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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

#361

Post by kevstev »

munificent wrote: post #198
kjerzyk wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I actually think starting with recipes and following them semi-blindly is a great way to learn to cook. For a couple of reasons: * It gives you successful experiences early in the process. It can be really disheartening to spend hours making a mess of your kitchen and end up with something unpalatable. Following tried and true recipes gets you to that amazing feeling of "I created something delicious" as quickly as p…

Agreed- I learned to cook at first by just doing some recipes, and also just making some basic dishes like pasta with sauce (from a jar) but then jazzing it up by adding additional freshly chopped garlic, or oregano, basil, whatever.

If you start making enough dishes, you will start to see the similarities. You start realizing that making something like chicken marsala is just like cooking almost any other protein and making a "pan sauce"- First you brown the meat with some oil (causing Maillard reactions) in a pan, then take the protein out and brown some onions, and maybe soften some garlic, then throw some liquid in the pan, typically chicken stock and/or wine, to get all the brown bits stuck to the pan up and unlock that flavor (called deglazing), then throw in other things to make it flavorful, whether it be herbs, mushrooms, veggies, whatever, and then you let that reduce down to a much thicker consistency, and then thicken with a fat like butter or cream, or maybe even mustard or roux- butter and flour mixed together and cooked briefly (finishing).

This is the basic process for making a pan sauce, and you can start experimenting from there.

For more specific advice, after cooking a bit, you can read a book like How to Cook Everything by Mark Bitman or Ratio by Michael Ruhlman that goes over some of the fundamental ideas of cooking. One interesting thing I have learned as I have gotten more adventurous is that many ingredients are often thrown together because of climate, geography and history- Tomato and Basil are like peas and carrots because they thrive in the same climates and are naturally harvested at the same time. Thyme rosemary and tarragon are heavily used in French cooking because they grow like weeds there, particularly in the south. With our modern supermarkets, you can get a lot more creative. But that's for later and you have to prepare yourself for a lot of failure in that process :)

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#362

Post by andrewmcwatters »

nine_k wrote: post #169
andrewmcwatters wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No idea what you’re trying to explain here. A business works when revenue exceeds expenses, not whatever you’re trying to talk about here. I’m pretty sure “literally everyone” understands that, and not “literally nobody.”

If it were so simple. A pizza place may generate more revenue than it consumes in expenses all the time , and barely provide enough for the owners to get by. A unicorn startup can have its expenses exceed revenue all the time (see Uber) and make its owners very rich in the process.

It is that simple.

Neither a pizza place nor a startup exist in for very long without revenue exceeding expenses.

Even in your own examples, both businesses work. It doesn’t matter whether it’s from low revenue and low expenses or high expenses and high capital injection.

Show me a business where revenue was ahead of expenses, had no debt, and it went out of business because it couldn’t pay its bills.

There’s no amount of surprise gotcha clever but-actuallys that can argue with you’re either making money or you aren’t.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#363

Post by Splendor »

ipnon wrote: post #358
d_burfoot wrote: post #276

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…

Not all hardworking people are successful, but all successful people are hardworking. Success is not guaranteed, it has an element of randomness. Attempting to be successful involves risk, and "survivorship bias" should be accounted as part of that risk. But still success is not entirely random, because only playing video games or watching TV will not result in it. It's not that you should think that consistent engin…

> all successful people are hardworking

That really depends on your definition of "successful".

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#364

Post by AndrewKemendo »

sebmellen wrote: post #328
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ted Nelson's Xanadu is what comes to mind immediately for me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu The Bulletball guy is a close second: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOOw2yWMSfk

Aha! But had the Xanadu folks showed up every day, they might have created something more than vaporware, and people might've used their software! From the linked Wikipedia article: > Wired magazine published an article called "The Curse of Xanadu", calling Project Xanadu "the longest-running vaporware story in the history of the computer industry".[3] The first attempt at implementation began in 1960, but it was not…

Sarcasm?

Ted Nelson is pretty consistent here and has put thousands of hours into it.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#366

Post by jstummbillig »

nend wrote: post #355
arnold_palmur wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the quintessential example of a pedantic Hacker News comment.

I don't know, I appreciated the correction and additional information. There was also an acknowledgment that it doesn't change ops point. Seemed like a useful comment to me.

Well, pedantry is quite popular around here.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#367

Post by tacLog »

sebmellen wrote: post #325
d_burfoot wrote: post #276

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…

I agree, but IMO that is missing the point of the post. For me, this lesson transcends software engineering and applies to nearly every quadrant of life. Yes, progress does not guarantee success, but progress for its own sake is still worthwhile. And even if your ultimate goal is to succeed, applying these principles makes the success more likely , which is most of what matters in any kind of entrepreneurial enterpri…

I agree, he barely talked about his startup at all.

The focus was on the habit that has nothing to do with the fact that he did well.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#368

Post by unsui »

telchar wrote: post #161
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…

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…

OP's comment is a vast simplification of what's happening underneath, but nonetheless still tremendously valid as a useful heuristic.

Valuable work, like many things in the real world, is not normally distributed, but skewed or following alternate distributions, such as power-law. This is likely what occurs within "torrents" of work: work that is has significantly more leverage than other work.

Nonetheless, the implicit bedrock of the just-showing-up heuristic is that the valuable work cannot get done without the consistency of simply showing up; indeed, expert performance is often a function of deliberate practice plus persistence (time); one without the other rarely nets positive results.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#369

Post by ziftface »

nend wrote: post #355
arnold_palmur wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the quintessential example of a pedantic Hacker News comment.

I don't know, I appreciated the correction and additional information. There was also an acknowledgment that it doesn't change ops point. Seemed like a useful comment to me.

It was pedantic but that doesn't make it a bad comment, I definitely appreciated the information

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#370

Post by OJFord »

simonw wrote: post #250
OJFord wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The three? Purple? Maybe it's different for different languages. Each lesson (as in topic badge type button) done through 5/5 crowns (1-7 stages per crown iirc), I just go through fixing the broken ones or practicing ones I know I'm rusty on now.

Yup that's what I'm talking about - the Spanish track added a concept of "purple" which is an advance on the broken ones - you can now take an additional set of lessons for one that shows up broken and it will never break for you again. I think the Spanish track is likely one of the most advanced in terms of number of lessons and quality of teaching - though I expect the "learn English" tracks are equivalent or more…

Oh nice. Mine (Hindi) definitely doesn't have that, it's also shorter than a lot of other older/more mature ones I think. (I've dabbled in the French one.) I'll certainly do it if it becomes available, but for now I've done all that is.
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