Do the Real Thing

Just watching someone doing the real thing is one of the most prominent strategies to avoid doing the real thing.

It is not enough to watch someone very skilled do the real thing. You have to imitate them: Reading a lot of great novels will not make you a better writer. Instead write a story in the style of any writer you admire and you will learn a lot while still doing the real thing. The same is true for almost any art you want learn.

Recent practical example: I had a lot of trouble picking which photographs out of 20-100 of a subject to use. Enough were sharp, well-composed, and properly exposed to make it near impossible to pick.

I've been watching James Popsys' videos[1] lately. He doesn't take the greatest photos in the world from a technical standpoint, but there's a theme that runs through most of his videos and pictures: tell a story.

It's a lot easier to pick the best photos out of a bunch of technically decent photos when "best" is well-defined. And it turns out fit in a story about the subject is a solid criteria for best.

When I got my camera, I got this photo of a squirrel: https://kyefox.com/2020/05/20/squirrel-surprise/

It's fine. Not bad, not great.

Then, after thinking about that advice, I decided to tell a story: https://kyefox.com/2020/06/20/eastern-gray-squirrels-at-play...

They're all worse in technical terms than that one photo, but they're better because they fit into a story.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6WYZrzBuNQnz_2F4EqjhDQ

Chess is an interesting example. If you want to get good at blitz, playing 1min games over and over is a terrible way to do it in my experience. Playing 3hr games and studying theory is painful and annoying yet way more useful for real improvement. I think the same concept applies to many things - learning an instrument is another example. Performing a piano piece at full speed over and over is fun, but focusing exclusively on the hard parts one hand at a time slowly is far more useful.

Actually chess is a pretty good counterexample, speaking as a guy who 'did the real thing' and just started playing chess.

I ended up with a ranking of about 1600, give or take a hundred points.

The thing was, that was my ceiling: I wasn't going to advance beyond that. Whatever I could've figured out on the fly was built into my ranking.

So, to advance, I would've needed to, flatly, learn: put down the pieces and pick up a book.

Eventually, I think you reach a point where you have to do that, if you want to get better. "Doing the thing" is great for getting you out of the 'rank amateur' stage, but it can be a hindrance further down the line.

This is excellent advice for everybody. Well said zoomlings.

I remember reading about forge work and thinking it would be fun. I remember playing on a forge and sweating pants and burning. I remember reading about advanced techniques and wasting a lot of iron and fuel. And I remember watching a master bend iron cleverly, and heat it minimally, achieving beautiful affect. Sometimes you don't need a hammer, you need practiced wit.

Some call these folk teachers, or professors, or craftmasters, or what have you. The best are better than artists, they're scientists. Alan Kay is a great example. So is Knuth. Check out John Baez. I was lucky enough to meet Des MacHale. He could tell a joke ambidextrously in chalk and you'd split your sides laughing while learning mathematical context. He were that good he were better.

Learning from others is faster than learning on one's own but we yield our sense of direction. Which is why innocent play is so important.

Now get back to studying Jacob Lurie and reformulate, reformulate, reformulate!

> Want to get better at programming? Write a lot of programs. Yes. But also read a lot of high quality code written by others.

Well, do this in moderation, as reading "high quality code" can lead to a premature focus on code-quality.

Most "high quality code" is the result of many iterations of ideas and use-cases. And trying to emulate that style can be counter-productive in many cases.

I find going back in the history of the code-base helps you see how simple the project used to be, which is helpful when learning to code.

The difficulty of the article and of your example is active vs passive learning - watching and reading people with more experience is important, and I guess the spirit of the article is to do that actively without procrastinating - real learning - watch and make notes rather than just relax and passively watch/read.

However, the part not touched on is that things you do passively do build up knowledge too - and it's not an exertion like active learning is. Absentmindedly watching Chess streams when relaxing is good to call out as not an intentional active learning experience, but as long as you're treating it as relaxing it's the kind of thing that is fuel for shower thoughts and can refuel capacity for active learning. As the article says, the "real thing" is hard and tiring, and doing "fake things" can add depth to understanding as well as recuperate for the next struggle. Being mindful and aware of what you're doing and pushing yourself to be doing the real thing when possible is my takeaway from the article.

Are there any celebrity programmers streaming? Would be interesting to watch Jeff Dean, Fabrice Bellard, or Donald Knuth code.

