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Embrace the Grind

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Re: Embrace the Grind

#211

Post by emptysongglass »

fartcannon wrote: post #68
beaconstudios wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also a mistake to think that people are static. We can improve ourselves through the expenditure of effort. The reality is like the parent said: there are limits to everybody's abilities, but you'll probably have to work hard as hell to reach yours (not targeting you personally, the general case "you"). If you believe that your present abilities are all you'll ever have then you're wasting what could be tremendo…

Who said anything about not improving, the parent comment believes the ADHD sufferer is simply not working hard enough. He's trying to show him where his bootstraps are.

As someone who suffers from ADHD, the simplicity of this comment really cuts to the heart of it for me: many words are written by PragmaticPup tiptoeing around what is essentially a directive to "work harder".

Unless you're living with ADHD, you really have no business handing out such directives. I was a hardcore meditator for years, arguably the crucible of mind training -- spent months of silent, directed attention in monasteries -- and despite blowing open the doors to some peak states, complete equanimity with all phenomena, and insight into some of the fundamental mechanics of desire and resistance, I was unable to hold any kind of job at all before I bit the bullet and medicated.

The decades of suffering I experienced because everyone around me was pushing this toxic narrative that ADHD was overdiagnosed and most likely a schema of my own failures could have been avoided if my parents just took a hard look at me and took me to a psychiatrist.

Armchair psychiatrists of Hacker News: please stop this irresponsible and dangerous public criticism of your interpretation of mental illness or the state of psychiatry.

Re: Embrace the Grind

#212

Post by chmod600 »

titanomachy wrote: post #166
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #30

When I joined a mentoring program targeted at recent college grads, I expected to be teaching things like interview prep, resume writing, negotiation skills, communication skills, and how to deliver results in a workplace. For about half of the mentees, that's roughly true. However, for the other half much of my mentoring ends up being about time management, following through on commitments, and putting in the effort…

This resonates with me deeply. I can barely get work done most of the time. My "solution" is to leave a company before people get too frustrated with me. Changing companies frequently nets me better pay and more promotions than my harder-working peers, but I haven't felt fulfilled by work in a long time. What do you tell these mentees? What would you tell someone a bit further along in their career who still has the…

I have a similar problem. What's weird for me is that I feel totally useless and undisciplined, but when I look back, I actually do accomplish important things. But if you watched me day to day, it is obvious I'm wasting a ton of time. Not just on work, but on myself as well.

I don't mean "wasting" like relaxing and maybe sorting out a problem in my subconscious. I mean wasting.

I seem to be doing better recently. What I do is focus on doing something. Whatever I will do right now that is remotely productive, that's what I do. It might be refactoring code, or drafting a proposal, or reading a book, or doing push ups, or using the debugger to explore something I need to understand, or playing with some new tech I enjoy learning. Pick up any tiny task and just do it.

It ends up mixing personal and work stuff, which is not great. But at least, at the end of the day, I did something. And slowly I will try to control my focus better to get particular things done.

Re: Embrace the Grind

#213

Post by dorkwood »

I experienced this when I first started learning the piano. When I played the first song I had learned for my sister, she was amazed. "Wow, I could never play like that", she said, "my fingers don't work that way". But when I broke down for her exactly how I'd learned it -- by breaking the song down into manageable chunks of just a few notes each, practicing each chunk with each hand separately many times until proficiency was reached, stringing the chunks together until I could play the whole song separately on each hand, and then bringing both hands together and repeating the entire process all over again -- her amazement turned to a look of disappointment. It was a mix of both realizing that her brother wasn't actually a genius, and a sort of mild disgust that I'd dedicated so much time to this activity.

Re: Embrace the Grind

#216

Post by [deleted] »

dorkwood wrote: post #213

I experienced this when I first started learning the piano. When I played the first song I had learned for my sister, she was amazed. "Wow, I could never play like that", she said, "my fingers don't work that way". But when I broke down for her exactly how I'd learned it -- by breaking the song down into manageable chunks of just a few notes each, practicing each chunk with each hand separately many times until profi…

[deleted]

Re: Embrace the Grind

#217

Post by developer93 »

ReactiveJelly wrote: post #47
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #30

When I joined a mentoring program targeted at recent college grads, I expected to be teaching things like interview prep, resume writing, negotiation skills, communication skills, and how to deliver results in a workplace. For about half of the mentees, that's roughly true. However, for the other half much of my mentoring ends up being about time management, following through on commitments, and putting in the effort…

