Ihor Kendiukhov

Are you still in the position to judge his strategy?

I knew for a long time about the idea of heroic responsibility.

But to exhibit heroic responsibility, you have to be a hero, right?

Many are irritated by the hubris of this phrase.

For there are, of course, reasons to be irritated by it.

And yet, as spary as it may sound, you have to just do things, even if you can't, because no one else is going to do them anyway.

You have to just do things, not because you have some special power to do things, but because you are forced, by societal incompetence, to do things despite lacking special powers.

You have to just do things, as a green schoolboy, because all adults are busy with something even more important.

And those who mock you for being presumptuous enough to think you are capable of solving your problems may very well be right.

So what?

Does it make you less forced to try solving these problems still?

So my most costly delusion was that I can leave some problems to be solved by other, more competent people.

To be clear, competent people exist.

There are just too many problems and they are too severe for the existing competent people to fill all the problem-solving slots.

More concretely, in my case, and it may not be the case for other people, this delusion manifested as the belief that I should focus on tasks corresponding to my experience or previous area of expertise rather than on the most pressing tasks because there are already people in the more pressing fields who have competitive advantages over me and I am not going to add value on top of them.

That was an extremely naive take, resting on the assumption that pressing areas are not an extreme deficit of people.

It is not to say that you don't need experience and expertise.

Of course you need them.

My point is that the absence of experience and expertise is not a vindication.

You may and you should gain them, especially since it is not as hard as you think to gain them to the level that allows you to add real value.