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Increasing your practice surface area

indiehackers.com

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Re: Increasing your practice surface area

#31

Post by jvanderbot »

JackFr wrote: post #26

> The difference between being good and being great isn’t talent or formal training, but the invisible practice that happens when you're just living life. Pure nonsense. Necessary != sufficient, and honestly neither are demonstrated in the anecdotes.

Two things.

It's possible to be great at something simply by practicing, assuming normal capabilities. But great here just means "better than virtually everyone". Being mediocre among people who practice regularly it makes you immediately better than basically everyone who has done it once or twice. By most definitions that's "great".

Median daily StarCraft ranked player? You're great at StarCraft.

Second, if you start young enough, you get the compounding effects of time. You're now "pretty good among lifelong daily players in their prime". That's Olympic/ world class.

Like that guy who had kids just to make them Chess masters. He did so by making chess part of the family life, so integral it wasn't working it just was. The guy from the original post actually.

So it's tempting to say things like TFA posits, and while I'm not sure it's 100% true, it's definitely not 100% false or pure rubbish.

Re: Increasing your practice surface area

#32

Post by boerseth »

peterfirefly wrote: post #28
boerseth wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was gonna say. I did it with French some years ago and it worked like a charm. Later I became obsessed with Argentine tango. Unfortunately, I thought, "comprehensible input" won't work with dancing, especially not a couple's dance. Nevertheless, unable to dance every day due to my local scene being quite small, I instead consumed a boatload of YouTube videos during my spare time. Instructional content, performances…

Watching lots of Doom videos on Youtube helped me learn some aspects of the game surprisingly fast. I can't control Doomguy as fast and as precisely as the best Doom youtubers but I can read a situation in the game about as fast and as good as they can and often come up with the plan they eventually follow faster than they do.

I get it! Years ago my obsession was Classic Tetris, and it was common knowledge that watching skilled players at work would improve your own stacking and strategy. A lot of the pros openly admitted to watching their competition while starting out in order to get good

Re: Increasing your practice surface area

#33

Post by dzonga »

ge96 wrote: post #13

I wonder how the indie/entrepreneur space is doing nowadays. I tried to do it myself but never really got anywhere this was back in 2016. Whenever I go on sites/subreddits around this topic a lot of the posts just seem to be about generating clout/some fake revenue numbers/screenshot of earnings. It's like entrepreneurs selling to each other. I suppose nowadays it's probably around LLM wrappers, photo generation, vid…

quite sad, the space had inspirational stories. & IndieHackers brought those stories to the masses to inspire.

but later 'fast money / influencers' entered the space. It has become a mini ponzi sell a starter pack / template to wannabe indiehackers, sell a course to wannabe indiehackers.

For solo founders I guess if you wanna get all meat no bones stick to MicroConf

Re: Increasing your practice surface area

#34

Post by seaucre »

The thing that doesn't click in articles like this is the advice section afterwards. Do you think the people described thought about how to increase their practice surface area? No, they were simply /interested/. And part of the reason they were interested was because of natural talent! Do you want to know how to increase your practice surface area? Find things you're interested in.

But the reality is that many people just aren't as interested in anything as some people are interested in something. And that's okay. The real advice is to learn to accept yourself as you are, whether you're an obsessive or not.

Re: Increasing your practice surface area

#35

Post by raincole »

bitbasher wrote: post #30

This article is quite shallow. It's essentially saying, in order to excel at something it needs to become a part of you. There's some truth there, but Charles Bukowski said it much better and more succinctly with, "Don't try." [1] 1: https://poets.org/poem/so-you-want-be-writer

I couldn't disagree this poem more.

> if it's hard work just thinking about doing it,

> don't do it

If it's hard work just thinking about doing it, it's a very good sign that it's something worth doing.

(I know I shouldn't take motivating quotes literally)

Re: Increasing your practice surface area

#36

Post by myth_drannon »

mikestorrent wrote: post #20
ChanningAllen wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's doing better than ever! LLMs offer the equivalent of $500k+ in outside funding if used correctly, so there's a huge uptick in # of new bootstrapped startups. In fact we (the Indie Hackers founders) are bootstrapping a new B2B app now that Claude Code & Codex CLI (etc) are on the org chat.

I hope this is a parody post and not actually the real exhultations of an actual founder.

Well the OP is the co-founder of Indie Hackers...

Re: Increasing your practice surface area

#37

Post by adamhartenz »

raincole wrote: post #35
bitbasher wrote: post #30

This article is quite shallow. It's essentially saying, in order to excel at something it needs to become a part of you. There's some truth there, but Charles Bukowski said it much better and more succinctly with, "Don't try." [1] 1: https://poets.org/poem/so-you-want-be-writer

I couldn't disagree this poem more. > if it's hard work just thinking about doing it, > don't do it If it's hard work just thinking about doing it, it's a very good sign that it's something worth doing. (I know I shouldn't take motivating quotes literally)

I never understood why people want to work so hard on things they are not good at. On the surface it seems obvious that you should do that. But I would rather put that time into getting even better at the stuff I am already good at.

Re: Increasing your practice surface area

#38

Post by ChanningAllen »

seaucre wrote: post #34

The thing that doesn't click in articles like this is the advice section afterwards. Do you think the people described thought about how to increase their practice surface area? No, they were simply /interested/. And part of the reason they were interested was because of natural talent! Do you want to know how to increase your practice surface area? Find things you're interested in. But the reality is that many peopl…

> Do you think the people described thought about how to increase their practice surface area? No, they were simply /interested/.

In fact, many of them did think about it. Many of them designed, tested, experimented, and tweaked their approaches to their crafts endlessly throughout their lives.

It can be comforting (because it lets us off the hook) to think that masters of their craft all follow the "just do it" ethos while simply "accepting themselves as they are," but usually the opposite is true. At least at the margin.

Re: Increasing your practice surface area

#39

Post by ChanningAllen »

wiseowise wrote: post #27

This is new level of snake oil. When you're not selling your own snake oil, but trying to piggyback off of other people. Burn out speedrun 101. If you want to keep your sanity, you need to find your own passion, not try to emulate others (especially with crazy routines like the examples).

Author here. I've spent a decade drinking my own "snake oil" (the advice in this essay), and I've only now committed it to writing so that others can apply it or ignore it as they wish.

I haven't burned out. Instead, I find my work fulfilling, endlessly novel, and valuable to others.

Does this do anything to change your mental model?

Re: Increasing your practice surface area

#40

Post by ChanningAllen »

satvikpendem wrote: post #18

How is IndieHackers doing since being independent? I used to use it quite a bit but it seemed like recently it's focused more on articles, similar to Starter Story I guess, which makes a ton of money so I can't blame you for going that route, than the forum (which I can't even figure out how to get to anymore). But then again, the forum had quite a lot of promotion and spam that got boring to read after a while.

It's doing quite well. Thanks for asking. :) Good observation re the forum: folks find it novel and engaging for about a week, then get bored of the repetition. Not very monetizable for an indie team.
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