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Comment by aresant | Hacker News Reader

Just out of User Interface curiosity how many other people immediately scrolled down to the six bullet points and ignored the rest?

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Flow:

1. While the page is loading, look at the utm_source crap in the URL and wonder why the submitter couldn't be bothered to clean that up.

2. Read the first sentence and identify this as a writer of the "I should start with a personal anecdote to make people like me" school of writing (a US thing? not sure), and start skimming for the actual content.

3. Slow down when the "Anders Ericsson" anchor appears, and wait for the mandatory "10,000 hours" reference.

4. Skim the six points, and realize that there's nothing new here -- you've read the same article before, only written by someone else.

(yeah, yeah, I'll log off now.)

Flow:

1. Decide to read comments before the article.

2. Read your comment.

3. Decide I don't need to read this again.

4. Decide to leave a thank you before going elsewhere.

Thank you for your informative summary.

Flow:

1. Read article, throw up.

2. Read comments, then realize that the comments made this substandard post worthwhile.

3. Upvote many comments.

4. Return to regularly scheduled programming.

Thanks for pointing out the comments. I was about to dismiss the article as well but there are some great contrarian comments as you pointed out. My favorites:

-Innate talent > Practice. Painful to admit, but better if you can own up to your weaknesses early on and focus things you are better at.

-Extensive practice only applies to single tasks, not complex activities such as business which requires being good at multiple disciplines plus coordinating and understanding the interaction between those disciplines

Yeah, who upvoted this article? Downvote me but jesus, there is nothing new in this post. And it's a list post. Does Harvard auto-get you front page karma?

What's HN etiquette about asking people to critique posts in contexts like this? I've got some posts I'm not sure about, but don't know if I should submit it to HN through the normal channels.

I wonder, on a site like this, what measurement they're looking for - time spent on article, etc? Maybe virality of the post to FB / linked in buttons?

I'd love to run a split-test of all bullets no header vs. current format - would be informative, maybe will try in one of my own blog posts . . .

Sure did. The problem with that type of post is they can often be a bunch of filler with a handful of "stating the obvious" bulletpoints. Heading straight for the bullet points lets you filter more quickly either way.

I had to click past the interstitial first, but besides that, spot on.

I did, when i read the heading it said six keys, i automatically scrolled to the six keys, then realized this is just like the books i read, "outliers" and "talent is overrated". I then looked at the links at the bottom and realized that there were two new books on the same topic that came out in 2010, how many more do they need to make to tell us the same thing.

Yep. Mainly because I wanted to know if I was going to have to concentrate on reading the article to disect the 6 points. Found that they were actually listed, read them, and left.

Yep.

The Key to Being Excellent at Skimming has an arrow pointing down.

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