You’re Never Too Old to Become a Beginner | Hacker News Reader

You’re Never Too Old to Become a Beginner

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227 pointswallflower94 comments

When you are young and inexperienced, you don't know the difficulty of a subject. So as long as each step you take to advance your skill is achievable, and the feedback loop is good enough, you'll keep going. But as soon as you realize that you've only scratched maybe 1% of what is needed for mastery (when prior to that realization you felt like you were 90% there), it can be difficult to keep going.

As you get older and more experienced you get exposed to many things that appear to be "easy" but you then find out how much work it is (after you've sunk a bunch of time and effort into it). After enough of this exposure you realize that any skill that isn't realized by a majority of the population takes an immense amount of dedication and opportunity cost. So after a while you tend to stick with what you already know (sunk cost).

Of course your life satisfaction can improve with more skills you have, especially if they are skills that don't become too obsolete. For example being able to do some maintenance on your car (brake job, oil change, tire rotations, radiator flush...) can save money at a mechanic. And being able to take apart a sewer trap under a sink to clean out the hair clog is better than pouring a strong alkaline solution down the drain and hoping it works.

So it is really important to learn enough life skills while you are young to help build up a health and satisfying life later.

Well the counter-argument to that is: why do you need to achieve mastery? You can be happy with the slow progress you make along the way. You don't need to be Picasso to enjoy painting.

Yea, the counter to mastery is the realization that you can get to a useful place in most areas with 100 hours or less of effort.

It’s nowhere near enough time to become say a short order cook, but plenty of time to learn to make bacon and eggs for breakfast in whatever specific way you want it.

Learning when to stop at a satisfactory level is equally hard as learning when to floor it and push against some difficult goal.

I think even 100 honest hours learning something will get you further than you probably need to go, e.g. basic home maintenance stuff that is just 1. find the right youtube video, 2. have the tools, 3. don't be a moron.

god knows that my far beyond satisfactory level of dotfile / config tweaking has probably paid fewer dividends than I'd like to think...

Not being a moron is a skill that is getting harder to find everyday.

Your first sentence stands well on its own. I suspect if you shadowed a short order cook for 2.5x 40 hour work weeks, you would be able to function as a short order cook yourself. The entire point of that job is to prepare food that takes a short time to deliver. This means lots of rote tasks which can be performed rapidly.

Cook doesn’t only cook by the way. The fact that you can remember a recipe doesn’t mean you will be able to easily adapt to the lack of certain ingredients on the market and/or optimise the cost of the finished product.

Even Picasso was a jack of many trades. I am in no position to decide whether or not he was a master in every field by the end of his life, but I know for certain he was mediocre at all of them at some point.

You'd have to go back into his very early childhood to find a time when he couldn't paint.

I find this is true for the handful of multi-talented people I know in my personal life. They truly have innate talent/ability in at least one area. Sometimes they have a remarkable ability to learn new things quicker than most people, other times they have to work hard for everything else, but they always have their natural talent to fall back on, in times of duress or limited energy. I'd be interested to see some research in this area.

I'm not sure.

I know a lot of seemingly "talented" people. How do they pick up a new instrument in 2-3 months? Or be able to balance on a skateboard after just a little while? Or get kills better than me with only 200 CS GO hours clocked?

The answer is always that they spent a lot of focused time earlier in life, or that they spend a lot of time that I wasn't aware of -- like I find out that they have 2500 hours in CS:S on another account... yeah that makes a lot more sense.

I don't believe innate talent exists. Other than that some people are mentally quicker, or have faster reflexes, or are physically more capable -- "general" things. But talent exists only from both hard work and time, which for many things can start at age 2 or 3.

>I don't believe innate talent exists. Other than that some people are mentally quicker, or have faster reflexes, or are physically more capable -- "general" things

I don't understand how this distinction is supposed to work. If someone has exactly the 'general natural inclinations' that fit to a certain activity, it seems asinine to not call them talented in it. Sure, they won't be skilled in it unless they actually put in the work, but they'll comparatively have an easier time with it.

They might be thinking of the tendency for people to assume talent in a particular task is something you are born with, not the general aptitudes for that task.

