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Increasing your practice surface area

indiehackers.com

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Re: Increasing your practice surface area

#71

Post by schwartzworld »

simianparrot wrote: post #63
ChanningAllen wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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" etho…

Came here to write this. To add to that, the book "The Art of Learning" is a great example of this; Joshua Waitzkin tells how his approach to learning saw him reach the pinnacle of both Chess and Tai Chi. From the outside it might just seem like a "genius" who just so happened to have innate talents for both of these highly disparate forms of competition, but his story paints a different picture. My own approach to l…

ADHD and autodidactism seem to go hand in hand.

Re: Increasing your practice surface area

#72

Post by beacon294 »

simianparrot wrote: post #63
ChanningAllen wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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" etho…

Came here to write this. To add to that, the book "The Art of Learning" is a great example of this; Joshua Waitzkin tells how his approach to learning saw him reach the pinnacle of both Chess and Tai Chi. From the outside it might just seem like a "genius" who just so happened to have innate talents for both of these highly disparate forms of competition, but his story paints a different picture. My own approach to l…

What goes on in your head when you attempt to increase your mastery? What is your own loop from your perspective? What emotions are you feeling? Thank you.

Re: Increasing your practice surface area

#73

Post by radiator »

simianparrot wrote: post #63
ChanningAllen wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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" etho…

Came here to write this. To add to that, the book "The Art of Learning" is a great example of this; Joshua Waitzkin tells how his approach to learning saw him reach the pinnacle of both Chess and Tai Chi. From the outside it might just seem like a "genius" who just so happened to have innate talents for both of these highly disparate forms of competition, but his story paints a different picture. My own approach to l…

> There is no "genetic" or inherited talent here

No, genetics is a crucial requirement. Not everyone can do those things.

Re: Increasing your practice surface area

#74

Post by schwartzworld »

egypturnash wrote: post #22
mikestorrent wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to use the word "grift", but it really seems like we're scraping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to new ideas for products a lot of the time. Go and read this month's HN "Who is hiring" thread for an example. It's all either fintech crypto crap that never seems to come to fruition for anything normal people want to use, weird microloans, and products for extremely small niches like using AI to hel…

Is it better or worse than when the greatest minds of our generation were lost to increasing user engagement by any means necessary?

This is a great way of describing it. I recently read an interview with Herbie Hancock where he basically blamed “YouTube rabbit holes” for his not producing a new album in 15 years.

Re: Increasing your practice surface area

#75

Post by philipallstar »

luckyandroid wrote: post #68
philipallstar wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The real advice is to learn to accept yourself as you are, whether you're an obsessive or not. Accepting yourself as you are is the opposite of practicing to get better at something.

I see what you're getting at, but I'd disagree. I think accepting who you are also comes with commitment to pursue the things you're interested in, because non-acceptance would be "ignoring this part of me I wanted to pursue but didn't think I should".

Pursuing interest isn't the same as practicing things to get better at them. Things can be superficially interesting, and it takes an understanding that self not being perfect is totally fine to know that the process of change is not necessarily interesting, but it has rewards.

Re: Increasing your practice surface area

#76

Post by vunderba »

simianparrot wrote: post #63
ChanningAllen wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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" etho…

Came here to write this. To add to that, the book "The Art of Learning" is a great example of this; Joshua Waitzkin tells how his approach to learning saw him reach the pinnacle of both Chess and Tai Chi. From the outside it might just seem like a "genius" who just so happened to have innate talents for both of these highly disparate forms of competition, but his story paints a different picture. My own approach to l…

As someone who also juggles (literally and figuratively) a dozen hobbies, I call this learning by "teetering on the edge". It's not just about being curious. It's about constantly figuring out unorthodox ways of challenging the same skill.

You want to force yourself to the very precipice of uncomfortableness. This is an ongoing process since our brains are designed to ruthlessly optimize any skill that you are learning.

