Genius does what it must. Talent does what it can. You do what you're told. Now get back to work.
Why cant Talent also do what it must?
Don't Become the Machine
21–30 of 157 posts
Re: Don't Become the Machine
#22Often there is a bell shaped curve where productivity peeks at a point and bigger efforts after that make you actually less productive overall.
In my personal experience most projects are a marathon not a sprint.
Always sleep the 8-9 hours necessary to feel full-rested.
I'm most productive in the morning so I try to work every day during mornings but since in the afternoon I'm a lot less productive I've decided I can allocate that time to entertainment and social activities.
My entertainment and social activity tend also to be along learning new things.
Re: Don't Become the Machine
#23The very basic (but incorrect) assumption that the “grind never stops” people rely on is
more hours == more productivity
It’s not. If you’re sleep deprived you’ll produce shit, which you’ll probably have to redo later. Sleep properly, produce more in less hours.
But hey, at least your colleagues think you’re busy because you’re last to leave redoing your shitty work!
Edit: read The Brain at Rest by Jebelli, don’t work yourself to death
Re: Don't Become the Machine
#24It seems so silly to say but I too have a dream of not wanting to work. Then I can just exist. I came across this YT video about enjoying boredom. It slows down time and you do things you really want to do. I'm currently the type of person that is always plugged into noise (music, podcast, YT). It is rare that I sit in silence. But yeah I'm hoping I can save, exit working, I'll still be making stuff that I enjoy at a…
Have you ever tried meditation? Does a great job scratching that ‘boredom’ itch…
Re: Don't Become the Machine
#25This is something that hit me during my master thesis the first time: I was entirely free to choose my work time, work mode. Since the prof was very hands-off too, only the result after 6 months mattered. That was quite the weird time. But it taught me some pieces about work-life balance and choosing what is 'enough work', as well as giving your brain time off, or time on something else to work through more complex topics and to recharge.
This is also why I honestly enjoy being a salaried employee. My employer buys 40 hours a week from me. Right, some weeks it's 50 and the next week only 30. Some weeks need a machine just executing, some weeks need more careful thought.
I could optimize it for more monetary output, but at the moment it is a predictable, usually not-painful thing with decent monetary output for personally more interesting subjects. I've found appreciation of this.
Re: Don't Become the Machine
#26The most important thing is not to have a purpose. Machines will always outdo you in optimizing for a goal function. Don't follow rules and if you really need to, make your own and never tell them to anyone. Keep people guessing and change your mind often. Never ask opinions. They are useless and if you never ask people think you know better. What you know you think and feel are not what you think and feel but dead r…
You don't seem to realize that you are undermining what you have written by sharing it with us here. That gives me hope for you. Of course, you can counter my objection by leaving it open in retrospect whether the text was meant seriously or not. Mind ninja! Always one step ahead! In any case, you won't be able to live a good life as a living gradient in a game-theoretical hell, denying your own goal orientation but strangely still interacting strategically with the world.
Re: Don't Become the Machine
#27It seems so silly to say but I too have a dream of not wanting to work. Then I can just exist. I came across this YT video about enjoying boredom. It slows down time and you do things you really want to do. I'm currently the type of person that is always plugged into noise (music, podcast, YT). It is rare that I sit in silence. But yeah I'm hoping I can save, exit working, I'll still be making stuff that I enjoy at a…
Have you ever tried meditation? Does a great job scratching that ‘boredom’ itch…
I'm trying to. I don't know how you know it's working. Maybe, sometimes I do feel present like I am in this building, this town right now.
It is funny, I bought an old phone of mine from the 2010s, I had a different mindset back then (try to make a shit ton of money through ads on a website). That did not happen but I had this ambition/tried to make a lot of dumb apps. I'm trying to get back to that mental state as now I can make like anything, back then I didn't even know how to generate a CSR like come on you amateur!
I use the phone as a grounding tool for meditation/try to go back in time what I was thinking back then. I also loaded it with old cloud photos from that time. It doesn't have internet.
Oh yeah, what does work for grounding you to reality is when you lose internet. Then you're grounded in reality, bored. What do I do with myself now.
Re: Don't Become the Machine
#28echoing this sentiment. I really do believe at some level there is strength/wisdom in being able to step away from a problem and return to it from a new perspective despite of what narratives are being pushed online by hustle
Re: Don't Become the Machine
#29I recommend reading the Happiness Files, by Arthur Brooks.
It contain great advice, including on how to handle your professional life. But even more importantly, I feel the world would be a better place if more people followed its advice. A world full of happy people would be a world that runs far better.
Re: Don't Become the Machine
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it’s exactly like going from paper spreadsheet to Excel in some very important aspects of engineering (but not all). I really encourage you to update your priors since capabilities are very different than even 6 months ago.
I like to think I'm very much abreast of the bleeding edge because I feel this anxiety myself. At this point I can't code without LLMs because I just notice things that I could hand off to LLMs and they will do it faster and there's no reason for me to do it myself (although I still could). But the overall gain in efficiency is still a low single digit speedup. It's not a multi-OOM speedup as if e.g. doing 1000 long…
For me the speed-up has not been in doing things I was already an expert at doing quickly with high quality. It has been in skipping the learning curve for adjacent things.