Like when one person says "A natural born musician" they are usually not just suggesting the person has general traits good for music. They often just believe the person was born with musical talent pre-programmed somehow.

"I don't believe innate talent exists" - This, in light of 100 years of (mathematized quantitative genetics) and thousands of years of empirical observation, is a profoundly wrong observation. There is variation in, broadly speaking, traits and (almost) all physiological and behavioral traits are heritable. Do you believe that taller parents tend to have taller offspring? I guess the answer is yes; then, it is not any different for other traits that are less-observable, for example control of motor functions.

There is a time, early in life, during which traits are more plastic, for a variety of reasons (for height, nutritional interventions are more likely to be successful early in life than during the teenage years), but you won't make a genetically slow phenotype into a top 1% 100-m specialist.

> truly have innate talent/ability in at least one area

How are you assessing that?

In the Picasso example it seems you are confusing "practiced extensively since early childhood with extraordinary external support and training and unusual personal motivation" with "innately talented" (whatever the latter is even supposed to mean). I would imagine that some of the people you know have some similar (probably less extreme) background.

Of course. My experience is that children generally take to activities they find easy, and avoid activities they find difficult.

What kids find easy or hard has substantially to do with past experience.

Watching my 2 small kids learn and grow, they can over the course of a few months go from not wanting to try something at all because it seems impossible or scary to performing competently, with the only thing in the middle being occasional short attempts (like 10 minutes at a time), spaced weeks apart. Then once they feel basic competence, they can continue to improve very rapidly, while having a better and better time.

Just before the pandemic we had gathered 4 3-year-olds together. Kid A was embarrassed at being a beginner riding a balance bike and refused to even try because kid B was already skilled at it (kid A is now also a pro 1 year later), neither of kids A and B wanted to try going across the monkey bars while kid C had no problem (because his dad had been encouraging him with candy placed further and further away along the monkey bars for a few months), kid C who didn't do much daily running compared to the others felt bad that he was much slower at running.

And the same can be seen for drawing, throwing a ball, reading, playing a musical instrument, speaking a second language, solving simple logic puzzles, building with construction toys ....

At this level, none of these differences are primarily due to "innate talent". There are multiple orders of magnitude difference in skill to gain in a very short time, with fast returns to small amount of spaced practice.

I don't think most people strive for mastery. But many things just aren't that fun or satisfying if you don't at least achieve competence.

A lot of hobbies, crafts, and activities really only start to become fun (rather than "rewarding but tiring") when you start to get good at them, because you have to think/work less hard to achieve basic satisfying outcomes.

>I don't think most people strive for mastery. But many things just aren't that fun or satisfying if you don't at least achieve competence.

Learning how to play the guitar was frustrating for me, but my stubbornness to be able to play the music I listened to is what kept me going. I'm constantly listening to music and I knew I would enjoy it in the long run so I'm glad I stuck with it, but man, the first hundred hours or so of learning honestly wasn't enjoyable to me. I love it now but it felt like a chore at the time.

I always laugh when people remark that some dancer "makes it look easy". Because it is easy when you've trained enough. And the more you train at it, the funner it gets.

What style of dance do you mean?

I think this "making it look easy" is probably most relevant for ballet, where high level dancers still train very "basic" movements or use a lot of muscular effort to create the illusion of lightness etc.

Pretty much any style that has prescribed technique to it (not just random movements). Partnership dancing comes to mind. It takes years of training to make it look effortless, and it is (for the dancers). Even the best regularly go over the basics again and again.

For me any style that has decided on moves. Salsa, Swing, Ballroom. I can jump around at a club to pop/house/techno/etc... but once I have to follow specific steps with a partner I have a huge hurdle.

I tried taking salsa classes once. Was going to 4 classes a week. The instructor told me it would be a year before I'd be able to lead. Of course that was one instructor's opinion. I stopped after 4 weeks and feeling like I was making zero progress. It was not fun to feel like I was in everyone else's way not being able to keep up or not being able to transition from one move to the next. Also not really a fan of salsa.

I've taken maybe 10 swing dance classes as well but zero progress. Bad teachers maybe.

As a swing dancer / salsa dancer, the best approach I found is to stick with one dance, and practice it repeatedly ... say every weekend for a month. You need to get to the point where you're not focused on your footwork in order to be able to focus on the arms/leading.