Truly watching others is the most natural way to learn. It applies to all aspects of life. I’ve often felt school, while important, was ill preparing people for actual jobs. Shadowing people is immensely helpful and something my school forced me to do and I was grateful for.

"The increased accessibility of this kind of content is one of the greatest achievements of the internet."

Completely agree...it's vast and largely free. I am grateful to live in such an unprecedented era of access to knowledge, know how, and instruction.

I am someone who wants to get better / generally back into Chess

Who/what should I watch? Where can I find good videos/analysis?

I think this is actually a good thing, though... you have something real you are trying to do, which guides you to what you need to learn.

I find it is a lot easier to learn in the pursuit of something I actually want to accomplish rather than studying in a vacuum.

So your approach, for example, is better than if you had just picked up a book on key and time signatures and started reading. You first tried to do something, ran into something you didn't know, so started to learn that thing.

Whatever you described (looking up key signature etc. in youtube) is the real thing. You are trying to do sight-singing and you are working on it. And if you keep at it and get to sing the whole piece,then you have truly achieved your goal. But if you languish on watching more and more youtube videos, say watch how someone else plays a piano piece or go into something inconsequential to the original problem in hand, then in your mind you started with something and you have not done enough to help that. I am not exactly telling that sidetracking is the problem here, but you moving farther away and away from the original set aside goal is what I am saying.

I agree that there are some over-simplifications here: I'd propose that there's a distinction he didn't make between "the real thing" and "the whole real thing". Taking a job speaking French when you speak NO French is too big a leap. But thinking that you're making real progress learning a language by memorizing verb-conjugation rules is mistaken thinking, you need opportunities to hear real French spoken, and opportunities to speak it. Expecting that you can sight-sing anything when you've never done anything close before is also too much. (Modulo massive natural gifts). Solfège (I had to look it up) I would argue, is pretty much at the core of the 'real' thing you're trying to learn: sight singing. It's just not the 'whole' thing you're trying to learn. But reading about solfège (or discussing it on HN), isn't the real thing. DOING it is the real thing. Hey, I could use a little solfège myself, how is it that I've never heard of it in 50 years of making music?? dammit :)

Ooh, here's a fun idea: see if you can track down a hymnal that uses shape notes, like those described here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shape_note

The basic idea is to make it much easier to sight-read songs in different keys. With shape notes, the "Do" in solfege is always the same symbol, regardless of the key signature. So it'd be a "C" in C Major, but the same shape appears for an "F" in F Major. Once you can recognize the 7 shapes, you can suddenly do two things very easily:

- Find "Do" and feel your way around the song using it as an anchor, without any risk of losing it

- Re-pitch the song so that the melody is in a more comfortable range

The first point helps out a lot with interval training, as it short-cuts the key signature translation steps. You no longer have to remember that a C -> an E (or was it an Eb in this key?) is a major third, you just look at the "Do" shape and the "Mi" shape following it, and hear what you should do.

The second point was especially useful as a song leader in my youth. Some of the composers had an optimistic idea of how high our tenors could comfortably sing, so over time I learned to nudge the key up or down a few steps to keep the voices comfortable. (This was a congregation of worshipers, not a trained choir.) Shape notes made that easy to do, since everybody in the audience could still follow the music and often without realizing that I'd changed the reference key on the fly.

I don't think the author is suggesting that we jump into the metaphorical deep end without taking swimming lessons first. He seems to be addressing the scenario where we use instructional videos on swimming and practicing on land as a means of avoiding getting into the water.

Have you considered that sight-singing anything is not the real thing? Singing is the real thing.

I think you missed the entire point of the article. The "real" thing is subjective and varies from person to person depending on their experience with the subject.

If someone else had no trouble creating art then this situation simply doesn't apply to them. That person might have a different part of the process that gives them trouble that they SHOULD be practicing.

For Eric, practicing the thing he had trouble with over and over was the best way for him to get over his struggles. Now he can move onto the next thing he needs to work on and continue to make progress.

Agreed. Following the article’s own advice of “ask someone who knows how your industry works” would certainly lead to “pay an artist” rather than “churn on your programmer art” if your goal is shipping a successful game.

...not if your crappy prgrammer art is the only thing standing in the way of shipping a game that could actually sell.

> Taking the first step often requires a lot of research and thinking

I generally agree with your comment, but strongly disagree with this part. You will have much more success if you take this first step as soon as possible. No research, no thinking. And a “real thing” first step. You want to start running? Put on some shoes and go for a run. Don’t sign up for a race, don’t look up running tips, don’t buy nice shoes. Just go run for a bit.