I'm not gonna disagree but I want to add a couple things. 1. Kids with ADHD probably can't develop executive function as fast or as far as other kids. I'm pretty sure I have it, it explains the repeated performance reports of "You're good when you apply yourself and useless when you don't." Unfortunately I struggle to _choose_ to apply myself. Willpower doesn't seem to come naturally to me, even after 10 years as a p…

I always had problems sticking to anything, I'd get enthusiastic for a month or two and then I'd get bored. Never could tidy my room etc. Not saying I've anything as severe as adhd but I had trouble with self discipline. At the start of the year I decided to try to develop a good habit, any habit, to persuade myself I could do it. I decided to exercise. I spent the first 6 weeks just with the principal of do 1 situp, or whatever. Something I could do without any effort, at home, to remove any excuse not to do it. I made a tick on the calendar the days I did it so I could see my progress, I praised myself for completion, and I made it the only priority. Don't worry about tidying or eating healthy or whatever, just do that situp every day. After about 6 weeks I was getting out of bed and immediately doing the situp without thinking, I started a proper routine like 10 minutes, still easy. It'll be 3 months next week, so I'm hoping it's actually stuck. When I get to 6 months I want to start adding something like filling the dishwasher before bed. I'm 37 and this is the first time in my life I can say I've been able to do something I'm not obligated to do and don't want to do for a long period.

Re: Embrace the Grind

#218

Post by ZephyrBlu »

closeparen wrote: post #191
ZephyrBlu wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think being able to sit down and do work is more about removing distractions than improving focus. Also, I'm curious about these statements: > There's a growing perception that traits like work ethic, focus, and motivation are fixed attributes that one is born with (or without) rather than abilities that are developed over time Really? Who believes this and why? > but then turn around and tell me that they're only…

Experience? When I find that I have been focusing for many hours on a complex task, it is usually something I slipped into effortlessly, even accidentally. The whole experience is pleasant. On the other hand I have tried on many occasions to force this when it wasn’t forthcoming, and on top of being extremely uncomfortable, it’s never worked. I don’t think I’m completely helpless about it - factors such as sleep, exe…

I think this is pretty different to stating that you can't code for more than 2 hours.

I don't think anyone can instantly snap into being productive on command, all the time.

Re: Embrace the Grind

#219

Post by _xnmw »

My personal magic trick is learning to speak almost fluently in a second language (Russian) in about a year. However, when people ask me how I do it, they quickly get turned off when they realize it's just a grind. You need to know about 20,000 words in any language to sound fluent, and there is just no way around brute-force memorization. And if you're serious about learning, you need to keep track of how many words you know, and add new words every day, and have a system for review (Anki). Although memorization alone won't teach you a language, it is a necessary but not a sufficient condition. In the beginning it is poring through grammar books and practicing basic concepts until they become second-nature. During the intermediate stages it is taking thousands of native-spoken complete long sentences with audio and building Anki card decks and memorizing them. Yup, memorizing complete sentences with audio. For advanced stages it is laboriously poring over classical literature (Dostoevsky) while having a repertoire of academic dictionaries on hand, manually recording every new word and brute-forcing every sentence, until one day the language opens up to you like magic.

Re: Embrace the Grind

#220

Post by Animats »

jldugger wrote: post #45

> For example, I once joined a team maintaining a system that was drowning in bugs. There were something like two thousand open bug reports. Nothing was tagged, categorized, or prioritized. The team couldn’t agree on which issues to tackle > I spent almost three weeks in that room, and emerged with every bug report reviewed, tagged, categorized, and prioritized. Honestly, this is one of those traps a team can fall in…

I did that when I first came to Silicon Valley. I went to work for a company which operated a large, for its day, mainframe data center. (Not IBM, UNIVAC). Each time the operating system crashed, which it did several times a day, a "panic dump" was produced, a stack of paper about an inch thick, with a summary and stack backtrace at the top, and a full listing of the contents of memory.

There were two stacks of these, six feet high, waiting for me.

It took me most of a year to work through the pile, finding out why the crash had occurred, by tracking pointers through memory with pencil and colored marker and comparing this with paper listings of the operating system. Then I'd code a fix for that problem, test it (usually around 2 AM when I could take over a mainframe), and nervously put it into production on one mainframe. Slowly, the piles of crash dumps got shorter and the mean time to failure went from hours to weeks.

There were very few meetings, and nobody interfered. They were just happy to see the crash dump pile shrink and the uptime increase.

After a few years of this, by which time the systems would stay up for months, I got a job in R&D at another company and got out of maintenance programming and into theory.

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