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

How To Be Fucking Awesome

gilesbowkett.blogspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 76 posts

Re: How To Be Fucking Awesome

#61

Post by wheels »

david927 wrote: post #60
kthakar wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you can call billg an awesome businessman, after all it takes a lot to be the richest man on earth. I haven't heard much about his programming skills, so I don't think he was a great programmer.

exactly. And he didn't spend 10,000 hours practicing business. I'm not trying to be snarky by pointing this out; I'm trying clarify that, while we should remember that in order to be great, we require dedication, effort and patience, the example chosen of Bill Gates shows that, sadly, this is often irrelevant.

Microsoft was founded in 1975. 10k hours is 5 years of 40 hour weeks. I think it's fair to say that he was working more than 40 hour weeks, so by the time MS rose to dominance, he'd almost certainly spent over 10k hours at it.

Re: How To Be Fucking Awesome

#62

Post by xiaoma »

migpwr wrote: post #22
aneesh wrote: post #3

Another equally important thing is choosing your battles: you have to not only work hard, but work hard at the right things . I could practice basketball for 10,000 hours, but there's no way I could do it professionally. You have to figure out what your natural abilities are, and work hard in those areas.

If you practiced basketball for 10,000 hours then you would be fucking awesome, regardless of having a contract. The right things don't exist... or have we already forgotten the whole "do what you love" concept?

You wouldn't be "fucking awesome at basketball, even after 10000 hours of practice if you were crippled, pushing 90, blind or disadvantaged in a number of other ways. It's not an easy truth to accept, but the playing field is not level and while the human will is capable of amazing feats, there are limits.

Re: How To Be Fucking Awesome

#63

Post by justindz »

tdavis wrote: post #30
raganwald wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

those are reasons not to upmod it, but I thought the flag was for spam. do I misunderstand? am I to flag everything I consider a waste of time??

I flag anything that makes me think, "I could have spent those X minutes/seconds of my life reading something worthwhile." This screams of a plug for Gladwell's book, which may well be worth reading, but doesn't really offer anything interesting beyond "Bill Gates spent lots of hours programming and made a successful software company so practice a lot." Well, yeah, duh.

Your summary didn't match with what I read in the NYTimes article. The point seemed to be that people have advantages in certain endeavors that are not attributable to their skill or talent. Bill Gates is a offered as a case of someone who had the advantage of privileged access to and time on computing systems (which is not a knock on his genius). Another case cited has to do with age cutoffs for Canadian youth hockey leagues. Basically, anyone born right before the cutoff tends to be the older, bigger, stronger kid in that bracket and this advantage increases over time. They practice, yes, but they also have a significant advantage stemming from a factor totally outside of their influence. The other point being that you can analyze these factors and reduce that influence, supposing you wanted to do that.

I think your assessment of what the book offers is actually more of an assessment of what Giles zeroed in on. I'm not defending the book--I have no interested since the concept can be summed up in a twitter post--but thought I'd point out that I think there's a different thesis at work.

Re: How To Be Fucking Awesome

#64

Post by mdakin »

aneesh wrote: post #35
migpwr wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you practiced basketball for 10,000 hours then you would be fucking awesome, regardless of having a contract. The right things don't exist... or have we already forgotten the whole "do what you love" concept?

Loving what you do is necessary, but not sufficient. What you do should be at the intersection of what you love and what you're good at.

How do you know you're good at something a priori without spending the 10,000 hours to find out empirically?

Re: How To Be Fucking Awesome

#65

Post by unalone »

justindz wrote: post #63
tdavis wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I flag anything that makes me think, "I could have spent those X minutes/seconds of my life reading something worthwhile." This screams of a plug for Gladwell's book, which may well be worth reading, but doesn't really offer anything interesting beyond "Bill Gates spent lots of hours programming and made a successful software company so practice a lot." Well, yeah, duh.

Your summary didn't match with what I read in the NYTimes article. The point seemed to be that people have advantages in certain endeavors that are not attributable to their skill or talent. Bill Gates is a offered as a case of someone who had the advantage of privileged access to and time on computing systems (which is not a knock on his genius). Another case cited has to do with age cutoffs for Canadian youth hocke…

I have no interested since the concept can be summed up in a twitter post

You can summarize anything in a Twitter post: any concept, no matter how complex. Gladwell's advantage is that he tells really fascinating stories that explore his ideas in a real-world context.

I think that TDavis was trying to say was what I wanted to say, but he said it more concisely: this post wasn't really saying anything interesting. It was essentially saying "If you want to be fucking awesome, practice a lot." There wasn't very much more quantitative than that.

