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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

#371

Post by Cd00d »

mrits wrote: post #347
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…

I can think of some counter examples. Golf is a big one. I have friends that play every weekend and never get better.

I don't think just doing an activity is enough - there has to be conscious effort at improvement.

A person doing a drunken Saturday 18 isn't going to improve. A person going to the range and focusing on technique 20 minutes a day will improve, with far less net time spent.

I think of it in terms of the "10,000 hours to mastery" - how many masters of driving do you see on the road? Most people are just barely not crashing from place to place, not focusing on skill.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#372

Post by [deleted] »

laurieg wrote: post #30

I like the advice but it always seems to backfire for me. I started jogging everyday. Maybe 2 or 3km. But recently I struggle to do 500m a day. Same with programming. I'll start with a few good days but then it devolves to opening an editor, writing a comment or one line then closing it straight after.

[deleted]

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#373

Post by robscallsign »

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 think that sentiment is a function of the HN startup/hustle culture, where anything less than becoming a unicorn is seen as abject failure.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#374

Post by telchar »

ziftface wrote: post #369
nend wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Since this comment got some attention, my source for this was [0] Ranney, Wayne. “How Rivers Carve Canyons.” Carving Grand Canyon - Evidence, Theories, and Mystery, 2nd ed., Grand Canyon Association, 2012.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#375

Post by rchaud »

deregulateMed wrote: post #35
andrewtbham wrote: post #21

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.

I don't know about that. I have the book here in front of me (Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit), and it seems like the whole thing can be summarized as:

Cue - Routine - Reward

With an additional 300 pages of weak, mostly theory-driven anecdotes about how corporations apply this at scale.

I'd be really interested to know how you applied this to your personal life.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#376

Post by TimTheTinker »

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…

> where someone spent 15 hrs/week for 5 years, built something really cool, but never got any funding or traction.

I just created an "Ask HN" to try to gather any anecdata about projects that ended that way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27838479

I'm really curious to see what people say.

(I just started my own 15+ hours/week project last month.)

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#377

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

hinkley wrote: post #235
mtberatwork wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 f…

It is also much safer to praise a dead artist. Famous alive writer might suddenly turn out to be big fan of some genocidal world leader, embarrassing everyone who loves his earlier work.

Dead people are mostly safe from this, though not completely - some dirty laundry might surface years after death, forever tarnishing the image, but such occurrences are rather rare.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#378

Post by spideymans »

reddiky wrote: post #258
Damogran6 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is perhaps a root cause of the Dunning–Kruger effect.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#379

Post by rchaud »

robscallsign wrote: post #373
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 think that sentiment is a function of the HN startup/hustle culture, where anything less than becoming a unicorn is seen as abject failure.

The only time we even listen to stories about failure is when they're told by people who are outsized successes.
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