Mental processes of chess masters revealed how people become experts (2016) [pdf]

Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/08/the-dan-p...

I think you're talking about two different things here. There are lots of musicians and artists and writers who have mastered their craft but have no amount of creativity. The opposite is also true. There are quite a few writers and musicians and artists who are rather poor from a technical perspective, but they manage to use what they have to create enduring pieces of art. Peanuts would be a great example for art. Snow Crash for writing.

Technical skill is one thing, but the ability to create an emotionally engaging piece of art is something else. Deliberate practice can only help with the former. As for the latter, John Cleese has an interesting perspective seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb5oIIPO62g

I'll try to keep this light hearted - so as a guitarist, one learns the rules, and practices them, then grows and grows and grows. Eventually, one learns how to break a rule, but over time, bend it into something that resembles an existing rule or otherwise still interests an audience, and create rules whereby none existed before. Sometimes minor mistakes or oddities become wholesale innovations in the right hands (ex: Jimi Hendrix, Tom Morello) but are very much a byproduct of deliberate, routine, intense attention and practice.

My experience is that music performance has an incredible power to both be-shaped-by-and-reciprocally-shape the human brain. The inherent elasticity and plasticity cross cultures. Generations. One of the most consistent observational effects though is that practice makes better in most cases.

I'm so impressed with their UI. You can watch games in real time and there's a dashboard showing you your Ping + Server Processing Time per Move (usually 2ms).

It's been ~5 years since I read it, so I can't remember too many specifics. I was ~6 months into starting to learn to program and I think I would have probably given up if I hadn't read Waitzkin's book. He talks about how certain people tend to give on something if they struggle in order to protect their intelligence, to keep from feeling stupid or like a failure. It may be common sense but it's something that really clicked with me as I realized that it was something that I had done my whole life up until that point.

I kept going and eventually made a career transition into engineering. But something else happened that was actually much more important, and that was that I developed a much deeper understanding of and appreciation for the whole learning process. I was so tuned in to the whole thing that I would have these insights where I would I could pinpoint almost all of the things he talks about in the book in my personal experience. Years later, I’m able to make parallels in my present experience to all the things I experienced then, which in many cases provides some encouragement because I know I’m on the right path.

Big takeaways for myself are the differences in what it takes to be "good", "great", and "among the best"

Also, once you become a master at something, then your opponents are more or less equally matched to you, and the final winner comes down to psychology

And, don't stick to one thing for too long if you don't want to. Put it down when you're finished, and begin mastering something else that's more fun / interesting.

Are you sure about that? I thought it was more solving the problem, then solving it again more efficiently / differently in the same environment. Like using recursion the second time around, not changing languages.

"Don't code your CSS from scratch, use Bootstrap or similar. Don't create an auth system, use the one that comes with your framework."

Definitely true for productivity, but a lot to be gained in experience by knowing how to roll your own.

Main point is the 10,000 hour rule comes from Ericcson's study that the best violinists in the world practice about 7,000 hours by the time they are 18. They average between 3-4 hours a day. This last point is really interesting because the ceiling for what qualified as good practice consistently was no more than 4 hours. So if you do 4 hours of top notch practice / studying, it would seem like no matter your field you are done for the day.

Continuing on, the 10,000 hour rule was stupidly expanded by 3,000 hours just to make it easier to remember, and additionally that number is COMPLETELY ARBITRARY anyway.

The only reason violinists practice that much is because everyone else is competing that hard. Old, well defined fields like Violin or say Chess have pretty clearly defined ways on how you get better, meaning the "secrets" are somewhat known. Therefore the only way to get better is via practice, which of course everyone does, which drives up these insane numbers.

In other fields which are much newer and far less defined, expertise is up for grabs and there are no well-defined broadly agreed on ways to get better. If you do 800 hours of the "right" practice you can be far ahead of anyone else, since no one really knows what's right.

That being said, Ericcson's research still shows lots of correlation before time and skill, so alas no easy shortcuts.

EDIT: between time and skill