Louis Rossmann on Giving Up

Two things: if you’re a nerd then you will really appreciate Louis Rossmann, who seems to be the King of Macbook board repair, and a general all-round self-aware person with a direct style I like. His board repair videos are guaranteed to calm the most troubled soul.

This is him talking about people who can’t solve problems, and how much freaking effort it is to solve problems in real life.


I cannot endorse these sentiments enough. Solving technical problems is difficult, experimental, full of hours of wrong directions followed by a moment of “oh, yes, I do it this way” realisation that solves the problem in five minutes. I let my emotions get involved, in the sense that I give voice to my frustration and puzzlement, and occasionally express the opinion that if I was someone really actually clever, like for instance Terence Tao, I would have solved this as soon as I looked at it. Two things to notice here: first, my idea of clever is Terence Tao, not the guy at the next desk; and second, a long time ago, I realised that the really smart people would never work at the companies I work for, and the people at those companies have no idea who Terence Tao is, let alone any way of appreciating how clever he is, so actually, in their world, I’m as smart as they will see.

I also have one actual virtue. I will not give up if it is a problem I believe to be within my competence and the scope of my tools. So I don’t bother trying to fix my work laptop when it does strange stuff because I don’t have administrator rights on it. I’m not going to tackle a problem that needs a proper programming language to fix, because the part of the business I’m in doesn’t have access to properly installed programming languages. If it’s an SQL problem, I am going to solve it. I just keep going at it: try this, try that, even read the manual.

Many of my colleagues don’t do that. They try once, see an error message and give up, or don’t get the results they thought they should get, and give up. For the longest while I have put that down to a) a lack of moral fibre, b) laziness and freeloading, since they always ask me if I can do it for them, c) tactical incompetence, where you suddenly can’t do something for someone who you suspect is off-loading the task to you because they too lack moral fibre.

Louis’ suggestion is that many of my colleagues are suffering from having a very low bar for feeling like a failure. Having various attempts fail is one thing, but feeling that you have failed, and are therefore a failure, or will feel like one if you carry on producing failing attempts, is another thing altogether. He has a high bar for feeling like a failure. So do I. Many people have a very, very low bar. A couple of tries and they are done.

It may be some kind of psychological factory setting, or it may be actual lack of moral fibre, either way when someone does the “I can’t do it, can you do it for me because deadlines”, while I continue to respect them as a human being and fellow traveller through this joyous pageant of Life, I can’t entirely take them seriously again. They aren’t One of Us, the Honourable Guild of Problem Solvers.

I feel pretty sure that Louis would think I was being unkind. And he may be right.