571–580 of 839 posts
Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot o…
Segment your time to complete things into weeks. Months have too much wiggle room and days are too tight. Most people don’t even have the weeks option displaying on the digital calendars (phones, laptops) they use.
For long term projects of any kind using the week as a unit of time is the best way to cross the finish line.
This is possible for personal projects and for entrepreneurs. If you can get into this time frame in an organisation you are going to have a much easier time with your projects.
Another important point is not to overload the time either, if you end up completing something within a few days do not move to the next phase within that week. Stick to the schedule.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a cool thing about learning something as a kid: You have no taste to get in the way of learning. You just learn. This is true of six-year-olds learning to play the violin. Another taste-bypass is to jump into a field that's new enough to have no established standards for taste. For instance when I learned programming, there were no beautiful websites or even software to compare my work to. Websites were a dec…
I don't see how you can learn anything without such taste. To learn you have to be able to know what can be done better. Or someone tells you. I think the point here is diminishing returns. When you're younger or rather a beginner you can make bigger leaps because you're learning the rough basics. When you're an expert and you can still tell that it's not good enough it can take months or years to make you reach that…
But then again, if there had been YouTube already, I'm not sure I wouldn't have been immediately discouraged by some 4-year old whiz kid somewhere in the world doing it better than me.
Back then I was the king of computer science because I was comparing myself to the rest of my rural high school. Now where I'm instantly comparing myself to 4 billion people, that can get pretty discouraging pretty quick.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Talent is too vague a concept to be useful.
Intelligence as measured by IQ on the other hand is a very well defined concept. It is a quite good predictor of all kinds of life "success" (however that is defined). It is not fluent. Of course it is not everything, and there are lots of idiots who believe so. However, the whole "you can do anything if you put your mind to it" is is not true. The people who are the worst off in society (and I live in "socialist Swe…
Also, if you aren't physically well, this will hinder your performance. So it's really quit hard to sort out if your "low IQ" is due to your poor health or if your poor health is due to your "low IQ."
And I put that in quotations marks because I know a fair amount about IQ tests. I used to be somewhat seriously involved with a thing called The TAG Project where I was briefly Director of Community Life and I rubbed elbows in cyberspace with people who worked at the Gifted Development Center in Denver, Colorado and such.
There are a lot of problems with IQ tests and with the history of IQ testing and yadda. Most IQ tests top out at around 145 points, which makes it inherently hard to measure anything about that and tests are only tools and only as good as the person administering them and can be gamed and so forth.
The first test that started the whole IQ testing thing was never intended to measure intelligence. It was intended to measure school readiness in France because they couldn't use age at that time since a lot of kids didn't have birth certificates and their exact age wasn't always known and there was huge differences in school readiness between the big city kids and the rural farm kids and it was the rural farm kids who tended to not have birth certificates and birth dates.
So they asked a guy, I think named Binet, to create a test to sort out which kids were ready for school and this went down in history as the first IQ test. This is where you get the Stanford-Binet, if I recall correctly.
The entire concept of IQ is problematic for a lot of reasons and it ends up being sort of circular, self-reinforcing logic and self-fulfilling prophecy. If you do well on a test, we believe you are the best and brightest and have a great future and we put you in better classes for "enrichment" and we give you better opportunities and so on and so forth and then we announce that "See: Smarts are how you succeed."
I've managed to do a lot of things the world told me couldn't be done because I was one of the smart kids and all that, but I also have serious health problems and spent years homeless and no one was lauding me as one of the smart people when I was homeless. And I didn't seem that smart during that time. I was very, very sick and my forum comments were full of typos and so forth.
I still thought I was smart. I was still pulling off things the world said couldn't be done against long odds under difficult circumstances, but I was very poor and I wasn't getting social recognition for any of it and people were literally calling me "crazy" to my face, probably in part because I was homeless and still had the self concept and self esteem of one of the smart kids who graduated at the top of my class and had a lot of academic awards and the world had problems with me acting like one of the privileged people while I was homeless.
No matter how correct you are, you won't get anywhere by making the other person feel stupid.
He gave me this after we went together to a conference on communication and I found the presenter to be making some rather doubtful statements. I asked questions and tried to break the presenter in the QnA session and when I didn't get what I wanted, I left. I was 15 at the time. So, I forgive myself but still cringe hard whenever I remember it.
This advice had and continues to have a really long lasting impact on me (especially in getting me out of my incredibly arrogant stage in life) and my relationships with people. I can still be critical of things while maintaining respect for the other person's context and intelligence. I've found that also helps a lot in disconnecting ego amidst a debate.
My Grandmother once told me: "If you want to work at a company, dress like the people that work there. Because those are the people that the company hires." I've used this general philosophy in my life to pass courses at university, win competitions, and get through job interviews. I don't know if my grandmother meant this in a literal sense, or was hinting at the fact that (as Tony Robbins says) success leaves clues…
Wouldn't a counter argument be that the MOST successful people do not do what others do and define their own path. I.e. it's great if you're optimizing a game for a particular outcome but if you're creating a new game following what other people do may just leave to the average (of whatever group)?
Steve Jobs' explanation of the simple, obvious truth that the world is made up of everyone's contributions and how much power each individual person has to contribute and influence it too: "Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact, and that is: Everything around you that you call life, was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build you…
I've found it to be an excellent philosophy to live by.
A decade of success against steep odds later, I ran into the high school teacher who I idolized and who helped me actually achieve something. Most teachers tolerated me or insulated the rest of the classroom from me. But he put in the effort to get me engaged with something that got me to sit down and try. I was excited to show him what his work had helped me accomplish. He had two things to share with me: 1. He does…
Great that you could "pinpoint" someone that had a such a profound effect on you. Do you think there's anything in his behavior that can be "stolen", to try and have the same effect on other people down the line ?