The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday • Hacker News Board

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#181

Post by weaksauce » Wed, Jul 14, 2021, 4:59 PM UTC

kjerzyk wrote: post #84

spideymans wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. Knowledge usually works like this. When I first got into home cooking a few years ago, the learning process was painfully slow. It must've taken several attempts spread across a week just to learn how to make basic scrambled eggs the "proper" way. Now after a few years of experience, every ingredient I learn to work with seemingly unlocks a dozen more dishes that I can easily assemble. The rate of learning accel…

Would you mind sharing what you used to learn cooking? My main struggle is recipe books that teach you the recipe rather than cooking. But I'd love to learn HOW to cook, not WHAT to cook.

watch J. Kenji López-Alt on youtube. does the full recipe from start to finish while telling you the whys. he started doing that kind of thing semi-frequently at the start of the pandemic and now has a pretty large catalog of videos.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqqJQ_cXSat0KIAVfIfKkVA

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#182

Post by nine_k » Wed, Jul 14, 2021, 4:59 PM UTC

xiphias2 wrote: post #147

closeparen wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While of course doing a startup is very hard and subject to a lot of unknowable, uncontrollable factors I don’t think it’s quite as dire as a retail investor picking stocks. There’s no “efficient markets” for software products; it’s much more likely that you can spot and exploit an unmet business need near your domain expertise than that you have unique insight into Walmart’s quarterly earnings.

As a sofware engieer I disagree: most software engineers have an edge over dumb analysts in analyzing companies, like Amazon / Apple / Tesla / Google / Walmart / Bitcoin / Ethereum / Goldman Sachs. We may not have a deep understanding in the balance sheet, but being able to read the code, APIs, and protocols (SWIFT vs BIPs, lightning protocol, cryptography books, testing infrastructure for example) we can see and und…

You should not underappreciate the subject area expertise of people who analyze stocks in a particular business area. Many of them learn the subject area at a serious depth, exactly for the reasons you state: the balance sheet does not tell the whole story.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#183

Post by ncrmro » Wed, Jul 14, 2021, 5:00 PM UTC

kjerzyk wrote: post #84

spideymans wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. Knowledge usually works like this. When I first got into home cooking a few years ago, the learning process was painfully slow. It must've taken several attempts spread across a week just to learn how to make basic scrambled eggs the "proper" way. Now after a few years of experience, every ingredient I learn to work with seemingly unlocks a dozen more dishes that I can easily assemble. The rate of learning accel…

Would you mind sharing what you used to learn cooking? My main struggle is recipe books that teach you the recipe rather than cooking. But I'd love to learn HOW to cook, not WHAT to cook.

Alton browns good eats gives you some light hearted science and basic methodology for cooking things.

Things like don’t put things into cold oil/pan, don’t over mix dough, here is basics for gravy etc

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#184

Post by rjh29 » Wed, Jul 14, 2021, 5:00 PM UTC

ModernMech wrote: post #16

Clubber wrote: post #5

Joel Spolsky said something similar. Paraphrasing: You find motivation by just committing a little bit every day: 10 minutes, 30 minutes. Once you get into it, you'll most likely do more.

I heard this advice in relation to doing chores-- don't think about the pile of dishes you need to do, then you'll never do the dishes. Just motivate yourself to do a single dish. Once you are in the context of doing dishes, the second dish comes much easier, then the third, and before you know it the dishes are done.

I take some dishes out of the dishwasher and put them on the table. Then I feel compelled to take out the rest and then put them all away, so it's easy.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#185

Post by rchaud » Wed, Jul 14, 2021, 5:01 PM UTC

mattjaynes wrote: post #89

If you haven't read or listened to this book yet, I highly recommend it: Daily Rituals: How Artists Work[1] It's a collection of daily routines of many famous and prolific artists. The surprising thing about so many of the artists is that they only work 2 or 3 hours per day, then spend the rest of the day walking around, socializing, etc. But they consistently show up and put in the work and it adds up to some amazin…

The Now Habit was a book I liked. Good descriptions of experiments and their insights.

