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How to do hard things

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Re: How to do hard things

#91

Post by 2wrist »

matwood wrote: post #79
scirocco wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree. I remember the first days of Algebra at university and you couldn't understand anything what the teacher was saying. Some freaked out as if they didn't know it now, meant they will never understand it (fixed mindset) and some thought "hell, I don't get it but I'll probably understand it once I studied it for a while (growth mindset). In high school, smart students can often get away with not studying.…

> In high school, smart students can often get away with not studying. In university, your attitude and mindset towards failure and learning becomes much more important. In high school I rarely opened the textbook and did fine. I ended up on academic probation my first semester in college because I had no idea how to study (or even that I had to study). While it was a rough first year, it was definitely needed.

this was me too. School was easy, I guess the real world is hard. I am still figuring out how to learn.

Re: How to do hard things

#92

Post by matthew349hall »

matwood wrote: post #79
scirocco wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree. I remember the first days of Algebra at university and you couldn't understand anything what the teacher was saying. Some freaked out as if they didn't know it now, meant they will never understand it (fixed mindset) and some thought "hell, I don't get it but I'll probably understand it once I studied it for a while (growth mindset). In high school, smart students can often get away with not studying.…

> In high school, smart students can often get away with not studying. In university, your attitude and mindset towards failure and learning becomes much more important. In high school I rarely opened the textbook and did fine. I ended up on academic probation my first semester in college because I had no idea how to study (or even that I had to study). While it was a rough first year, it was definitely needed.

This is exactly my story. Luckily second semester freshman year I figured things out and now I'm still on track to graduate on time.

Re: How to do hard things

#93

Post by hoorayimhelping »

less_penguiny wrote: post #58

My biggest realization about doing hard things is that I needed to let go of my intellectual entitlement. Just because something is (or seems) effortless to others, doesn't mean it will be the same for me. Part of this entitlement stemmed from a (now eroded by bitter experience) belief that I'm somehow a faster learner than normal, that _I_ don't have to do the work. For example, about seven years ago I wanted to lea…

>Just because something is (or seems) effortless to others

My favorite part of skate videos growing up was at the end when they showed all the wipeouts and crashes. They hurt to watch, so much, but they always drove home the fact that it took a lot of painful and frustrating failures before the guy landed that really smooth 35 stair grind.

The point it, things often seem effortless to others but that's just cause you're not really seeing the effort being put in.

Re: How to do hard things

#94

Post by msiyer »

keypusher wrote: post #85
Xelbair wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly my course at university was too easy - most of the times i could easily wing the exams, prepare for a presentation day before, and do the same thing to the project - and get equivalent of B. Professors were also good at teaching, which reduced the need to study at home even further. It hurt me in the long run - i am really bad at putting in effort unless something catches my attention(thankfully programming can…

It is unfortunate that many smart people go through their life without being truly challenged to work hard and develop these skills. It is often too easy for us (excuse my pride) to coast by on our ability to grasp material quickly and intuitively, yet ultimately feel dissatisfied as we know we didn’t work that hard at it. The only way I have found to overcome this is to engage in rigorous study with those who are be…

>> Laugh at your mistakes, throw it away, start over, iterate and improve.

Nature plays the same game, I believe.

In addition to mastering the field of study that interests us, mastering our own minds may help us get better results.

Re: How to do hard things

#95

Post by gigantum »

feviskus wrote: post #61

I am a 4th semester CS student from Germany and still don't grasp recursion, even though I already took the data structures & algorithms courses. If you did have something like a magic moment where it made sense to you, please enlighten me as I would really like to truly gain an intuition (and implement a parallelized msd-radixsort for learning-purposes because I failed to do this assignment yesterday).

You just always start with the base case. It could be recursion is just so simple that your mistake is thinking there must be something complicated.

Also, if the algorithm is not tail recursive, you may be missing that there is an implicit call stack where intermediary results are pushed to.

Re: How to do hard things

#96

Post by pkroll »

jacobolus wrote: post #12
yay_cloud2 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment reminds me of the exercise where a class was split into two cohorts, one was tasked with producing just one clay pot (I can't remember the thing now), while the other cohort was tasked with making one per day or something similar. Put simply, one group put all of its energy into producing just one, and the other group just turned out pot after pot after pot. At the end, so the story goes, the group that…

> (I can't remember the thing now) Don’t worry about the details; it was just a made-up story in the book Art & Fear ; I have never seen any evidence such a pottery class ever existed. https://kk.org/cooltools/art-fear/ > The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they p…

Which is much like the Harvard or Yale study (it's usually one or the other) that shows people with specific goals and an action plan do ten times better than those without. Nice to know, except, it's all made up: https://www.peer.ca/Singles/MM255.pdf

There have of course been studies on goal setting and achievement (one of which is mentioned in the above pdf) but while they show an effect, they don't show the spectacular results of the made up study.