Also, find a place where the partners swap / dance around, ideally during the lessons as well, you'll learn more and won't feel like you're boring everyone. You'll also recognize more people and possibly be more willing to ask people to dance.

I did much better when sticking to one style, getting it down, then starting the next. I found that mixing them just got them muddled.

I also found I greatly preferred swing, both the music (former sax/clarinet player) and the crowds. Swing dancers seemed more focused on having fun and generally less snobby.

As for leading, I improved greatly when I: 1: found a few partners who could back lead to show me what I was doing wrong. Its generally poor technique, but it greatly helps with getting the strong connection needed to telegraph the moves. 2: Understood the connections and flow enough to vary the patterns on my own.

It's a great way to make up for all the time stuck sitting a computer.

Thanks for the advice. I did stick to one style while learning. You say a month every weekend but that's just 4 lessons. I had 16 salsa lessons over 4-5 weeks and made no progress. The swing lessons were later.

That doesn't mean I won't try again though

Scott Adams has a way of thinking about this that he casts as "Systems vs Goals", where he advocates developing a talent stack of skills that work well together towards unspecified, undefined future goals. He says his talent stack is comedian+cartoonist, he's not amazing at either individual skill but he's one of the best at the combination which allowed him to create Dilbert.

I got value from this way of thinking but I also think specific goals are necessary (e.g. as a startup founder targeting a specific market, product or vision) and that there are some domains that demand you to be the best in a single talent vertical due to a winner take all tendency (e.g. athelete, musician, professional gambler - although in any of these we can still distinguish systems & talent stacks from goals).

This is good advice. the hard part is finding the skills you can intersect

I think Adam's approach is mostly lacking deliberation, it's only after the fact that the synergy is realized but it's hard to intentionally engineer it.

I can definitely see the validity in the other school of thought though; i.e. that we should deliberately seek out synergistic talent verticals. I know this is Conor Mcgregor's approach, he's very much systems over goals (in Adam's vein, and explicitly so) but is deliberate about the specific talent stack he's working towards. Ironically it is all done towards a specific goal (to be the best fighter) although the path towards that goal is underspecified.

Here's a very common talent stack here on HN that works pretty well: math + CS + data science + one domain (e.g. finance or biology).

> Here's a very common talent stack here on HN that works pretty well: math + CS + data science + one domain (e.g. finance or biology).

Nice formulation! The domain expertise is key, I think. And often underappreciated by people at the start of their career.

Skills one might think have nothing in common can have surprising intersections.

For example, my training as a mechanical engineer and 3 years spent working on a gearbox design for the 757 have had a significant positive effect on my programming and the design of the D language.

It gives me a unique advantage.

Can you please comment on the advantages and the effect on your programming?

Do you think these advantages are common among those who have (mech/electrical/chem/etc.) engineering education and training who move into software development?

Some principles:

1. Code that looks right should be right, code that looks wrong should be wrong. (I know this sounds trite, but there are many examples.)

2. When a program self-detects a fault in its logic, it must stop immediately, as it no longer will be in a known state. (It's still common practice to imagine one can recover from an assertion failure. I've spent many, many hours trying to convince other programmers of this.)

3. Better education will not prevent programming bugs. Better process and mechanical checking will. (This notion has been gaining a lot of momentum.)

4. Reliable systems can be built from unreliable components. https://www.digitalmars.com/articles/b39.html

> Do you think these advantages are common among those who have (mech/electrical/chem/etc.) engineering education and training who move into software development?

Heck, they haven't even trickled into the nuclear power industry (Fukushima), the oil business (Deepwater Horizon), or the automobile industry (Toyota surging problem). Those disasters taught lessons learned by the aviation industry decades earlier.

Perhaps I should amend my earlier statement that it's experience in the aviation business that I've taken over to software. My engineering training was mostly about math, not cutting metal and the nut behind the wheel.

I appreciate the principles, thank you for sharing them.

I started my career in automotive manufacturing before becoming a business analyst on a team developing in-house business automation tools. The program I studied did cover an engineering design process. We were taught to quantify design requirements (subject to a static load of this much, must be within these dimensions, and so on) and use a combination of calculations, simulations, and prototypes to check we are meeting those design specifications.

