because by not giving a shit, I'll do a better job. Really. It's absolutely true, or my name isn't David Leisure.
I can't remember historical dates worth anything, but I can remember pi to twenty-ish digits (down from fifty-ish in high school) and long random numbers used as passwords.
When it comes to things I want to do, I thrive on pressure, as it forces me to actually get it done before I start becoming apathetic about it (which is followed quickly by loathing and tends to result in difficulty getting it done).
When it comes to things I don't want to do, I have a hard time dealing with presure because I tend to wander off and do other things and never get back to it. When I'm doing something I don't want to do, the slightest thing will distract me hopelessly.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
You know, you mean to be funny, but you have a point.
Doing well in stressful situations is due to training, preparation and self control, not because you are too stupid to get nervous about success.
The more you practice being in stressful situations, the easier it is to handle them.
I have seen something related. I work with lots of engineers. Most want to be told what to do. They seem to want to put a high level of thinking on a very focused task. When the thinking becomes broad, they tend shy away.
People seem to need rules to break.
In my experience with engineering, the more you can work _without_ information the more valuable you are. But engineers always want to get all the information before they begin...
Why engineers want info up front can be broken up roughly into the following problems. Usually it's a combination.
1. Bad management.
It's more common than you think to be blamed for not reading the client's mind. (You should have just known that when they explicitly wrote "save when exitting every field", they actually meant "we don't want the info to disappear, but we don't really want disk access every time we hit TAB." Whatever gave them the idea that info just disappears in a form. It's your fault when they come back complaining about performance.)
Or when it's not outright "you're to blame, you horrible monster", it's being asked to do overtime to "fix" it. Because the boss is too weak to tell a big client that those changes cost extra time to implement.
I can tell you that it doesn't take more than 1-2 such projects, to give one the idea "no, you don't. Not again. Give me a good spec up front this time." Because anything short of a full spec simply comes back to screw you with a chainsaw lately.
2. Bad management again: changing the same thing back and forth, just because the client can't make up his/her mind.
It's been said that the most depressive thing you can do for example to a prisoner is to just make him do not something that's hard work, but something that's obviously _useless_. Such as asking the prisoners to move a big pile of sand from here to there, and then back to the same point. That "I'm doing useless stuff" thought saps someone's self-esteem and ultimately even health faster than if you tortured them or made them break rocks with a pickaxe.
And the same applies to software projects.
I've _actually_ been in one project where for a whole _year_ the client manager couldn't make up his mind whether he wants the reports landscape or portrait. Never mind that the program included a report designer, where he can lay them out in whatever goddamn way he needs. No siree, bob. He's not gonna accept the program until the reports are landscape... then portrait... then landscape again... then portrait again. Repeat ad nauseam. For a year.
Going through something like this will make it _very_ tempting to say "screw this, I want a signed spec up front".
3. Bad design.
Most programs are basically Write-Only. People give no thought to maintenance later, and even the smallest change means rewriting half the stuff.
Now I'm not a fan of extreme programming as such. (And please, if anyone feels like taking it as an opportunty to preach, have mercy and spare both my time and yours.) But I do think that they did get the basic ideas right. (It's just the turning it all to the max that I disaggree with.) Programs should be written to be easily changed.
4. Lack of test-cases.
That's probably the worst anti-pattern. So you most often have not only a spaghetti program that's hard to change, but it's not even possible to be sure you didn't break something else.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Piling tons of extra work upon your programmers, and unrealistic deadlines, comes back to bite you in the ass in various forms. Of course, a true PHB won't see it, and can pat themselves on the back for "getting the most out of the people". When in fact they're getting the least.
1. Bad code.
The thing about programming is that there's at least 20 ways to achieve anything. About 18 of them involve cutting corners and making a bad product, just to keep that unrealistic schedule the boss gave you.
Making and implementing a good design takes time. Throwing together a piss-poor Write-Only hack takes a lot less time. Guess which one you get if you just mindlessly pile more work on people.
