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Comment by johnnujler | Hacker News Reader

This was beautiful! In fact, a note to all the YouTube productivity gurus who think they are giving us a master class on productivity or VCs on twitter who sell their (obvious but apparently profound) wisdom thinking they are doing a service to humanity. At least IMO things that are best learned in the form of a class are vocational stuff and hard sciences, anything other than that like a course on confidence, productivity, loving yourself, learning to learn etc should be f*cking banned into oblivion.

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Or you could just, like, not watch/read those videos/posts/tweets if you don't like them?

Also, there's a lot more academic fields than the "hard" sciences and vocational stuff.

Cute!

How do you say you don’t like a video/post/tweet without reading/watching those videos/posts/tweets?

Yes there’s a lot more academic fields than the “hard” sciences and vocational stuff, add them to the list too. That was not a treatise on teachability/learnability of a subject.

I seriously didn’t get your point, you thought of being sarcastic and bitter because I ranted about how I disliked VCs and Productivity gurus? Thanks, got your point, be well.

If someone else has figured it out, I’d rather just get their take on the thing than try to figure it out myself, especially if it’s something like productivity or learning. I want to spend my time mastering software engineering, not reinventing the pomodoro technique.

Seriously? You put on a 25 minute timer every time you sit for work? Dude, I know I shouldn’t have generalised, but tell me that these things are anything but homeopathy of the mindset problem? I understand that these things can be reassuring/calming/satisfying but so can be the superstitious rituals in religion or the words of a healer, do we not condemn those when we see the fraudulent nature in them. I’ve seen with my eyes how these guys concoct stuff they call productivity hacks right out of their a and slap a polished 4K video to sell it.

I understand that all our wants differ, For instance I only want to have a decent grasp over software engineering to sustain a livelihood, but even if I wanted to master all of computer science, I don’t know if I would equate using a timer(pomodoro) or recalling the answer without looking at the answer(active recall) to mastering compiler design. I don’t about you, but to recall the answer without looking at the answer while preparing for a test or studying for a stipulated time before losing focus didn’t need a overly sophisticated term at least up until a couple years ago. Most of us did pretty well through our schools and colleges. What is this all of a sudden now, if not money grabbing, avarice, charlatanry, fraudulence? In fact, I would’ve conceded if the benefits of these sophistication were extraordinary, they are not even marginal. Anyway man, be well:)

I'm going to take this question seriously. I worked for a project management company once in a support role. It seemed to me that a lot of what they were doing, and teaching in their courses, was basic common sense. I asked the VP if they weren't charging a lot of money for common sense. His answer? "When people pay for advice, they're more likely to follow it."

There's not really a lot new under the sun. A person can hear the same advice a million times without following it. What people are often paying for, when they pay for online courses or coaches or whatever, is a structure that will make them more likely to commit to doing the good thing -- that they probably know to do anyway.

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