I am assuming that you would have done something similar in aerospace. If so, have you carried over any of that into software development? Do you have any guidance or D design documents you can point to? The D specification is the final product, but I’m trying to gain a better understanding of how one gets to that final specification.

Thanks for your time!

You're right, we did this a lot at Boeing. I am very proud of the fact that none of my designs needed to be modified once the metal was cut, and it all passed test and certification without any problems.

Software development, on the other hand, lends itself very well to iterative development. You don't have problems like sinking a new forging die costing half a million bucks, so work really diligently to not need to scrap a die. Keep making mistakes like that, and Boeing will move you to a position where you get to design ash trays.

D is very much an iteratively developed product.

3. Better education will not prevent programming bugs. Better process and mechanical checking will.

I don't know if this is what you meant by mechanical checking, but I highly rate two things to reduce bugs:

(1) Checking that the output of the entire system is 100% (and I meant 100% literally in every sense of the word) accurate, not just that the smaller unit tests pass or that the output "looks right".

(2) Scrutinizing the logic of the code line by line at least 2 times after you've finished writing it.

As a dev with a data science background, I'm always impressed how many bugs pure devs are able to smuggle in whenever the task involves any kind of data, despite extensive unit testing. I check out their code, run it once, and immediately see the output is wrong and then they have to go back and debug. If we just check our output that wouldn't be the case!

A simple example of mechanical checking would be:

    int[10] a;
    a[10] = 3;  // Error, array index out of bounds

The idea is to allow powerful metal code, while providing constructs that make errors much less likely. For example,

    if (a < b < c)

is allowed by C, but few C programmers can tell you what it means, and the appearance of it in code is almost always a bug. Instead of educating programmers with "don't do that", D makes it illegal. (If you really want it, you'd have to write it as: `(a < b) < c`. But notice you have to make an effort to write code that way, it is highly unlikely to be accidentally written.)

> Scrutinizing the logic of the code line by line at least 2 times after you've finished writing it.

I find it useful to go back through the logic a couple months later. I usually find a lot to improve :-)

“The passionate state of mind is often indicative of a lack of skill, talent or power. Moreover, passionate intensity can serve as a substitute for the confidence born of proficiency and the possession of power. A workingman sure of his skill goes leisurely about his job, and accomplishes much though he works as if at play. On the other hand, the workingman who is without confidence attacks his work as if he were saving the world, and he must do so if he is to get anything done.” - Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind

There’s an opposite view argued here: https://danluu.com/p95-skill/ with the claim that it isn’t that hard to get to 95%ile of many activities but that this level of skill is still useful.

It misses an important qualifier: 95% among who and for which activity? It is relatively easy to get to 95% for a skill/activity few care about. But try to become 95%ile in like baseball among the Texas 13-17 years old cohort and the music changes. I mean, I agree you can get to the top 5% in your neighborhood, but does it matter to any soul?

That is literally specified in the first or second paragraph

I think adults become seekers of efficient learning. You know

1) time is limited

2) the map is huge

3) the topic might be totally unknown

You have to devise ways to explore neither too fast nor too slow.

This comment really resonated with a feeling I’ve had over the past few years. When I was younger, especially at the beginning of college, I loved to build things by programming. I learned new languages, new patterns, wrote an OS, a website with all the front end complexity, etc. I could hack something on the weekend outside of schoolwork.

For a few years it has felt so difficult to start something - perhaps a curse of “experience” is that you see the failure modes ahead of time. I think I’m overall more efficient, but my motivation to just strike out there and try something has been wrung out of me.

Lately I’ve been trying to trick myself into working through that feeling and learning on the side. A desire to “finish” (i.e. write up as a blog post, publish software, send to a friend) is what gets me to overcome this bias to inaction. But it still shocks me how much more creative energy I had as an 18 year old than I do now.

My trick for avoiding that feeling is to intentionally set out to do projects in a terrible way, just to see what that'd be like. So for example I might write a project all in a single file, or entirely without classes, or with wildly too many classes, or with weird fp-trickery for no reason. There's a million weird ways to write a project badly, and in practice you'll discover it's almost never a real hindrance to progress compared to best practices.

