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The Top Idea in Your Mind

paulgraham.com

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Re: The Top Idea in Your Mind

#111

Post by jdavid »

quickpost wrote: post #22
michael_nielsen wrote: post #4

A very closely related idea is that most people have a "ground state": an activity that they naturally gravitate toward when nothing else intervenes. For many people, their ground state is shopping, or talking with friends, or watching tv. Nothing wrong with any of these. For some people, their ground state is aimless coding, or writing, or drifting around some community (e.g., the community of actors, or musicians,…

I like your idea... it makes me wonder if it's possible to change your own "ground state". It certainly seems like it would be an awesome lifehack if you could change it over time to suit your objectives.

i have found that if i want to be a designer, it takes a few weeks to get thinking about design, about noticing good design and bad design everywhere and the imitating it in my work. however, if i want to think about raising money, or engineering the same is also true.

so it may be possible for people to wear many hats, but maybe it's best if you only where one hat a month.

Re: The Top Idea in Your Mind

#112

Post by statictype »

Playing Devil's Advocate: I would say that sometimes you have to bring unpleasant thoughts (like fund raising) into the top of your mind. Because if you don't do it now, then it becomes an even bigger problem later on.

Re: The Top Idea in Your Mind

#113

Post by matwood »

roedog wrote: post #106
matwood wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a great time for me to read this essay and in particular this part you left out. My small team operates as a startup inside of a large company. We have produced more software at a faster pace than any other group in the company. We had a conf call today with the powers that be who have decided they want more process. Why would they do this? Well, while other groups are sitting around talking about resource this…

It sounds like they want to control something that works so they can claim credit, or at least reap the rewards. I went through this a couple years ago. It's painful. I worked on a system that we had deployed and that was working. A competing group, highly process oriented, who were was still generating requirements paperwork, but not a single line of code. Their objective was to take over our project. They played me…

Yeah, taking credit is definitely a big part of it, but it's more than that. By simply doing what we do we keep making other groups in the company look horrible. I don't think we're all-stars, but in big corporations it seems that just doing your job with a results minded attitude easily sets you above the rest.

Also, don't think we anti-process :) I'm a stickler for SCM and testing, but we operate in an agile manner. Most projects start out with a 'hey, this would be cool' and then we iterate based on user feedback. Early on code changes can roll out daily, while the new process wants us to bundle our code and hand it to a 'deployment team' who might take 2 weeks to get around to deploying. How this is acceptable is beyond my comprehension, but it might explain why other groups never seem to deliver anything (or put 6 months on any timeline).

I told my boss today that if this goes through that it will likely destroy what makes us so successful and he agreed. I'll just look at it as motivation to work harder on my own ideas and maybe once and for all escape ;)

Re: The Top Idea in Your Mind

#114

Post by gfodor »

Great essay, and great writing.

This is why I shower twice a day. The morning shower is to boot the brain and for all the other things that showering is done for.

The second shower is simply to think, before the night's coding binge. Refreshed and with clear thoughts, I find that it provides a fresh start for the evening's challenges.

Re: The Top Idea in Your Mind

#117

Post by aharrison »

ddewey wrote: post #95
edash wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue of day-to-day work falling by the wayside was addressed in pg's essay on "Good and Bad Procrastination" http://paulgraham.com/procrastination.html

Wow, that's an inspirational read. Thanks. Maybe I won't try to fix my "problem" :) Hamming's Questions ("What are the most important problems in your field? Are you working on one of them? Why not?") are great, but somewhat daunting. Maybe the blow can be softened by loading those problems into ambient thought mode instead of pounding against them systematically. That was one of Feynmann's methods: keep a few hard p…

I have always envisioned Hamming's third question as less of a leading question and more of an honest one. Having read that lecture, I think if I said "well, because they don't pay and I have a mortgage" Hamming would have just as easily agreed and moved on. The interesting part to me about this series of questions is more that it requires being honest with yourself. That, and the fact that most of the people he asked were apparently insulted, took it negatively, and hated him for it. Not only could they not be honest with themselves, they metaphorically shot the messenger.

Still, a great series of questions to make you re-evaluate your course in life.

Re: The Top Idea in Your Mind

#118

Post by alnayyir »

aaronblohowiak wrote: post #98
alnayyir wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, yes. I shifted my ground-state from 90% video games to 33% video games + 66% coding. It's helped a lot, but I would like to push it further.

All work and no play..

I do a lot of non-work-related coding in addition to my work-related coding.

I do it because I enjoy it.

Nobody's going to pay me to (edit: because I'm not a tenured professor) make finite state machines, toy languages in LLVM, and roguelikes.

Re: The Top Idea in Your Mind

#119

Post by anthonyb »

TotlolRon wrote: post #110
anthonyb wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Killing yourself and a bunch of other people and destroying a large house? That is productive... how, exactly?

It delivers justice. (if you've been taught to turn the other cheek you will not see why, but if you've been taught another way, you will. This is cultural and fundamental)

It delivers revenge. Whether it delivers justice or not depends on the specific situation, but if you have to resort to vigilantism, probably not.
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