Something small, every day (2013) | Hacker News Reader

Something small, every day (2013)

austinkleon.com

126 pointswallflower14 comments

A corollary to this I include in my life is "Do your worst." I get stuck a lot creatively: this feature I'm building is too hard, this design in my head is too vague, my article idea sucks, my video isn't going to make sense, etc. What helps me break through that, is just put the crappiest version out on the page. No edits. Radical self-acceptance of whatever I put on the screen. Often the whole thing gets a huge refactor. Yesterday's architecture document I was working on started this way and I ended up throwing the entire first version out. But that crappy first version totally unblocked me to get something I'm now proud of.

I completely agree. Another heuristic which has helped me in research (and I owe to my supervisor) is to break the problem down to the simplest set of elements which mimic the problem or mechanism or physics of whatever needs to be solved. This helps me stop panicking.

I saw one HNer refer to this as a "vomit draft".

One of the best phrases I've ever heard: "Shitty First Draft":

https://wrd.as.uky.edu/sites/default/files/1-Shitty%20First%...

I like this quote from Ira Glass:

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, and I really wish somebody had told this to me.

All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But it's like there is this gap. For the first couple years that you're making stuff, what you're making isn't so good. It’s not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not that good.

But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you're making is kind of a disappointment to you. A lot of people never get past that phase. They quit.

Everybody I know who does interesting, creative work they went through years where they had really good taste and they could tell that what they were making wasn't as good as they wanted it to be. They knew it fell short. Everybody goes through that.

And if you are just starting out or if you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month you know you're going to finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you're going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you're making will be as good as your ambitions.

I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It takes awhile. It’s gonna take you a while. It’s normal to take a while. You just have to fight your way through that.

—Ira Glass

Cognitive techniques to fight procrastination and to get control of your life and work are important. But if your problems are deeply emotional or spiritual or physical, the will-power will only get you so far.

My therapist says that will-power and small good decisions are like the starter motor. You can ignite it with will, with habits, schedules and what not. But your emotional life, and your deeper personality and your talent is your real engine and your fuel. You need to have that in working order, serviced regularly and filled up with energy. Or the battery of will will drain out fast.

> You need to have that in working order, serviced regularly and filled up with energy.

How do you do this?

I'll venture that it's "the work" that's at the center of transformation, spirituality, self-actualization. Pick your modality: therapy, AA, fitness, yoga, meditation, many others.. anything that leads you to truth, awareness, empowerment, accountability.

You can find references to this in recovery, relationships ("Looking for [..], someone who's done the work..."), etc.

I also think about it as emotional gas tank. If that’s empty you can get some improvements with willpower but there is the risk of draining the gas tank even more in the process. It’s important to find something that really feeds your soul.

For me the problems is less of "how do I find the time for this" and more of "holy crap I have so much time yet so many things to do how do i optimize the in order in which to do them / decide which to do today / decide which will be better long term vs short term / pick out ones that are futile and should be let go".

The other problem I have in all sorts of things I do in life is getting compeltley halted, often at the beginning of a task,because of something small. Working on something hand on? Well shit, I dont have one specific tool I need. Well it will be a few days before I can have it shipped. Backlog it. Working on learning a new SDK? Oops the docs are 4 years out of date and theres no one in the IRC channel that cam get back to me in a timely manner. Backlog it. Bought a cool piece of retro equipment but csnt find any info about how it works on the internet, even after engaging on various forums? Backlog it. Trying to learn something but dont have the prerequisite knowledge? Backlog it.

All of those examples are real and have happened recently and combined with what I mentioned in the first paragraph ultimately just end up with men getting nothing done everyday, despite having loads of time.

I really like this Jacob Riis quote that the NBA Spurs have posted in the locker room:

"When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before."

I've published several scientific translations and my goal is basically one page of the original a day. Or if it has small text and multiple columns, one column might be a better choice. One page a day is manageable. Just doing a bit every day makes this seem much more tractable.

Here's probably the most popular one (by downloads) that I've translated:

https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/handle/2152/76302

Probably the largest things I've translated were about half of a Russian dissertation (76 pages) and a chapter of a German dissertation (50 pages). Either would have seemed beyond my capabilities if I hadn't taken them one page at a time.

Of course, there's more to translation than doing one page a day. I do one page a day for the rough draft. Editing a translation can take time (particularly to make the terminology consistent as automated translation tools don't always do that) and maybe I should also have a daily quota for that too.

Pro-tip: If you use exactly the same translated title as most people, Google Scholar will think that your translation is the one other people are citing when they use the translated title:

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=15045678099109134...

Trollope used to religiously follow a similar motto: "Nulla dies sine linea" - not a day without a line.

A well written reminder! The Slight Edge is a worthwhile read for those really looking to leverage this approach at scale over time.

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