I've also heard it argued that youth still don't know what's impossible, so from time to time, they approach a problem that's deemed "impossible" from a different angle and find a solution.

I strongly believe the key to learning new complex skills is to just enjoy the journey and recognize that you're going to be a beginner for years.

The best time to plant a tree is 10 years ago. The second best is now.

In some years you’ll be 40. Time passes whether you use it or not. Try to use it.

The hard part is realizing when it’s time to become a beginner (because you’ve stopped growing) and try something new. Choosing the new thing is tough.

>The hard part is realizing when it’s time to become a beginner (because you’ve stopped growing) and try something new.

You know it's time when you look back at things you did years ago and find them still pretty stunning. The future within that discipline can only hold different variations of that feeling. The only way to change this is by branching out and come back with fresh perspectives.

no, it would be 9 years ago, 8 years ago, etc.

That is my favorite rebuttal to that overused quote

Reminds me of, “war is not the answer.” It really depends on the question! “What is a three letter word for...”

-> In some years you'll be 40 ...noting value for "some" may not necessarily be positive

Yep, 10 years ago I wouldve used “30”. It’s a useful mindset at any age. You aren’t done until you say you’re done.

The original quote is 20 years so seems like there is agreement!

With respect, speak for yourself. :) I fully plan on having a last enjoying a bottle of something tequila and then promptly hanging myself off an tree in a nice quiet grove somewhere before then.

Gotten everything I set out to do done in this life, so at this point I'm still around by the time 40 rolls around, then something has gone really awry.

I remember when I was 19 and 40 sounded depressingly old and impossibly far away. I assume you're around the same age.

35, actually. I've got a mild form of arthritis in the hands that makes working with them for more then an hour or two unpleasant.

Something is wrong with my left knee that makes physical exertion painful. Walking is okay but it really doesn't take a whole lot to make it painful enough that I have to sit down for 4 or 5 hours to recover.

Something else wrong in the chest that makes breathing uncomfortable most days; like I was lying down and like fully grown St Bernard is sitting on of me. Occasionally feels like God taking a long thin ice pick and just jabbing it slowly through the ribs.

I can manage most of it with aspirin and alcohol but obviously that brings with it a slew of it's own risks. Add in deteriorating eyesight, constant fights with insomnia that leave me tired most day, and teeth that are wearing away fast enough that it's scaring my dentist.

It's not that 40 sounds depressingly old. It's that I'm already old and now getting older. It's been a good life mind you, and I've gotten everything that I was supposed to out of it; university degree and a job. There's little else that I care enough about to make me want to stay beyond for what I have to.

"The best time to plant a tree is 10 years ago. The second best is now." - I have many problems with this often-repeated sentence. The best time was 10 years and maybe right now is a terrible time to do it and the good times passed and it is much better to move on.

Many years ago I heard about someone who started learning the piano at 70 and was a concert pianist at 80. That's stuck in my head ever since as a counter argument to any time that I think it's too late for me to start learning something new.

That's both inspiring and horrifying. I'm a little older than the demographic here and sometimes see myself on this somewhat stressful hamster wheel of "Okay I tired of x, now I should explore y." Then y becomes tiresome and I move on to z. Over and over. I wondered when that would end. I guess it never does. No one talks about what happens when your life becomes steady. You just get unsatisfied in other ways so then your hobbies take over. Worse, if you don't do anything like this and just become a TV/social media addict then you brain ages worse than being a productive forever learner. I think about the Buddhist idea of suffering and being forever unsatisfied here a lot and wonder if the meditation crowd has this better figured out.

I think the other solution is diving into more interpersonal relationships. Atleast those can be extremely fulfilling over a long time.

That's super inspiring. I'm learning piano improvisation and music composition at 50.

If you have the name of this person, please share and I'll write his story on my blog.

I completely agree, especially if you are, like I imagine most HN readers are, already at the top of your professional field.

In 2019, I started training Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. It's had a dramatic improvement on every aspect of my life: health, weight loss, stress relief, mental fortitude, friendships, breathing, everything.

And in starting BJJ, you're going to be _awful_ at it. No matter how athletic you are, you're going to get destroyed (choked or joint locked) many, many, many times by people younger, older, weaker, stronger than you simply because they know more and have better technique. You really truly do start at the bottom.