Re: How To Be Fucking Awesome

#66

Post by cpr »

david927 wrote: post #47

Wait, wait, wait. Bill Gates didn't program ANYTHING (at least not anything of note). He bought DOS, which made his fortune, and it was his connections through his mother which helped him in the deal with IBM. You /can/ be awesome with practice. But Bill Gates isn't an example. (And, yes, I know he wrote an early Basic interpreter, but he was also considered a mediocre programmer by many who knew him.)

Sorry, he's not a mediocre programmer. I knew him in college and he was darned good. We took the same grad CS courses as undergrads together, and he did well.

Re: How To Be Fucking Awesome

#67

Post by dmoney »

If you believe it takes 10,000 hours to become Fucking Awesome, it will take 10,000 hours to become Fucking Awesome. Of course it must take many hours of practice at a given activity, but 10,000 is just a number (and Fucking Awesome is vaguely defined).

Re: How To Be Fucking Awesome

#68

Post by giles_bowkett »

beaudeal wrote: post #14

I found this really interesting, because we covered this exact topic in a psychology course that I took while in university, and I think that it is often mis-quoted / mis-used. The conclusion that was drawn from scientific research was that the vast majority of experts all shared a common trait - they all had at least 10,000 hours of deliberate practice (not that anyone who practiced for 10,000 hours would definitely…

"They also noted that some fields of expertise (such as the NBA) have built-in physical constraints (ex: height) which must be considered."

Mugsy Bogues.

Re: How To Be Fucking Awesome

#69

Post by giles_bowkett »

raganwald wrote: post #26
unalone wrote: post #11

Flagged: it's a fun little post, but it's repeating the key claim that Gladwell made in his new book, which appears here in 3 other top-page stories right now, and it's not adding anything new other than the title.

those are reasons not to upmod it, but I thought the flag was for spam. do I misunderstand? am I to flag everything I consider a waste of time??

this is why these sites are doomed, dude. any site built on this model of news dissemination is doomed. putting out a flag button makes your site vulnerable to the tragedy of the commons. it's in everybody's group interest to only flag spam, but it's in everybody's personal interest to flag anything they don't want to see again. these sites are so intrinsically vulnerable to tragedies of the commons that we might as well call them sheep pastures.

they make the same mistake here that everybody else makes with tagging. if you look at the research on tagging, the big tagging success story was delicious - which leveraged SELF-INTEREST in its tagging system and produced a useful public resource as an emergent byproduct. this is not coincidence! read James Surowiecki. seriously. economics 101 for social software.

leveraging independent self-interest is THE key factor which differentiates the wisdom of crowds from the stupidity of groupthink. "the wisdom of crowds" is really just a reiteration of adam smith's invisible hand. to create an invisible hand effect, you must leverage independent self-interest within a shared context where independent self-interested actions are visible to other independent self-interested agents.

every tagging system that fails to leverage self-interest fails to capture that. you can't just sprinkle magic web 2.0 fairy dust on something and go "Tagging!" if you want delicious results, you have to find out what made delicious work and emulate that. what made delicious work was a fundamental principle of economics. the reason so many sites have useless tags is that their makers are ignoring this fundamental principle. it's cargo cult site design.

similarly, this flagging nonsense flat-out ignores another basic fundamental of economics. what makes it even more insane is that Paul Graham already explained in one of his first blog posts about Bayesian filtering exactly why spam filters should be tuned to an individual's preferences and not to a group's. if you had a bunch of individually-tuned spam filters, you could find a way to leverage that. since you have a group-tuned spam filter, you have nothing but a tragedy of the commons magnet.

anyway, just ranting about why Hacker News should hurry up and cease to exist already.

edit: just for the record I'm responding to Reg's comment. I don't know if that's clear from the UI. it is a non sequitur rant, but it's not a complete non sequitur rant.

Re: How To Be Fucking Awesome

#70

Post by giles_bowkett »

aneesh wrote: post #44
beaudeal wrote: post #14

I found this really interesting, because we covered this exact topic in a psychology course that I took while in university, and I think that it is often mis-quoted / mis-used. The conclusion that was drawn from scientific research was that the vast majority of experts all shared a common trait - they all had at least 10,000 hours of deliberate practice (not that anyone who practiced for 10,000 hours would definitely…

In short, practice is necessary but not sufficient for awesomeness. In particular, this implies: "If you have not practiced, then you are not awesome." So to be awesome at X, you need: 1) some natural talent for X, varies based on the field 2) a love for X that will allow you to practice for 10,000 hours

"1) some natural talent for X, varies based on the field"

No. The trend in the research is that "natural talent" is a MYTH. It does not exist.

Agree or disagree, I don't care, but as a summary of my post, your comment is inaccurate.

Post reply on HN