The Right Kind of Expert

From Paul Graham’s “The Right Kind of Stubborn:”

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 about how to solve a problem, even though these are the least informed by the experience of working on it. So the obstinate aren’t merely attached to details, but disproportionately likely to be attached to wrong ones.

I like this distinction.

In some ways, Graham’s distinction between persistence and obstinance feels analogous to experts and “experts” (or, perhaps more fairly, between continuous growth and brittle skill).

There are people for whom expertise is partially a mindset: they question assumptions, their approach, and their knowledge. They want to be challenged, and they want to learn, and they want to improve.

And then there are those for whom expertise is a status. Their identity is tied to having the answers, and they know the right way to do things.

It’s a bit of a false dichotomy. People can be both obstinate and persistent in different contexts.

But if you’re overly rigid in your work or competing approaches feel like threats, you’re probably being too precious. Your excuse for doing things a certain way in the face of better alternatives probably shouldn’t be “It’s the way I learned how to do it,” or “That’s the way I’ve always done it.”