It's exhilarating. Every day after work (or before), you and a bunch of friends go into a padded room, put on pajamas with a thick belt, and attempt to strangle and/or joint lock one another. You learn new techniques, body mechanics, and actual fighting techniques. When you're rolling with someone else, literally every other stress in the world melts away as you're trying to stop your opponent from submitting you while you're trying to submit them. It truly is physical chess, and there's nothing better than switching from the drudgery of a job to a night of martial arts.

Going by some sentiments on this site, too old is when you pass the age of twelve and haven’t by some innate instinct been drawn to hacker/tinkerdom.

Silicon Valley captured this perfectly

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdXKdRoB9Wk&t=1m10s

What are people from the community here going to start to learn for the first time this year? I'd be interested on hearing a range of different plans; creative, personal, business, technical and so on.

I know I plan to pick up sewing this year. It isn't something I've ever given any thought, but I've fallen down a rabbit hole in the last few weeks and am excited to start mending my own clothes and creating new outfits.

One of my favorite things in life is to get into a rabbit hole of a new hobby. This usually comes with lots of energy from the excitement and learning something new.

I also love listening to friends and others talk about whatever hobby they are deep into. It's fascinating how almost anything can become someone's main hobby and passion.

It may be a meme, but using Gentoo for the first time. I did Linux From Scratch in a VM and it piqued my curiosity. Although I would prefer Nix or Guix due to their interesting declarative approach, I decided to go for Gentoo so I can have a better understanding of how to tweak the heck out of a real system.

Also, probably getting more up-to-date on C++. I have let my skills slack, and some of the new things in C++20 seem intriguing. The only issue here is finding a good project to work on. Doing interview-style problems is basically "how to use the standard library proficiently in the scope of one file, and probably just ~5 methods", and other things seem difficult to approach. This seems very different from the clear progression one finds in other popular languages.

(If anyone has any suggestions for such projects, please do share. I could use some help)

C++ has been my main programming language for the last 20+ years. (Dang this makes me feel old.)

For my paid work (at multiple jobs), I've never been allowed to use C++ newer than C++11. At first it was due to incomplete compiler support, and later on it was because various customers were using older versions of RHEL whose standard version of GCC was something like 4.8.

Anyone else experiencing this?

the vast majority of C++ dev out there is >= 11 per https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/devecosystem-2019/cpp/ with C++14 / 17 being regularly used by >60% of respondants.

Large libraries such as Qt now require C++17.

At 40, after having a kid with my wife a couple years ago, I've just started getting serious about learning to program, after a lifetime of lazily dabbling in various i.t. things. Am now enrolled in uni to finish my bach in CS, which is also where I work.

Have also began to learn about investing in 2020 and have had a lot of fun doing that. Highly recommend the Investing for Beginners podcast with Andrew Sather and Dave Ahern if you don't know anything (like me).

Not afraid to say I've been contributing time to a nonprofit arts organization in my area, and have gotten on its board of directors. I run their web site and we're doing a frontend overhaul/server swap/Cloudflare DNS setup this month. Admittedly a bit scared because I've done this on my own setups but not on a site that gets traffic. Onward to 2021!

/r/wallstreetbets was a fantastic place to really get into the higher forms of investment until it garnered attention from the mainstream... now its full of idiotic "autist" and "retard" jokes.

There was surprisingly high-level technical analysis going on there at one point.

I've been trying to work on my outdoor skills... I already rock climb and ski a little bit. I am hoping to learn to lead easy ice climbs and get into the backcountry to ski this winter, including some overnight trips. We got out today, booted up a snowy canyon... only to find no ice. Oh well, that is the process: we just keep going out and doing progressively more difficult goals, and try not to get killed in a slide or a fall.

Also, my company has hired someone to work directly under me, so I hope to learn to be a competent manager, which I've never done in a formal situation. I've been reading a lot and reflecting on my own experiences, and have been documenting our processes. I will have a plan to onboard the new person soon.

