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The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

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211–220 of 591 posts

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#211

Reminds me of the book atomic habits. It emphasizes the compounding gains of small wins.

If you liked that book, Power of Habits is the 10x better version. It's less of a 20 year olds book of lifehacks and more of a science based approach. Power of Habit book changed my life, quit all drugs and video games. Now I just read nonfiction books.

Other books in a similar vein that I liked:

_One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way_ by Robert Maurer

_Mini Habits: Smaller Habits, Bigger Results_ by Stephen Guise

Both are short reads, and the Kaizen book is also in a nice small form factor that you can stick in your back pocket. These books emphasize the importance of making even the smallest change possible.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#212
post #119
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me too, about half that. But I'm painfully aware it's no longer getting me anywhere (I completed the 'tree' hundreds of days ago) - what I really need to do is sit down with my textbook in order to progress further with the grammar, and widen my vocabulary beyond what's in Duolingo. But that requires more time commitment, so I do it much less often, and do Duolingo instead.. fairly pointlessly - sure it probably help…

Likely what you need is an immersion experience, the best way to learn a language.

Yes.. I've wanted to for years, even before learning the language. The pandemic is a solid excuse at the moment, but I only have myself to blame really.

One day I'll go, एक दिन जाऊंँगा!

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#213

I've written two books over the past decade as well as learning some other skills and hobbies and this is absolutely the most vital lesson I've learned. There is an incredible power in simply pouring a little time into something every day over a long period of time. It feels like a superpower when you see it start compounding. The Grand Canyon was created by little drops of water bouncing off rocks for millenia. Cons…

Also in dating.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#215

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…

I really like this analogy, especially while WSB-style "YOLO" has become a life philosophy over the last 5 years. That said, I wonder if the "fantasy financial league" game can become a lesson by selectively choosing a handful of stocks over a 30 year period. Tell the kids about the economics of the period (let's say the 1960s - 1990s) and provide a few companies with the tickers, names, and descriptions replaced. Wa…

My class did almost this exact exercise in junior high back in the early 90's. Teacher gave us a menu of stock tickers of companies that have been around since 1960, complete with some rudimentary financial info as of 1960. Told us to research the companies and come up with a list of stocks to pretend we bought and held for 30 years. This was before the Internet so we couldn't just sneak a peek at the current prices. The goal of the exercise was to learn about research and ultimately diversification, but our team "won" by simply guessing the stock that was most well-known today, and YOLOing the entire fake money investment into it. Taught entirely the wrong lesson.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#216

I've written two books over the past decade as well as learning some other skills and hobbies and this is absolutely the most vital lesson I've learned. There is an incredible power in simply pouring a little time into something every day over a long period of time. It feels like a superpower when you see it start compounding. The Grand Canyon was created by little drops of water bouncing off rocks for millenia. Cons…

Not to take away from your point, but from what I have read, the Grand Canyon was most likely not formed by little drops of water, but instead by occasional torrents of water. There is ~70 feet of boulders and detritus at the bottom of the Colorado River. Only a flood powerful enough to get all that material moving at once will erode the bottom of the river bed and carve the canyon deeper. The slopes and walls probab…

And so maybe true effectiveness would be achieved by having a torrent of work once a week instead of a few minutes a day.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#217
post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Duolingo is great, because learning a language (and many other skills) is a matter of doing it consistently. If you have a 4 hour class once a week but don't study or read anything in Spanish outside of the class, you will forget things before the next class.

Of course, Duolingo is not magical, but it gives you enough vocabulary and understanding that you can start following people on twitter/instagram and know what's happening. Then you start trying to reply and interact, and then at some point try a book, then a TV show..

Also, many people plan on starting something (like learning a language) later on, when they have more time. Many people I know that wanted to learn English (Im Brazilian) didn't start years ago because they `didn't have time`, so now, after a few years, they still need to start from 0

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#218
I learned this with my email forwarding app (https://hanami.run) as well. I have tried to bootstrap a few ideas, and just like the ops, I got married, I got kid, family problem, change jobs.

Then COVID happens and I promise myself to wake up at 3-4AM everyday to write code and ship https://hanami.run during that period.

I don't even worry about competitors, I just want to build a platform that I enjoyed to use and iterate every single day. Many small features were take for granted.

Such as we auto refresh DNS constantly so users with like 100 domains don't have to check DNS one by one to activate domain. I then supported cloudflare auto config dns to make thing even easiser. And auto refresh DNS means we're easily to got block by CloudFlare DNS servers, but I put the cost on me to make our user's life easiser.

Another effects of this showing up everyday is you are allowed an unlimited time budget and can try out cool thing.

Such as I recently expriment with OpenResty autossl to make our URL redirection work with HTTPS. Other day I experiment with leaky bucket rate limiting.

With a time budget, I'm probably won't work on that, but sometime I feel down, and knowing I have tomorrow I can use today's time on something that make me happy.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#219

I've written two books over the past decade as well as learning some other skills and hobbies and this is absolutely the most vital lesson I've learned. There is an incredible power in simply pouring a little time into something every day over a long period of time. It feels like a superpower when you see it start compounding. The Grand Canyon was created by little drops of water bouncing off rocks for millenia. Cons…

Not to take away from your point, but from what I have read, the Grand Canyon was most likely not formed by little drops of water, but instead by occasional torrents of water. There is ~70 feet of boulders and detritus at the bottom of the Colorado River. Only a flood powerful enough to get all that material moving at once will erode the bottom of the river bed and carve the canyon deeper. The slopes and walls probab…

Not sure about the Grand Canyon, but at least around the Alps, lots of wide, deep river valleys were carved into close to their current form at the end of the last ice age, when rivers carried hundreds of times their usual water for quite a while as the ice shield was melting away.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#220
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.

You are referring to Fire and Motion.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/

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