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The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

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Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#271

Post by throw1234651234 »

redisman wrote: post #269
throw1234651234 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do. I have accomplished a lot of petty things (at risk of humble brag, which this is not) - decent lift numbers, few skills at competitive level, new things like GCP/AWS/Azure/K8S certs at work, etc. None of them are achievable through anything other than hours a days for months. Even things that seem basic like "do a handstand" or "drive a stick". I also have friends who have accomplished petty things - none got r…

So you’re saying putting 40 minutes to things every day works wonders.

I am saying 40 minutes a day is an absolute minimum sufficient for simple maintenance tasks (aka walking, cooking healthy meals, etc) and a far greater amount of time is required to actually accomplish anything meaningful, let alone novel or groundbreaking.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#272

Post by jdhawk »

nly wrote: post #167
TheAlchemist wrote: post #85

Reminds me of these equations: 1.01 ^ 365 = 37.78 0.99 ^ 365 = 0.03

Yup, and the difference between putting your 401K in a fund charging 1% instead of 0.25% a year, over 30 years, is having about 20% less in retirement.

If the funds have equal performance*

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#273

Post by c22 »

nostrilwig wrote: post #45
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!

try something like ticking off/writing down your successfull tries eg in a calendar or a (bullet) journal. helps to keep yourself committed to it, as you probably do not want to break your already created streak.

I use a giant sheet of graph paper on my desk with days of the month marked off horizontally at the top and a column of daily habits on the left. I put a big fat X in the grid for each day I accomplish a given task. It's incredibly satisfying and very obvious when I've missed a few days. Also the paper acts as a nice desk protector.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#274

Post by macksd »

dheera wrote: post #216
telchar wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think at this point we're reading too much into specific units to compare very distinct things. The point of the analogy either way is the compounding effect of seemingly small things repeated.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#275

Post by lisper »

tudelo wrote: post #268
lisper wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually had this exact experience in a civics class in junior high school -- in 1979! We pored through the stock listings in a physical newspaper every day for several weeks and recorded our buy and sell decisions. The "winner" bought a penny stock which went from 1/8 to 1/4 in a day (or something like that). And I did in fact learn exactly the wrong lesson from that because 20 years later I lost a fair bit of mon…

I don't think that is the "wrong" lesson. It's a lesson in risk. But it's not a viable strategy long term for most. I think if you teach the concept of ruin, the chance of going bust, you can help develop a healthy relationship with the concept of risk and investing. It's also pretty easy to show real examples of what risk can cause... "guh"

It was the wrong lesson because the focus was entirely on who made the most money. And because it was funny money, the losers didn't actually suffer any real consequences other than the psychological pain of not being the winner. It flattened the risk-reward curve to the point where there was no real difference between losing 90% and simply coming in second. IMHO that is the wrong lesson (though I also note in passing that it is a philosophy that many Americans seem to subscribe to).

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#276

Post by d_burfoot »

I feel like HN should have a special flag called "survivorship bias" that we can use to tag posts like this. For every project like this one, there are 1000 others where someone spent 15 hrs/week for 5 years, built something really cool, but never got any funding or traction.

Now, that time was probably better spent on a cool project than on playing video games or watching TV. But you shouldn't think that consistent engineering effort alone will have any payoff bigger than personal intellectual satisfaction.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#277

Post by chris_j »

simonw wrote: post #190
chris_j wrote: post #156

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…

That's really fantastic - good work. I'm glad to hear that my experiences with Duolingo aren't the only ones possible.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#278

Post by iamricks »

kabdib wrote: post #58

Reading one paper a week is 520 papers a decade, and there's your "Oh wait, I've seen a solution to this problem before..." superpower as a senior dev. Not your only one, but one that's easy to acquire.

Whats the best place to search for and read papers?

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#279

Post by astrange »

roland35 wrote: post #163
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…

I think it is a great idea, but if you want to reward a more sane investing strategy (ie low-cost broad index funds) you could maybe accelerate historical or simulated data and anonymize the ticker IDs? Obviously there will probably be one lucky YOLO player but you could rank everyone and also factor in risk-adjusted returns.

If you want to end up with the normal retirement strategy you probably want to simulate regular contributions and occasional emergency withdrawals.

If you just have a simulated pile of money and want it to go up, but don't actually need it in the meantime, then the risk isn't important and diversifying too much will just guarantee you lose. The usual math in MPT makes strange assumptions like a normal distribution anyway, so it thinks an asset is bad if it has too much upside risk.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#280

Post by dheera »

dreamer7 wrote: post #263
dheera wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think it depends on the activity. It's impossible to build any medium to high complexity software by working on it for 5 mins a day. But you can make a lot of progress by practising every day for very little time. For example, I've improved on my tucked planche progression by just leaning forward while holding a plank for 5 seconds every day.

Yeah I agree. For software I find the major infrastructure laying and overhauling should be done in "torrent" blocks of several hours to a full day, while incremental bugfixes and feature add-ons can be done by daily short amounts of time.
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