Finally, if the covid situation eases up later in the year, I hope to return to performing music. I've been in a lot of bands and performed solo, or even one-off gigs with other musicians, but I hope to be able to build a band that a) I am fronting for > 80% of the material and b) brings in some income beyond what it takes to operate. That part of the business has its own set of learning curves, at least as far as I can tell from my years as a semi-professional side guy. The plan there is to start as a solo performer and gradually add other musicians, using low-rent bar gigs as rehearsals, but I am not sure how that will work out.

I'm going to continue learning Japanese. Focusing more on reading instead of just flash cards.

I've also set a five-year goal to get a creative work published. The first two years will be dedicated to reading more good works and writing more (likely terrible) things. Not planning beyond the first two, because that'll likely change when I understand more about how one goes about getting published.

Even if I give up after a year, I'll have enjoyed the prep work.

I am planning to learn how to write better. I am starting that by maintaining a stream of consciousness personal daily log. Also get more practice by commenting on Hacker News :)

In 2020, after 30 years in IT / simulation, I started as a volunteer in a raptor conservancy. It’s an outdoor job: in rain or shine, hot or cold, the birds still need their aviaries cleaning, and the weeds in the grounds don’t stop growing. The experts on the bird team are perhaps 30 years younger than me, and I will never be as good as they are at handling prima-donna falcons and flying-psychopath eagles. This has been a superb exercise in learning humility and the need to earn respect based on getting menial jobs done rather than one’s past glories.

The pay off is the privilege of being able to help with the flying displays, and having these stunning birds fly to you over the heads of the excited audience when you correctly give the "I've got food" signal they've been trained to recognise.

> What are people from the community here going to start to learn for the first time this year

Continuing learning how to handle these magnificent animals and to work with them to create impressive experience for the visitors.

I’ve got a few plans that involved substantial learning. I try to get a head start on New Years, this time specifically because I moved cities and that’s a great opportunity to build new habits.

1. I’m forcing myself to push through with Linux on the desktop and managing a more robust network. This will help with 2. It’s going pretty well so far. The big insight has been to work around some of the harder parts rather than punish myself; e.g. I just don’t use the intel graphics and the nvidia graphics simultaneously. I bought a DisplayPort cable so I can use two monitors with my one nvidia card. Next up, I want to get a setup where I can run my self-hosted services reliably across several devices. I may do a kubernetes type setup across several raspberry pi servers and possibly a new dedicated x86 box. I’ve never used kubernetes so figuring out if that’s crazy will be part of the learning process.

2. I’ve always a wanted to take on a real-life 3D mapping project. I’ve got a 360 camera on the way, which I’ll be using at first with mapillary, then self-hosting with openstreetcam. The pieces are all there to build 3D models from that content, so that will be my opportunity to really learn how that stuff works and make it happen. I love the city at night so I’d like to build a full nighttime map if possible; it looks totally different than during the day, but there’s enough artificial light I think it should be possible, if not practical.

3. I’ve outfitted my kitchen and am committing myself to cooking all but one or two meals a week, and to try to do that well. I suck really bad, but I’m starting to build an intuition for how basic bread works, I’ve had some mild success with quick breads and am also starting to have intuition for corn bread specifically. I made butter chicken on Monday for the first time, from a recipe that suspiciously used no butter. It came out great but not quite like I’m used to at restaurants; I look forward to trying again. I’d love to get into sweets and pastries like croissants. Biggest lesson learned so far: hand-rolled butter is worth every last penny, despite being twice as expensive than the usual butter. It has a depth and complexity of flavor more like cheddar than the mass-produced stuff.

4. I’m learning piano and music theory through that. It is a lot of fun, but certainly not easy. This is the first time in a while I’ve get viscerally what it’s like to be a child learning to walk - getting my hands to do the right thing at the right time is very difficult, especially with two-handed playing. I’ve also been amazed at how quickly ability builds with regular practice. I still suck really bad, but I’m getting what I wanted out of it, including a deeper appreciation of the music I listen to, the ability to read very simple sheet music, and honestly just a humbling challenge. I highly recommend it if you haven’t learned music already; it so so different from my usual skills that it really is like building from scratch. The process is physically exhausting because of the amount of effort it takes to operate my hands and not press the wrong keys. I feel like I can feel how much my brain is changing to build those new pathways.

