The mistake must have been to work on the problems that happened to be in front of him, and not to seek other, more promising ones. He’d been sucked in by the work itself, by his capacity for it.
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The mistake was failure to think through clearly the boundary conditions that the decision had to satisfy, and refusal to face up to the unpleasant reality that a decision that has to satisfy two different and at bottom incompatible specifications is not a decision but a prayer for a miracle.
The mistake was failure to think through clearly the boundary conditions that the decision had to satisfy, and refusal to face up to the unpleasant reality that a decision that has to satisfy two different and at bottom incompatible specifications is not a decision but a prayer for a miracle.
My attempts to mold him failed, and I felt increasingly frustrated. He thought I’d fire him. Fortunately, for him and me, I began to grasp that he had not failed me; rather, I had failed him by putting him in a role out of frame with his encodings. Furthermore, I felt somewhat responsible for his future; I did not want to see this wonderful young man start his professional life getting fired. So, I began making a series of iterative steps, testing him with different tasks that drew upon what I sensed to be his intellectual gifts, and he showed signs of flourishing.
“On the downside, he doesn’t see himself sometimes. When something he does is shit – you know, he does sometimes actually just make a mistake – he can’t see it and thinks it’s gone wrong for some complicated reason to do with him being so brilliant.
And he insisted with every tool of his personality that they see the situation as he saw it, that they feel as he felt or as he convinced himself he did. As he worked on them, they began to tentatively sense – not as with James, that they were led by a man of admirable vision and ability – but that they were in this together, and that they wanted themselves to succeed.