However, the Daily Rituals book I didn't find as compelling. The information sources are not first-hand, because most of these artists are long dead. Their routines as laid out in the book is at best only partially accurate. It's far more likely that these profiles are mostly apocryphal.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#186

Post by dredmorbius » Wed, Jul 14, 2021, 5:02 PM UTC

deeviant wrote: post #79

This type of sentiment generally makes me feel that literally nobody understands why business work or don't. I remember pitching the idea of a fantasy financial league to a friend who is a teacher, as a way of teaching kids about the stock market and finance. His reply instantly gelled with me and let me know they actually understood much more than I about both teaching and finance: He said it will teach exactly the…

There is an alternate strategy and it's what V persue: rather than going all-in on single bets, they diversify their portfolios.

That, combined with stop-losses and favourable terms tend to assure winning-on-average.

Individual founders face vastly greater risks, and poorer average returns (in part due to those stop-losses and favourable-to-VC terms).

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#187

Post by dasil003 » Wed, Jul 14, 2021, 5:02 PM UTC

jnovek wrote: post #63

This was exactly how we built OwnLocal before we quit our day jobs. In a sense, it was very easy because when you don't know how big the problem is, everything feels like progress. Now I see 40 barreling towards me and it's hard to just do a little bit every day. Because I have experience, I can form a much bigger picture of an idea in my head and it's hard to peel off a tiny bit and make that feel like a success. Th…

On the other side of 40 here, I definitely know what you mean, but I also think you can cultivate a beginner's mind and openness to ambitious ideas while still leveraging your experience to see around corners and avoid dead ends. Two ideas:

First, remind yourself that software is malleable. You don't need to build it perfectly the first time, and in fact you will always need to modify it as you go, so don't get stuck in analysis paralysis. You're good at writing code, so leverage that skill to iterate quickly.

Second, don't equate growth with chasing more and more powerful abstractions. Remember, "all abstractions are leaky" in the same way that "all models are wrong, but some are useful". IMHO valuable software comes from concrete use cases. So as you get more experienced you should be able to write simpler code that provides more value. Let the abstractions emerge from practice and experience rather than obsessing over them before you understand the problem.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#188

Post by awillen » Wed, Jul 14, 2021, 5:03 PM UTC

Once I was taking a weekend trip down to San Diego with my now wife, and we decided to look at some open houses. It started raining - not super hard, but a fair bit. Most of the open houses we showed up to ended up not happening as a result.

One of them did, though, and I spoke to the agent showing the house for a while about San Diego real estate. When I moved down to San Diego, he helped me buy a home and find a space to lease for my new business. I'm almost certainly going to have him help me find some real estate investments in the future as well.

Unlike everybody else, he showed up that day, and it's made him tens of thousands of dollars with more to come.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#189

Post by reggieband » Wed, Jul 14, 2021, 5:04 PM UTC

One of the more interesting sayings I have come across lately is: People overestimate how much they can get done in the short term but they underestimate how much they can get done in the long term.

I see this all the time with friends who pick up the guitar as a hobby. Often someone practices intensely for one week or one month and then gets frustrated at their progress. That frustration often causes people to give up. Now I see it as a mismatch between short-term estimation/expectations. The frustration is caused by overestimating how much progress they think they should make in the short-term. The quitting is caused by underestimating the progress they could make in the long term.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#190

Post by simonw » Wed, Jul 14, 2021, 5:04 PM UTC

chris_j wrote: post #156

simonw wrote: post #80

Duolingo taught me this. I started doing ten minutes of Duolingo a day... 959 days ago. It showed me the enormous power of doing something small every day. Since then I've tried setting myself other streak targets. My most successful has been publishing weeknotes (just published number 92) since that forces me to focus on what I've got done - and through that incentivizes me to get stuff done, so I can put it in my w…

What results do you find you get from using Duolingo every day for 959 days? Do you find that it's working for you, in terms of gaining better language proficiency? I ask because I personally became disillusioned with Duolingo's streaks and leaderboards. I found that I was forcing myself to use it every day but I lost the love of learning the language. Ultimately, I stopped using it because I had a lot of extrinsic m…

I've tried learning Spanish theee different times - a course at university, a course at an employer and now with Duolingo.

The results I've got from Duolingo have been by far the best - a little very day works way better for me than a larger commitment of time in shorter bursts.

I can now read tweets from Spanish language Twitter accounts and understand them 90% of the time (CNN and BBC News in Spanish are great).

I took some in-person lessons via video chat to practice conversational Spanish which was also useful, and I'm hoping to spend a few months fully embedded in a Spanish speaking country some time in the future - but I don't feel the need to rush things. I'll be happy getting incrementally more vocabulary and grammar in 10-15 minutes a day for a long time to come.