Piano. I am 48, but I love learning new things. Playing instrument is something what I wanted to do for a looong time. Bought myself an electric guitar last year, and I do practice a bit, but have nothing to show for it now. It appears to be going a bit easier with a piano (I still do practice guitar). Not willing to stick to self-learning only I've already made an arrangement with a piano teacher, will have my lessons when the quarantine is lifted. For now SimplePiano and Flowkey will do.

Last year was when I got hooked on astrophotography, going very well so far (I have good skills at photography and image processing so it was way easier). Brought some satisfaction for not finishing my astrophysics PhD program.

I'm planning on learning Unreal Engine this year. I had purchased some courses on Udemy including the Unreal Engine C++ Developer course. I've been wanting to pick this up for a while so my personal OKR is to finish this course in the next 3 months.

That's nuts, I literally just downloaded UE yesterday and subscribed to Quixel to compliment my learning. I'd be very interested in knowing which courses you selected.

I'm doing https://www.udemy.com/share/101WeuA0EbdFZbR3w=/

As a grown man (with grown children!) I find it incredibly humbling to learn to read all over again. I am learning Hiragana as a necessary step to learning Japanese.

Downsizing our current company has given me some more free time (which is bittersweet, as it seems to signal the beginning of the end for us, but liberating at the same time) to pursue some non-career oriented goals. I’m learning statistics and probability. I’ve found that learning an academic subject, without the academic pressure, is a very productive way to learn for me. Doing the exercises feel more like a rigor of learning rather than for a grade, which is a refreshing and unfamiliar feeling for me.

I already picked some stuff up in 2020, so I'll probably continue with that.

I started painting miniatures - it's something I've always wanted to do but never really did. I also bought some cheap ones so my kids can paint along.

Working on my text MUD. Which involves learning more about Elixir. And spending more leisure time reading books - I don't have that much exposure, and want to get some worldbuilding inspiration.

I'm mostly planning on spending my time honing in on the skills that I started learning in 2020.

That is music production and art. I've been doing music production on and off, but this year i plan to really hone in and try to improve . I also got an art tablet after half a year of doing pixel animation, and digital art is really rewarding! It helps that I already have the basics of art down.

Reminds me of Cicero - On Old Age

> For when Caecilius speaks of ” the old fools of the comic stage,” he has in mind old men characterized by credulity, forgetfulness, and carelessness, which are faults, not of old age generally, but only of an old age that is drowsy, slothful, and inert.

> Yet his literary culture must have been of a high order. He learned Greek in his old age, after despising the language and its writers during the whole of his earlier life. He was a friend and patron of the poet Ennius, and brought him to Rome, though manifestly without any generous provision for his subsistence; for Ennius led in Rome as poor and straitened a life as he could have left in Sardinia, where Cato found him.

https://www.butwhatfor.com/on-old-age-with-cicero/

>From queuing to Zoom to mask etiquette, we were faced with an unsettling societal learning curve.

The biggest nuisance with masks was forgetting to bring it with me when I go out. Now I just always keep one in my pocket.

3 years ago ~ I powered an led on a breadboard. It felt more magical than deriving a y combinator in my own lambda calculus. Strange (and beautiful feeling (and counter intuitive))

I seem to be unable to muster the energy and focus needed to learn anything new. (40s)

“Over the hill” feels very real

I saw an advertisement for an "apprenticeship" at a UK game development tool company that I'm a fan of. It said applicants must be aged 16 to 24. Is that standard practice in UK? How is that not age descrimination?

It's because the UK offered apprenticeship grants to companies, but only for people age 16 to 24. It was age discrimination, but it wasn't the company discriminating.

The rules have changed. Similar grants are available for anyone 16 or older now, so the opportunity should be available at any employable age.

There's still an age bias, but it's in the amount of money now. The total grant amount is higher for younger people than older people, with several steps. But on the other hand, the minimum wage is lower for younger people, and other things like housing benefit are also lower for younger people.

On a certain level Western Tarot is said to be a journey of mastery from 0, The Fool, backwards through the Major Arcana from 21 down to 1, The Magus.

The only place to go upon reaching 1 is back to being The Fool, 0, to start the journey again.

Never too young either... I guess never a bad time!

https://archive.is/qOHnx

having changed profession completely 3 times in the last 10 years, I need to completely agree with the article

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