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

The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

typesense.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 591 posts

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#251

Post by ghostbrainalpha »

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…

Thank you so much for these recommendations.

I'm better now, but these procrastination problems have plagued me my whole life. To the point that I was suicidal while writing my Thesis, I'd spend 10-12 hours in the library every day and accomplish almost nothing except self torture.

I can't imagine how helpful this "un-scheduling" would have been to me at that time.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#252

Post by raunak »

kureikain wrote: post #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…

I'd recommend getting someone to review your site a bit - obviously not sure if English-speaking countries are your target market, but some small mistakes here and there catch my eye (great supports are our norm over great support, never "lost" your emails over lose). Sounds very cool :)

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#254

Post by Raineer »

I highly recommend this same approach for schoolwork/studying. Just simply doing something, everyday, keeps topics fresh in your mind. It's so much better than forcing activity into giant chunks. I feel it reduces stress as well.

It keeps feeding your brain to subconsciously churn over topics during downtime like showers and sleeping.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#255

Post by rkrishnaan »

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…

Hey munificent, big fan of your work. Eagerly waiting for the paperback version.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#258

Post by reddiky »

Damogran6 wrote: post #129
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…

The number of domains of knowledge that are effectively infinite are compounding...this thought tends to make me hyperventilate if I think about it too much. It was very important to me to be smart so that people looked positively at me, now that I'm getting older, I'm having a hard time letting that go as I know more and more about less and less.

Wisdom is knowing how little you actually know

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#259

Post by icelancer »

schnevets wrote: post #120
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 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…

"EDIT: I cannot stop thinking about how ubiquitous YOLO as a philosophy has become in the last decade. Everything about life has become a binary of win or lose. Your stock market plays "won" if you are in the green, your tweet "lost" if you did not get effective engagement, your latest commit "won" if the established metrics succeeded after deployment. And then there are the implications in machine learning, where everything becomes a binary "correct or incorrect" assessment..."

Much of this is reinforced through perceived and real rampant income inequality. If people think they can't advance without taking disproportionate risks - and they're mostly correct here - you'll start to see that action, and then it gets amplified in the social media atmosphere that we live in today.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#260

Post by allenu »

This is great advice and one that I'm using in my own side project.

I have a macOS/iOS app out in the App Store and spent several months of my spare time working on it. Once it was released, I've pulled back a bit on how much time I spend on it, but I do manage to spend a few hours here and there during the week to add more features to it and to fix up bugs. I don't have specific goals, like "must release new feature X by 7/20". I just tend to ship a new version every 2-4 weeks depending on how I'm feeling and how much work I've actually done.

I've been amazed at the steady progress of improvements I've made on it. This pace feels a lot better than when I was working hard just to ship the darn thing. I'm not burnt out on the project, and the lack of pressure gives me time and space to reflect on what to do next and how best to achieve it.

Post reply on HN