Never, never, never give up.
- Winston Churchill
Time anxiety: is it too late?
41–50 of 173 posts
Re: Time anxiety: is it too late?
#42I remember in my 20s I had this constant anxiety about running out of time. That if I didn't accomplish whatever I wanted to accomplish soon I'd never be able to do it. The emotion gradually disappeared during my 30s. In a way I was right. I'm 40 now and the things that seemed of extreme importance in my 20s are mostly gone now. In retrospect it's not that I wouldn't be able to do those things, but maybe I feared tha…
I'm not in my early thirties and time anxiety is actually growing stronger. I worry about the big three: children, career, and personal health. My idea is that with kids... my finace and I are aging. Are we going to do this or not? We have to know within the next 2ish years. With career... what career path do I want to take? I need to focus on schooling or professional certificates ASAP so I can utilize those as I ag…
Don't put those things off. Focus and go for it.
Re: Time anxiety: is it too late?
#43I remember in my 20s I had this constant anxiety about running out of time. That if I didn't accomplish whatever I wanted to accomplish soon I'd never be able to do it. The emotion gradually disappeared during my 30s. In a way I was right. I'm 40 now and the things that seemed of extreme importance in my 20s are mostly gone now. In retrospect it's not that I wouldn't be able to do those things, but maybe I feared tha…
I'm interested in your perspective. What do you mean by "gone now"? Is it that now those things are not of importance anymore?
Yes. I have changed, I care about other things now and I give much less importance to the things I care about.
When I was younger I was very passionate about some topics and ideas, to the point that I could get angry when arguing with someone. Now I rarely get angry, much less about an opinion or an abstract idea.
I've come to the realization that so much is temporary and inconsequential. Nothing is really as good or as bad as it seems, at least for me.
Re: Time anxiety: is it too late?
#44I know there are some people disproving parts of Malcolm Gladwell's theories, but sometime in the last year or two it occurred to me that one of the consequences of the 10,000 hours theory is that you actually have time to get expert-level good at three or four things in your life even if you spent part of it 'fucking around'. I've expanded that into a philosophy about 'Software eats the world": the only way that doe…
I would take it even farther than that and say that people vastly overestimate the time it takes to get good at most things. It might take 10,000 hours (or more) to be considered an expert pianist, but you could spend a tenth that much time getting good enough to impress everyone you know with a few songs at parties, and with just 50 hours of practice, you'll be better at the piano than basically everyone you know (y…
I would absolutely agree that a 1000 hours in you can have rewarding interactions with actual experts. Even 100 can open up conversations.
And as a software dev it’s almost expected that you’ll do that at least a few times for some problem domains.
Re: Time anxiety: is it too late?
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Serious question, what other hobbies can one have?
here are the hobbies I have had archery, bowling, pool, mountain biking, ice hockey, inline hockey, floorball, ultimate frisbee, sailing, windsurfing, kitesurfing, rock climbing, shooting, reloading, hunting, home improvement (has a lot of sub areas), games programming, tae kwon do, kung fu, krav maga, jiu jitsu, paint ball, role playing games, online games, being helpful on forums, scuba diving, piano, golf, camping…
That's pretty good, but you're not at Simon Quinlank levels yet:
Re: Time anxiety: is it too late?
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would take it even farther than that and say that people vastly overestimate the time it takes to get good at most things. It might take 10,000 hours (or more) to be considered an expert pianist, but you could spend a tenth that much time getting good enough to impress everyone you know with a few songs at parties, and with just 50 hours of practice, you'll be better at the piano than basically everyone you know (y…
I wrote a book on this topic: https://first20hours.com There's a ton of (replicated) psychology research that supports this thesis: the early hours of skill acquisition are very effective/efficient in terms of improvement-per-hour-invested. 20-50 hours is enough to see very substantial improvements in any skill, even if you have no prior knowledge or experience. I wish more people focused on the early process of skil…
As long as you don’t get stuck in the expert beginner trap.
I like to say that my long history of studying the art of studying helps me get over that hump quickly. But you’d have to ask other people if I have or I’m full of it.
Re: Time anxiety: is it too late?
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a software eng who has always had a lot of hobbies, it's almost alienating how so many people in the office are only into TV shows, super hero movies, sci fi books, video games... It's like, there's a whole world out there people!
Serious question, what other hobbies can one have?
I make models. Metal Earth has some very nice aerospace ones [1]. Guillow's makes some amazing balsa wood models -- if you really want to, you can put RC engines in them and they'll really fly [2]. I currently play with Estes Rockets, but want to get into amateur rocketry like this guy who built a model Falcon Heavy with onboard navigational computer and engine gimballing [3]. Every Christmas, I add one more model building to my seasonal train set.
I'm also into photography, graphic design, videography, fishing, surfing, and backpacking. My wife's paints.
[1] https://www.metalearth.com/aviation [2] https://www.guillow.com/ [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18504117
Re: Time anxiety: is it too late?
#48I know there are some people disproving parts of Malcolm Gladwell's theories, but sometime in the last year or two it occurred to me that one of the consequences of the 10,000 hours theory is that you actually have time to get expert-level good at three or four things in your life even if you spent part of it 'fucking around'. I've expanded that into a philosophy about 'Software eats the world": the only way that doe…
As a software eng who has always had a lot of hobbies, it's almost alienating how so many people in the office are only into TV shows, super hero movies, sci fi books, video games... It's like, there's a whole world out there people!
I think that my similar experience may be how I discovered this problem in the first place.
I like to think that brogrammers were trying to solve this very problem. But they failed by going too aggressively the opposite direction.
Re: Time anxiety: is it too late?
#49I know there are some people disproving parts of Malcolm Gladwell's theories, but sometime in the last year or two it occurred to me that one of the consequences of the 10,000 hours theory is that you actually have time to get expert-level good at three or four things in your life even if you spent part of it 'fucking around'. I've expanded that into a philosophy about 'Software eats the world": the only way that doe…
You'll need less hours for your second thing if there are concepts that you can translate, or if you maybe start with a third thing in between that can be a bridge between the other things.
Some study skills translate, but there are categories where one kind hinders another.
I’ve been studying in a domain that doesn’t intellectualize things and that was really a hard row to hoe. But now that I have around a thousand hours I’m finding learning other intuition-based fields is quite a bit easier.
Re: Time anxiety: is it too late?
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Serious question, what other hobbies can one have?
Any sort of crafting hobby, which ranges from making clothes to making swords to making furniture. Graphical arts, digital and analog (which covers everything from painting with all different types of paints to mixed media, large format, small format, from the side of a building to the size of a grain of rice) These are all mostly looks-based, but you can also make things that do things, make electronics, restore old…
It always amazes me how many people are subscribed to /r/woodworking. There are some people out there living it up.
And I can never tell if my coworkers don’t have cool hobbies or the urge to bring them up has been beaten out of them.