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

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#231

Post by hinkley » Wed, Jul 14, 2021, 5:57 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…

I’ve had two bosses/mentors who aspired to write project management books. Then they would tell me the thesis and I would think, “What? No, that’s not why we are effective.”

Nobody sees the times you didn’t fall down. Someone swooped in and fixed something before it broke. Maybe just in the nick of time, maybe far ahead. The forward thinking person is important to that process. If your management skills may keep that person around or drive them away, then that’s material to your discussion. If it’s neutral, then there’s a whole lot of iceberg below the surface that you’re not seeing.

People can copy your theory and totally fail because they can’t motivate the people who keep the wheels on.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#232

Post by sombremesa » Wed, Jul 14, 2021, 5:57 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #215

schnevets wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

It would've been so easy to avoid this, even in the internet age, by just replacing the actual tickers with made up names...

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#233

Post by Erwin » Wed, Jul 14, 2021, 6:02 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.

In addition to Twenty and Food Lab already recommended, I'll mention Niki Segnit's books: Lateral Cooking and the Flavor Thesaurus. Lateral connects "adjacent" dishes -- you know of dish X, but Y is almost the same but from another food culture but everyone agrees on these basic things with just these slight pivots.

The Flavor Thesaurus does the same for ingredients -- you want to do something with figs, what dishes have figs in them, what complements them? The books cover the Western world, and Niki is the most witty writer among the dozens of culinary books I have.

Outside of that I like the "Perfect" columns by Felicity Cloak in the Guardian. Felicity takes a well-known dish and analyses all the differences in recipes, e.g. 6 cookbook authors have 6 different takes on coq au vin, what works best and how do they end up differently to each other? Like on Serious Eats, there's always well-spirited discussion.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#234

Post by rchaud » Wed, Jul 14, 2021, 6:02 PM UTC

j1elo wrote: post #165

aidenn0 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has literally never worked for me with any habits I've tried intentionally cultivating. I'll pick something and do it every day for several weeks. Then I stop. Am I doing it wrong? Am I just weird that I can't seem to form good habits? I sincerely think I wouldn't remember to brush my teeth in the morning if my mouth didn't feel so gross, and I've been doing that every morning for over 30 years!

Meh I don't think you're doing anything wrong unless you suffer some kind of condition or attention deficit. One thing about these motivational speeches or techniques is that sometimes we just think we'd like doing something new, but deep inside our mind we really do not want to have that new habit. In those cases what we typically really want instead is to be the person who had already cultivated the habit for a lon…

I know exactly what this feels like. I have been making digital mini-magazines about music subgenres for years. I have never finished a single one. Shoegaze, Garage Rock, Post-Punk ... I always move on to a new issue before I'm even done with the first.

I want to already be the guy with a boring 9-5 by day, and a 'cool' punk historian by night. But I'm not, and the older I get the more I'm sure I won't ever be.

And yet I've been doing this for several years. Maybe I never finish them because I'm scared I'll feel the exact same way I did before I embarked on this hobby.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#235

Post by hinkley » Wed, Jul 14, 2021, 6:03 PM UTC

mtberatwork wrote: post #164

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 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 amazing things over time. Artists don't have stand ups, team meetings, planning sessions, one-on-ones, commutes and whatever other office distractions to deal with though. I suppose fig…

Someone blew my mind describing why some artists are not appreciated until they are dead.

The theory as it went is that most artists aren’t “ahead of their time”, it’s that they see Now in a way that nobody else will understand for years. Eventually, with the aid of the lens of nostalgia we see that they really “get us”, as we now understand ourselves.

Being out in the world is how they “get” us. It’s material, not faffing about.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#236

Post by slowwriter » Wed, Jul 14, 2021, 6:05 PM UTC

I don’t see others mentioning it so I thought I should. This reminds me of DHH and the creation of Rails. He followed essentially the same method: chipped away at it over a long period of time, little by little, day by day, with no specific deadline in mind. Works like this can have a huge impact on a person’s life and the world around him.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#237

Post by chegra » Wed, Jul 14, 2021, 6:06 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…

I did a summary of that book:

https://www.chestergrant.com/highlights-from-daily-rituals-b...

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#238

Post by xiphias2 » Wed, Jul 14, 2021, 6:07 PM UTC

rmah wrote: post #171

xiphias2 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Engineers may have an edge in analyzing company products . But that's not the same as analyzing the company . Not understanding the difference has burned a lot of investors in the past.

Can you give recent examples of investors overestimating public tech companies with great tech?

In the private market we had Theranos, which was completely opaque, but most of the big public failures were business innovations with unimpressive tech, like Groupon and WeWork.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#239

Post by SamoyedFurFluff » Wed, Jul 14, 2021, 6:09 PM UTC

brm wrote: post #124

Everyone always writes these and yet I've seen very few ever talk about how to decide what's worth showing up for or how to get a working hypothesis of an animating principle for your own existence. It'd be remarkably useful to have a working framework for how to figure out what to want, especially targeted at smart people with top level talents in several areas.

If you love multiple things totally equally as a total novice(aka haven’t put a ton of time yet into it but shows initial talent), pick one (with rng if needed) and stick with it for an hour a day or so for a while. If you like it and it works for you keep doing it.

And FOMO can be paid off with a therapist ;)

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#240

Post by Dangeranger » Wed, Jul 14, 2021, 6:11 PM UTC

superasn wrote: post #160

munificent wrote: post #40

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…

> 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. There is an amazing book called The Slight Edge which is based on this very principal and it can really change your life. Here is a small excerpt from it that really resonated with me: It sure would be nice if, somehow, you could do something…

James Clear writes in his book Atomic Habits, that making one small change and performing that change consistently every day is the compound interest of life. I like how James’ description and the one from your book suggestion are so similar.