Let me give an actual specific example. When I was a teenager I became interested in learning the piano. I quickly found myself plateauing where sheet reading was concerned. In an effort to scale the difficulty up, I used to take the organ sheet music from our local church and try to play it on the fly on a piano. The challenge? There is an extra bottom staff representing the notes to be played on the pedals - thus you had to transpose that bottom staff up while you were playing and merge them together in a pianistic manner.

Another example? I used to play a LOT of Tetris for the NES. As soon as I could feel my internal system optimizing - I wrote a tiny little program that would use text-to-speech to read out random arithmetic problems that I would try to answer while playing. I remember the first time I tried this it felt like somebody had poured miracle-gro on the dendritic trees within my mind.

Re: Increasing your practice surface area

#77

Post by simianparrot »

schwartzworld wrote: post #71
simianparrot wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Came here to write this. To add to that, the book "The Art of Learning" is a great example of this; Joshua Waitzkin tells how his approach to learning saw him reach the pinnacle of both Chess and Tai Chi. From the outside it might just seem like a "genius" who just so happened to have innate talents for both of these highly disparate forms of competition, but his story paints a different picture. My own approach to l…

ADHD and autodidactism seem to go hand in hand.

I think that’s down to two things: Adaptability and survivorship bias. If you have ADHD (and mine was never medicated nor have I bothered to get a re-evaluation as an adult; they called it “slightly hyperactive” when I was a kid, no idea if I would still be considered to have ADHD today) then most education isn’t effective and so most likely you either adapt to autodidact or you fail.

Re: Increasing your practice surface area

#78

Post by simianparrot »

radiator wrote: post #73
simianparrot wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Came here to write this. To add to that, the book "The Art of Learning" is a great example of this; Joshua Waitzkin tells how his approach to learning saw him reach the pinnacle of both Chess and Tai Chi. From the outside it might just seem like a "genius" who just so happened to have innate talents for both of these highly disparate forms of competition, but his story paints a different picture. My own approach to l…

> There is no "genetic" or inherited talent here No, genetics is a crucial requirement. Not everyone can do those things.

Ok let me restate the point more clearly: Of course there's _some_ genetics in play; if I was born without arms, a handstand would be very hard -- depending on factors, _maybe_ possible with robotic limbs but doubtful.

My point was, there's nothing genetic about my ability to teach myself the skills. In fact in many cases -- including being born with asthma -- I had to work around weaknesses many of my peers didn't have. I've always had weak balance, so it took me much longer to get used to acrobatics to build up to handstands than my friends. I have innate low blood pressure which means I more easily get dizzy when I handstand if I'm not very particular about how I breathe. In most things, I'm slower to learn them, but I'm generally better at perseverance and structured learning.

Re: Increasing your practice surface area

#79

Post by listenfaster »

Nice succinct read outlining something I think a lot of people are aware of, but don’t often describe. It’s my first time reading Indie Hacker, and I think there’s nice balance of quality, depth, and brevity that you’re trying to strike?

I recently watched a YouTube on cultural communication pathways, and there was a comparison of “engineered communication” being a top down approach, as opposed to a gardening approach to communication being a bottoms up approach; one being predictable with measurable outcomes, and the other being organic and unpredictable. In gardening we plant seeds, help them germinate, watch them grow. A lot of the articles on Indie hackers seem to be planting seeds, which I appreciate. I wish HN would see value in a range of articles, and not skew to preferring engineered rigid predictability. Pardon the overstatement but you get my drift.

Re: Increasing your practice surface area

#80

Post by vunderba »

A lot of the article goes into trying to "multitask" your practice - building it into some minimal viable practice routine.

I would urge caution around this - in fact - deliberate practice is probably worth 10 times this. There's a reason people tend to plateau early in their efforts to master something. Once your brain figures out how to put the skill on autopilot you're going to find your rate of improvement significantly slower.

It's not just about the time you put in - it's about the type of practice you put in.

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