Comment by hobs
4 hours ago
Disagree strongly, frustration is like the setup before the payoff, it's what makes figuring out something "worth" it - the more frustration, the bigger the payoff.
4 hours ago
Disagree strongly, frustration is like the setup before the payoff, it's what makes figuring out something "worth" it - the more frustration, the bigger the payoff.
That's not what any psychologist would say. This isn't my opinion on frustration, this is just the standard interpretation under emotional appraisal theory.
Also, it is absolutely not the case that more frustration leads to higher payoff. There are tons of cases where frustration leads to zero payoff, and where you get complete payoff with zero frustration.
Frustration is not the same as hard work. If something takes a lot of hard work but progress is constant and clear, there's no frustration involved.
Can you explain something?
I did a lot of iOS development. The layout of elements was done with Auto Layout, and I really had the hang of it. It was replaced by how SwiftUI does it, and I knew it would take me a couple of weeks to get the hang of it.
I often felt what I'd call frustration. Lots of times, I knew I could easily express solutions in the old framework. But I knew I needed to learn the new one.
Are you saying that's not called frustration?
Maybe it's how frustration with what things are before can make you want to do something to change it?
From a product design or startup perspective, sure -- identify the sources of frustration in other people can help identify potential business opportunities where people would pay money in order to alleviate the frustration.
But that's very different from the idea that frustration is somehow intrinsic to accomplishment at all, for your own goals. It's not.
A certain amount of frustration is expected if you set the goals high. But an excess of frustration becomes counter-productive and should signal it's time to change strategy. It doesn't mean "give up forever" but rather "try getting to midpoint first, then reevaluate".
It's surprising how effective being lazy can sometimes be. Some tasks that could be brute-forced seem to magically melt away if you adopt round about ways and let time pass. It's a latency/throughput tradeoff.