Re: How to do hard things

#97

Post by wastedhours »

less_penguiny wrote: post #58

My biggest realization about doing hard things is that I needed to let go of my intellectual entitlement. Just because something is (or seems) effortless to others, doesn't mean it will be the same for me. Part of this entitlement stemmed from a (now eroded by bitter experience) belief that I'm somehow a faster learner than normal, that _I_ don't have to do the work. For example, about seven years ago I wanted to lea…

> long-term efficiencies in following every step the great teachers of the past have laid out, in moving slowly albeit with rigor and confidence.

I always return to this [0] diagram when thinking about learning. Am I taking shortcuts that'll actually stunt my ability to progress further in my development. The "Expert Beginner" is a dead-end development wise - it might be a perfectly reasonable place to end up, but not the right way to expertise.

[0] https://daedtech.com/pics/ExpertBeginner.jpg

Re: How to do hard things

#98

Post by denzil_correa »

less_penguiny wrote: post #58

My biggest realization about doing hard things is that I needed to let go of my intellectual entitlement. Just because something is (or seems) effortless to others, doesn't mean it will be the same for me. Part of this entitlement stemmed from a (now eroded by bitter experience) belief that I'm somehow a faster learner than normal, that _I_ don't have to do the work. For example, about seven years ago I wanted to lea…

> My biggest realization about doing hard things is that I needed to let go of my intellectual entitlement. Just because something is (or seems) effortless to others, doesn't mean it will be the same for me.

The movie Goodwill Hunting has a scene that describes this [0].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKu_QQVHJLA

Re: How to do hard things

#99

Post by frogpelt »

jacobolus wrote: post #12
yay_cloud2 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment reminds me of the exercise where a class was split into two cohorts, one was tasked with producing just one clay pot (I can't remember the thing now), while the other cohort was tasked with making one per day or something similar. Put simply, one group put all of its energy into producing just one, and the other group just turned out pot after pot after pot. At the end, so the story goes, the group that…

> (I can't remember the thing now) Don’t worry about the details; it was just a made-up story in the book Art & Fear ; I have never seen any evidence such a pottery class ever existed. https://kk.org/cooltools/art-fear/ > The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they p…

This story is somewhat true actually if you correct for the literary license taken.

James Clear reached out to the authors of Art& Fear and this is his footnote: (Link:https://jamesclear.com/repetitions)

This story comes from page 29 of Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland. In an email conversation with Orland on October 18, 2016, he explained the origins of the story. “Yes, the ‘ceramics story’ in ‘Art & Fear’ is indeed true, allowing for some literary license in the retelling. Its real-world origin was as a gambit employed by photographer Jerry Uelsmann to motivate his Beginning Photography students at the University of Florida. As retold in ‘Art & Fear’ it faithfully captures the scene as Jerry told it to me—except I replaced photography with ceramics as the medium being explored. Admittedly, it would’ve been easier to retain photography as the art medium being discussed, but David Bayles (co-author) & I are both photographers ourselves, and at the time we were consciously trying to broaden the range of media being referenced in the text. The intriguing thing to me is that it hardly matters what art form was invoked—the moral of the story appears to hold equally true straight across the whole art spectrum (and even outside the arts, for that matter).” Later in that same email, Orland said, “You have our permission to reprint the any or all of the ‘ceramics’ passage in your forthcoming book.” In the end, I settled on publishing an adapted version, which combines their telling of the ceramics story with facts from the original source of Uelsmann’s photography students. David Bayles and Ted Orland, Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking (Santa Cruz, CA: Image Continuum Press, 1993), 29.

Re: How to do hard things

#100

Post by nestorherre »

feviskus wrote: post #61

I am a 4th semester CS student from Germany and still don't grasp recursion, even though I already took the data structures & algorithms courses. If you did have something like a magic moment where it made sense to you, please enlighten me as I would really like to truly gain an intuition (and implement a parallelized msd-radixsort for learning-purposes because I failed to do this assignment yesterday).

Sometimes the best way to grasp an abstract concept is to translate it to a real life example (usually a stupid example). So I'll try to explain recursion to you with an example, let's say that you want to take a shower, but you have your pijamas and your underwear on. What you must do is take all your clothes, one by one, and then get into the shower and take the bath. You first take off your pijama shirt (you have 2 pieces left), you then remove your pijama pants (1 piece left) and finally you remove your underwear. Notice that this is a repetitive pattern that must be repeated a couple of times in this case (in other case, you might have more clothe pieces, so you will do this process more). Finally when you're naked, you ask yourself: do I need to remove another piece? NO!, you reply, and you proceed to go and take the bath.

In recursion, you have 3 main components: -A function that performs the same action a repeated number of times, except for when you meet a base case (end of the recursion) -A value that must be tracked and modified in order to perform the said action n times, and know when to stop doing it -A base case that stops the repeating action, and usually performs another 1 time action.

In our example, our components are: - Function that performs the repeated action of taking a piece of cloth off. - Value tracked, which is the , and on each iteration or call of the function will be reduced by 1 (asuming you're taking 1 piece at a time). - Base case, which would be and you can perform the last 1 time executed action which is .}

Notice the importance of the base case, otherwise your program will keep iterating and the program will get stucked.

Hope that this helps.

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