Coding? Pop open repl.it. Scuba? Get your head under water. Even for things that might be out of reach like flying an airplane, read up on something specific like how to land.

With your very first step out of the way, you can then start thinking a bit more.

> Research, analyze, digest, and then execute.

I mostly disagree. Too many people (including myself) get sidetracked with tasks that are not actually “doing the real thing” as the article says. For low risk activities, making mistakes is important. Semi-relevant: one term for wantrepreneurs is “making house” where they give the appearances of building a business without actually doing so.

For some riskier tasks, there are obvious “real“ steps to perform before doing the real thing e.g. doing a SCUBA course before using an aqualung. Or getting advice when buying your first home.

For many tasks, just doing it is far more successful e.g. learning a language by speaking it with people that have that language as their first tongue. Listen to people who have learned English as a second language, and so many mistakes are due to learning from reading rather than just speaking (babies learn languages naturally, and adults can too, but most adults follow the standard crap techniques which screws their language learning, especially trying to learn to speak by following rules and reading written material).

While doing anything, it is important to mix in introspection, videos, books, and training. Repetitive practicing without feedback ingrains mistaken habits into our minds: habits which are extremely difficult to correct later e.g. I have skied a lot but I still make habitual errors learnt as a child. If you are using learning techniques while applying them, the material sticks in your mind and you can take what is relevant.

Yes.

I'll take it a step further and ask, do adages actually contain any signal at all? If you have a saying "try try again" and another saying "don't bust your head against a brick wall" which one wins? When?

Getting fluent in French is probably best done without a plan, but just practicing a bunch. But I'm sure you can think of several activities where "just try it" is godawful advice. Who says writing is in the former camp? Prove it.

Blogspam

Yeah I think that’s something Mr. Young glosses over in his book—it’s hard to muster the courage to suffer through this kind of direct approach when you’re anything less than absolutely committed. I think it takes a certain personality to be able to just pick some random skill and convince yourself that it’s do or die.

"The real thing" does not mean the absolute hardest iteration of whatever you're trying to do.

C25K doesn't start with a marathon, but it does involve actually getting your ass out the door and running. It does not involve shoe shopping, reading about stretching techniques or tinkering with your training schedule in Excel. Running is the real thing.

Reel 2: https://www.youtube.com./watch?v=a7pH6CQcGMU

> For example, Christopher McCandless dove head-first into the real thing (that is, surviving without help in the Alaskan wilderness), without proper preparation and training, and died.

He didn't go straight from normal life to Alaskan wilderness though. He spent a good bit of time traveling and being homeless. If anything, he was in the uncanny valley of being skilled at most aspects of living in the wildnerness, but unaware of the specifics of being in Alaska and how the environment would change between seasons.

I think for your first point, you're definitely reading into it too much...

As for you second point, what kind of proof do you need? Do you want scientific studies that dive way too deep into specifics and are not applicable to real life? This article is targeted towards learning, which varies heavily from person to person and can be very subjective. Think about it from your perspective and see if the ideas apply to what you do. Simple as that.

For your third point, yeah sure real and fake are pretty subjective. In the end it's obviously up to you to decide or come to a decision about what is and what isn't. Our gut instinct usually fails here thought...

However, to address the point about learning Japanese, I would argue that taking the time to learn before doing so is the "fake" way. How do children learn a language if they can't use a computer or phone to get on Duolingo or go to a community college to take a course? They literally just are exposed to it and pick it up over time.

People may not know his background but he is a prominent figure when it comes to language learning and his strategies are to replicate natural learning methods and ignore the canned courses like Duolingo that don't do you any good...

I think the response to the first and third point is the same -- it's up to YOU to decide what's an important part of your life, it's up to YOU to decide what's real and fake.

Or rather, actually -- first, you decide what's an absolutely important part of your life. Then you do THAT real thing -- not any fake thing peripheral to the real thing that you decided was important.

I think that trying to draw value judgments out of the article is a serious mistake. The author is not suggesting any values. The author is trying to suggest the best way to pursue your own values. The idea is not that success in public speaking or architecture is important. The idea is that success in your own goals is important. The idea is not that time not spent toward the goals the author endorses is wasted. The idea is that time not spent on the goals that you endorse is wasted.

How to know though?