71–80 of 124 posts
I do the things I enjoy, um cause I enjoy them.
I also don't (or try not to) do the things I don't enjoy.
Nobody gave me that stunning advice. It's nature's built in reinforcement loop.
How about; "Do something you suck at (but want not to) or are afraid of. Stick with it at least until you don't suck or are no longer afraid."
Is the 10,000 hour rule even true? I know this was popularized by Gladwell's book 'Outliers' but I had heard the study referred to in the book might not be accurate. Is it that 10,000 of practice is common to experts or that there are no experts without 10,000 hours of practice?
Raising yourself into, say, the top 5-10% requires an order of magnitude less effort. It's the difference between "The fastest possible version of this real-time algorithm" and "No longer doing it by hand."
10,000 hour rule is a bit strange. I've been programming for 8 years doing so at work and at home. Working full time there are roughly 2,080 work hours in a year. 2,080 * 8 = 16,640 hours of programming. Now there is also all of that time spent programming in classes, on homework, on hobbies, and doing freelance work. That easily brings the amount of hours spent programming to 18,000. To account for all the time spen…
Just engaging in an activity for 10 000 hours does not guarantee expert performance, you need to spend those hours constantly looking for the rough edges in your performance and finding strategies to polish them off.
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs/freakonomics/pdf/D...
Given the 10,000 hour rule as generally true (at least in spirit), what's very difficult and seldom discussed is just how hard it is to get there at anything worthwhile once you're passed a certain point in life. Why? Because job. Having gone through college and taken work terms between years, I saw this first-hand: after you're done 9 to 5 for that paycheck (+food, +commuting, +exercise, +social life), good luck fin…
It's interesting you didn't mention family at all. Having kids is a huge commitment of time. I think a good take-away from your rant (plus the consideration of family) is that we need to be talking more about making time for things. Too often we talk a great deal about what can be done in a few hours a day, but when it comes to making that time, we just say, "If it's important to you, you'll make the time." We should…
Other great areas of expertise for family guys are: Cooking, music, coaching sports, outdoorsmanship, and almost anything educational (science projects are my favorite.) Get ideas by listening by to what your kids are interested in. It will help motivate them to learn and it will expose you to cool stuff you would have never thought of on your own.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know about softball, but I played baseball from the time I was 4 until I was 19 and the biggest change in youth baseball has been monitoring pitch counts for youth pitchers. If I remember correctly, Softball pitchers usually have trouble with their knees while baseball pitchers have arm trouble. I still have arm trouble and I had parents who put my safety first and did the best they could to take care of my a…
Yeah, I cut back significantly after talking to a cousin of mine who played college ball. At first I was a bit frustrated because she was really interested in pitching, as was roughly half of her team. So when you play 3 games a week for a 4 month season, if you spread it around (like you should at a young age - give everyone a chance) you have each kid throwing about 2 innings a week. (6 inning games, ~8 kids who wa…
[0]http://files.leagueathletics.com/Text/Documents/5200/27001.p...
10k hours rule is not general to a topic, and is quite specific -- 10,000 hours of a skill-based, feedback giving action in which productive practice takes place is different from, "spend 10k hours learning about history and you become a history master." And 1k hours is completely unsupported by experimentation. Why do people think they can just randomly throw nonsense at a wall and expect it to stick?
Such a poor attitude! This isn't Science magazine. The entire article -- a hypothesis anyway -- is prefaced by "words I would have wanted to hear as a child". Were you expecting him to run experiments for this piece?
This isn't Science magazine so... we can just make things up and say whatever we want, even if it's blatantly and provably untrue?
10,000 hour rule is a bit strange. I've been programming for 8 years doing so at work and at home. Working full time there are roughly 2,080 work hours in a year. 2,080 * 8 = 16,640 hours of programming. Now there is also all of that time spent programming in classes, on homework, on hobbies, and doing freelance work. That easily brings the amount of hours spent programming to 18,000. To account for all the time spen…
- not feeling like an expert is a good sign - unless you were pushing yourself for 10k hours the rule doesn't apply. depends if you were doing stuff you're already familiar with?
Given the 10,000 hour rule as generally true (at least in spirit), what's very difficult and seldom discussed is just how hard it is to get there at anything worthwhile once you're passed a certain point in life. Why? Because job. Having gone through college and taken work terms between years, I saw this first-hand: after you're done 9 to 5 for that paycheck (+food, +commuting, +exercise, +social life), good luck fin…
There are ways around the 'because job' problem. I've been reading a lot on this guys blog: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/ and he's got some pretty interesting ideas on getting off the treadmill, with both actionable advice and the lead character eating his own dogfood.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Gahhh I'm not even that old, don't scare me with this family talk. >We should be looking at ways to maximize the use of very small chunks of time. I may not be able to commit even a single hour of dedicated time per day... but I can certainly do something for a few minutes here and there throughout the day which adds up to an hour. Sounds noble in theory, but in practice there are two problems: 1) you won't be enteri…
To point number 1, I tend to think of flow as helpful but not necessary. For some tasks, I'm not really sure flow applies at all. I mean, I'm pretty damn good at tying my shoes. I do it without even thinking about it. I don't think flow was involved in learning that; it's just muscle memory. That's a trivial example of course, but there are other factors than flow which influence the effectiveness of practice. I don'…
Basically, to more familiar the subject, the less time you need to accomplish something, the more efficiently you can use scattered time. So if you want to really broaden your skillset, it is very difficult when you have a 9-5 with a long commute, a home to maintain, social obligations/family, basic needs, etc.
I suppose that might mean that if you want to make efficient use of your scattered time to perfect skills, you would have to focus on your strongest skills when you have minimal time, and improve them to perfection.
> http://www.pgbovine.net/oldpages/fourth.jpg Wow...