Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A Project of One’s Own

paulgraham.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 384 posts

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#311

Post by astrange »

fearthetelomere wrote: post #177
rossdavidh wrote: post #41

Jared Diamond, in his book "The Day Before Yesterday", talks about how children in Papua New Guinea when he was an anthropologist there would play at making a garden or raising pigs. The kid would have a toy, wooden pig, and then eventually be given a piglet, and then gradually their "play" would become more realistic until it shaded into adult work. My daughter, as a youngun', wanted to play "coffeeshop" where she w…

There's a working theory that you could do this with anything. A cool story to read is the Polgar family. His daughters became some of the best chess players of their time. >Polgár and his wife considered various possible subjects in which to drill their children, "including mathematics and foreign languages," but they settled on chess. "We could do the same thing with any subject, if you start early, spend lots of t…

Judit Polgár is to this day the greatest woman chess player of all time. She retired but is still the coach of Hungary's national team.

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#312

Post by lmm »

shard wrote: post #297
dpogorniy wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because parents are afraid that their child won't be competitive enough to have a decent life. If only parents were relaxed, if only they knew that their child can live full life without grinding through exercises. Then child just would pursue what they love, interested (unless it's unaffordable to their social strata). I wonder what we can do today to make this happen sooner. On the side note. There is a grea…

My parents were pretty hands-off, and luckily I had a strong interest in academics and was sufficiently self-driven. But I did sink untold number of hours into RPGs when I was young, and I wish my parents had insisted on some music lessons or sports activities. Not for any competitiveness reasons, but just to have various enjoyable skills. Certainly I can take them up at anytime, but compared to the amount of free ti…

This is the normal pattern of music or sports: you wish to have done them, but they're (for many people) not fun enough that you actually want to put the hours in. It's the same when you're a kid, IME, it's just easier for parents to force them to do something unfun.

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#313

Post by aspaceman »

matmatmatmat wrote: post #303
rel2thr wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tiger parents are already evolving on this, every elite high school student is now starting non profits or micro startups to put on their resumes .

Or "volunteering" at an animal sanctuary at the base of Mt. Kilimanjaro, which they happen to have climbed while there over the summer.

Sometimes I really wish I could read some of those college essays that went in with mine.

I wrote about my dad playing games with me, making a GB emulator and my mom dying. At the time I figured that's what most of them were. Grandma/Uncle/My pet fish died and that was sad. I broke my leg / struggled with grades / couldn't make friends blah blah blah. I built something or wrote something or did this charity thing. The occasional military / older adult.

Would really be curious how those have changed. Plus the difference in Ivy League vs Public schools.

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#314

Post by tppiotrowski »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #9

I once wrote that "My dream is to, one day, work for free." I am now living that dream. When I left my last company, in 2017, I looked at working for someone else, but was almost immediately told that no one wants old men. It was pretty crushing. But I went and set up a corporation that allows me to get equipment and testing kit, and started to write my own stuff. I explored surveillance cameras and ONVIF, as well as…

I’m in a similar boat. Previously built vaporware costing millions of dollars of seed money. Now I have my own project and although it makes no money it is awesome to see people use it and exciting to see people share it on social media.

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#316

Post by tppiotrowski »

The difference between kids and adults is that adults compare themselves to one another and will abandon projects that don’t earn them recognition from their peers. Kids seem less influenced by this, at least until puberty.

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#317

Post by shard »

lmm wrote: post #312
shard wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My parents were pretty hands-off, and luckily I had a strong interest in academics and was sufficiently self-driven. But I did sink untold number of hours into RPGs when I was young, and I wish my parents had insisted on some music lessons or sports activities. Not for any competitiveness reasons, but just to have various enjoyable skills. Certainly I can take them up at anytime, but compared to the amount of free ti…

This is the normal pattern of music or sports: you wish to have done them , but they're (for many people) not fun enough that you actually want to put the hours in. It's the same when you're a kid, IME, it's just easier for parents to force them to do something unfun.

The regret comes in two stages for me. What I previously mentioned, and the second stage, which is when my kid started developing an interest, and I am unable to join in as my rudimentary skills are surpassed within a few months.

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#318

Post by lq313c »

jdmoreira wrote: post #216
opportune wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Grades still matter for the vast majority of people who aren’t born into mega rich families. Most people don’t become Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and even those that do benefit greatly from the pedigrees that academic achievement opens up (going to top colleges, working at desirable employers, although grades matter little there unless you’re right out of college). For everyone else grades are still used for trackin…

Grades don't matter. They matter if you really want to follow the beaten path. Sure, go ahead... join McKinsey or something like that. Being good a learning matters. Being good at executing matters. Being good at communicating matters. Being good at leading matters. Grades and credentials are just gatekeeping invented by people that are worse than talented people. Grades are for status not for wealth and even much le…

Is this not just an argument over terminology? I think most people realize that grades are just an approximate measure of learning ability. I doubt many parents would prefer that their kid cheated on every test to get straight A's rather B's from honest studying. When most parents tell their kids to get good grades, they mean "study hard and show me you learned", not "go get good grades by any means necessary".

If there was a better measure of learning, executing, communicating, and leading than "grades" at the pre-collegiate level, then I'm sure we would've found it by now and used that instead. For me to be convinced that grades don't matter, I'd have to see proof that there is no correlation between successful people and good grades at a population scale.

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#319

Post by leppr »

nostromo wrote: post #263
jdmoreira wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Grades don't matter. They matter if you really want to follow the beaten path. Sure, go ahead... join McKinsey or something like that. Being good a learning matters. Being good at executing matters. Being good at communicating matters. Being good at leading matters. Grades and credentials are just gatekeeping invented by people that are worse than talented people. Grades are for status not for wealth and even much le…

Grades correlate with learning ability, executive function, and communication skills. Good grades aren't the goal. Good grades are an indicator other people can use to gauge your preparedness for a job or opportunity.

Good grades are also an indicator of being able to optimize for grades. Being able to optimize a metric is a good thing, but the problems is that typical students spend 20 years learning to optimize that one and only metric. Therefore it's no surprise out-of-school students are often only good at optimizing similar metrics, and suck at the general creative + critical rational thinking that's required in life.

(I think I'm basically paraphrasing another PG article here, but this opinion mostly comes from my own experience working with both people from higher education and early drop-outs)

Post reply on HN