This:
you should try to improve your numbers by doing smaller, easier sub-projects that you can have a high success rate at.
and:
Your success rate on whole, big projects, involving many sub-projects, should also be high.
Imply that medium sized projects should generally have the lowest success rate. I think that makes sense. You want large projects to be safe, because you’re risking more. The larger the project gets, the more unknown there is, so they’re harder to predict the difficulty of. Therefore for shorter projects we can have higher confidence that we’ll succeed. So medium sized projects are harder to predict than small projects and also not as risky as large projects.
Or maybe we should just adjust our ambition to a certain expected success rate that’s the same for all sized projects.
Actually the quotes don’t necessarily imply anything about medium sized projects. Elliot just say didn’t anything about them specifically. I don’t think the exclusion actually implies anything.
One thing that reduces risk is valuing the journey more than the destination. Then if you don’t reach the destination, the project could still be a success. You might have no regrets and still think it was worth doing.
What about valuing sub-goals in and of themselves? Like maybe your big goal is to end aging, but you’ll also be happy if you cure cancer, extend healthy lifespan by 10 years, or cure some other smaller diseases.
On the other hand, if you said the destination was your goal but you’re still happy to stop short and you found the journey really valuable, then that’s success.
I didn’t do this here:
I was concerned about being unaccountable. I was worried about something like:
to pretend you didn’t fail by moving the goalposts,
But I agree with:
It’s your actual, internal goals that matter most.
Samo Burja sometimes brings up how the Chinese imperial examination had to be revamped many times because over time people figured out how to learn skills specific to the test, and so it stopped being a good measure of real world merit. That’s an example of achievement of goals not being matched with real success. You ought to chase real success and not only success on paper.
I think the stuff I didn’t cover was good. I think this article will be helpful for my future projects.