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Permission to Suck

kadavy.net

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Re: Permission to Suck

#31

Post by rhizome »

irollboozers wrote: post #15
kadavy wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good points. Part of being okay with sucking is that if you're okay with sucking – you're more likely to be okay with shipping. The surprising thing I've found about being okay about sucking at writing is that often the "barf drafts" (as I call them) that seem god-awful when I'm actually writing them, turn out being pretty darn good when I revisit them.

Is it possible to be good at sucking? Or, is there anyone who is the best at it, and either in frequency or strength of sucking (e.g. do you want to suck tremendously hard once or suck very little very often)?

The better you get at being a beginner, the less you judge things as being sucky or not. It's the "sucks" that constitutes jumping to a conclusion.

Re: Permission to Suck

#32

Post by rhizome »

criswell wrote: post #12
ebiester wrote: post #9

This is where my startup failed -- We made the decision to work in a new technology (then another!) but I was afraid of writing code I was less than proud of. I then proceeded to learn what I could of best practices, spending far too long experimenting with the language and far too little actually doing. In the end, we ended up with two half-baked infrastructures in two different languages and reached the trough of d…

I suffer from this as well. It's called Analysis Paralysis. Now, I just need to figure out the best way to stop it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analysis_paralysis

"Start anywhere." --John Cage

Re: Permission to Suck

#33

Post by UnoriginalGuy »

Do you know what I like about HNs compared to other sites (e.g. Reddit, /., etc)?

It is constructive. There are a bunch of people who are interested in self improvement, trying things, failing, and then picking themselves up and trying again.

That's rare. You don't find that in many communities. Most of the time it is just negativity and "you can't," "you shouldn't," "here are all the flaws," etc.

Hopefully this grouping of people and ideas will help all of us in some way, they do say that it is the people you surround yourself with...

Re: Permission to Suck

#34

Post by levesque »

UnoriginalGuy wrote: post #33

Do you know what I like about HNs compared to other sites (e.g. Reddit, /., etc)? It is constructive. There are a bunch of people who are interested in self improvement, trying things, failing, and then picking themselves up and trying again. That's rare. You don't find that in many communities. Most of the time it is just negativity and "you can't," "you shouldn't," "here are all the flaws," etc. Hopefully this grou…

Well reddit is also a lot of this when you dig in the smaller communities. Sure, if you stay on r/AdviceAnimals you are bound to be disappointed ;)

Re: Permission to Suck

#35

Post by UnoriginalGuy »

levesque wrote: post #34
UnoriginalGuy wrote: post #33

Do you know what I like about HNs compared to other sites (e.g. Reddit, /., etc)? It is constructive. There are a bunch of people who are interested in self improvement, trying things, failing, and then picking themselves up and trying again. That's rare. You don't find that in many communities. Most of the time it is just negativity and "you can't," "you shouldn't," "here are all the flaws," etc. Hopefully this grou…

Well reddit is also a lot of this when you dig in the smaller communities. Sure, if you stay on r/AdviceAnimals you are bound to be disappointed ;)

There are tons of cool communities but none that I've found yet about starting a small business or similar. If you know of any along the same themes as HN then I'd love to join them.

Re: Permission to Suck

#36

Post by coroxout »

UnoriginalGuy wrote: post #33

Do you know what I like about HNs compared to other sites (e.g. Reddit, /., etc)? It is constructive. There are a bunch of people who are interested in self improvement, trying things, failing, and then picking themselves up and trying again. That's rare. You don't find that in many communities. Most of the time it is just negativity and "you can't," "you shouldn't," "here are all the flaws," etc. Hopefully this grou…

Agreed.

I recently saw a thread on Slashdot (which I hardly ever read these days) started by someone who'd got a bit burnt out and whose skills were by his own admission out of date, asking how to get himself back into the game. It got a lot of replies saying "staying on top of the game is your job, which you are clearly terrible at: give up now" and no actual advice. Which made me realise just how (generally) positive, inspiring and helpful HN's occasional burnout threads are.

Re: Permission to Suck

#37

Post by Natsu »

lnanek2 wrote: post #10
batgaijin wrote: post #3

No! Meditation is not about thinking about nothing! It's about focusing on your breath. Think only about breathing. That sounds boring but manageable. 'Thinking about nothing' seems impossible and stupid at the same time; people who do the disservice of saying that should be slapped. The point of meditation is to learn how to control your thoughts, specifically in being able to realize that your are choosing your cur…

Agreed. That's how I was trained, at least. Although the end goal is to quiet your mind and gain more control over it, to think of one thing instead of a bunch of crabs on a string scuttling everywhere. So you could sort of sum of the end goal of a quiet mind as "think of nothing" but the one current thing...I'd definitely prefer other wording.

If you imagine your thoughts as a directed graph of associations, it's clear that the only way to stay in one place is with a thought that links back to itself. Otherwise, you'll go off along some tangent and end up elsewhere.

Re: Permission to Suck

#39

Post by tspike »

UnoriginalGuy wrote: post #35
levesque wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well reddit is also a lot of this when you dig in the smaller communities. Sure, if you stay on r/AdviceAnimals you are bound to be disappointed ;)

There are tons of cool communities but none that I've found yet about starting a small business or similar. If you know of any along the same themes as HN then I'd love to join them.

/r/startups /r/Entrepreneur /r/smallbusiness

... of course, you'll find plenty of reposts from HN.

Re: Permission to Suck

#40

Post by biscarch »

kadavy wrote: post #8
minikites wrote: post #7

I found this out on my own in some sense, but I still have trouble putting it into practice. I was taking guitar lessons and I would always be afraid to bring in side tunes I had been working on because I thought they were terrible (and they are) but it's tough to give yourself permission to suck when doing nothing hurts a lot less.

I've been playing guitar for 13 years, and I still am not very good. A breakthrough for me though, was when I stopped obsessing over getting every note right, and instead focused on strumming the right chords. Then, I found playing much more enjoyable, and it was easier to play whole songs and sing. Once I got that down, I was able to move on to more complex things. Like many things, it helps to embrace your suckage…

Randomly connected, but the game Rocksmith takes this approach. It'll give you points if you get the strumming correct, but are fretting 2/5 notes correctly. There's a huge focus on "get as much as you can right now, but we're going to keep throwing this at you until you get it right."
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