Sure, it looks like you're getting some extra work done at first... until it's time to debug or maintain it. Then you start finding gems like "oh dear, instead of making a proper connection manager class, they've just directly accessed and _changed_ internal variables in other modules and got their connection from there." Any change suddenly involves a lot more work, because instead of a clear orthogonal design, it's a spaghetti mess.
Oops. It bit you in the ass.
(And so far _twice_ I've not only encountered such messes, but had to deal with them because even the original coders didn't want to touch it any more.)
2. Lack of test cases, or even of manual testing.
_The_ more common excuse for lack of that is that there's no time for it. Pile enough work on someone to give them the idea "hmm... I could still make it if I dropped the test cases", and those will be the first to go.
And it only makes problem 1 suddenly cost 10 times more time. Because not only you never know which other module messes with the innards of your class, you can't even tell if you broke something when changing it.
True personal story: oops, changing the table model also caused all the reports to stop working. And it was only found after we delivered it to the client.
True personal story: oops, the program was packed by an overworked coleague with the test templates instead of the real templates. Some real business partners got bullshit emails as a result. (If you thought MS's inapropriate comments in code were fun, emailing stuff is more fun.)
3. Tired people are stupid people. (Not meant as an offense. I'm stupid when extremely tired too.)
Every notch you go above someone's limit, and every hour of overtime they have to do for more than 1-2 weeks in a row, soon starts reducing their productivity. They make more mistakes. They need more time to find them and to fix them. They see less of the picture, so each fix is more likely to break something else.
4. Lowered morale also lowers productivity dramatically.
Nerds are a funny breed. If you overworked a factory worker, they'd be more likely to tell you "no, sorry, this is as far as I'll go." Or just do as much as they can, and pack their bags cheerfully when the clock struck 5 PM.
Nerds tend to be more insecure. A lot are autistic too, so they can't even tell how bad or not bad the situation is. They'll go beyond their physical limits, rather than risk disappointing the boss.
Unfortunately, as they say, "there ain't no such thing as a free meal". The extra effort comes at the cost of tiredness and lowered morale. Either of which alone can count for up to an order of magnitude productivity, if brought to extreme levels.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Three rules to live by, if you're a manager:
1) Make decisions
2) Get out of the way
3) Be there
Managers who waffle at making decisions end up with an aimless and very frustrated crew.
Managers who try to dictate the "how" part of creativity go too far and the result is an equally frustrated crew.
Managers who operate in "aloof mode" are equally destructive. They think, "I'll just be so hands-off. They'll love me for that." But what they really need to be doing is removing roadblacks, quashing in-fighting, being a good arbitrator, just being available.
Hire experts, give them a destination and a compass, and let them navigate the waters. Good managers do exist. If you've ever worked for one, you know what I'm talking about. Work can be a real joy!
Check out Overcoming Procrastination by Steve Pavlina. It's a nice article (the guy is a shareware developer-turned-motivational speaker) and it gives a very simple solution, which can be surprisingly effective. Set a timer and just work 30 minutes on the task. Work on any aspect of it, do whatever you can/like/want, but work on this task. After 30 minutes go eat a cookie. Repeat. Do it 10 times and you've just spent 5 hours on the task, which was probably enough to do a lot of progress.
I came to realise recently how horrible it is to be a perfectionist. I can at least feel happy that I don't hate myself for not being 100% perfect, but because of it I dropped out of a M.Sc. program - I just couldn't force myself to do crappy projects, to go to exams not knowing the subject perfectly, etc. So I didn't go to exams and didn't finish the projects. Meanwhile, the rest of the group (95% of whom were much less capable than I was) didn't have any problem going to the exam and trying to fake knowing the subject and making some crap that often passed for a project.
It can be really sad. I can be really productive as a perfectionist, but not all tasks/projects are equally suitable. There are many things I just can't force myself to work on.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.