Comment by TimTheTinker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TimTheTinker | Hacker News Reader

If life were a zero-sum game and I had no regard for others, I'd be glad about others not being self-disciplined, as that would mean more room for me to succeed by being disciplined myself. But it's not a zero-sum game. The more of us who work hard at important things in life, the better off we all will be.

So please do apply self-discipline in your life. Having no discipline is like having a car with an engine that stops running frequently and won't exceed 2000 RPM.

Hard work does get easier in time, like working a muscle. And just like working out, you need to pace yourself -- approach hard work wisely and don't overdo it, even if you're enjoying it immensely.

I'm so glad my mom forced me to practice the piano - I wouldn't be the musician I am today without it... and I have no regrets about working hard at front-end web development. I owe my career in large part to the many hours I spent poring over JavaScript: The Definitive Guide and writing SPA web apps while others at my workplace were still using ASP and WebForms.

I don't think you've understood the article or you do not have the problems the author is having.

Disciplining myself is in a way like dealing with a child. If I force my inner child to do something it will resist, shut down, burn me out. The problem is I can't be creative if I can't convince my inner child that the activity we're doing is fun so I have to frame whatever work I'm doing in a playful way otherwise my inner child will go ”boooooooriiiiing” and either make me waste time on social media or, if I catch myself, battle me for control which is very tiring

I think they understand it, but maybe they believe that advice is misleading. If you are enjoying it and having fun, then you are in your comfort zone, and that means you are improving at a much lower rate than your potential. This is true for any activity, from physical fitness to academic pursuits.

If you are in zone dominated by System 1 thinking and System 2 is on pause, then you are not building skill. There is nothing wrong with having fun in life for things that are not critical to you, but your core areas are developed with effort and focus.

I have not met a single successful self-made person that found success without struggle and focus on their craft.

> This is true for any activity, from physical fitness to academic pursuits.

I don't think it's true for all activities. The author is a writer. I don't think you can grind story building or maybe you can but I doubt you will get anything actually good or creative out of it. Do you know of any painters that grind painting like you can grind exercise?

All this advice about discipline is good for stuff like keeping your house clean, going to the gym, sucking it up and doing your tasks that suck at big corp or any other task that sucks because it's boring or it physically hurts. It's boring because you already kind of know what needs to be done so there is no novelty to it, it doesn't need your creative input and if you are a creative person that sucks.

I care more about being satisfied with my life, getting pleasure out of it. That to me is being successful. I don't need a vacation home and a yacht or private jet so why would I grind and toil for extra money?

> Do you know of any painters that grind painting like you can grind exercise?

Do you think Leonardo got good enough to do the Sistine chapel by daubing a doodle or two when the mood took him?

You absolutely can and, to get good, must grind such things. Everyone knows this is true of musicianship; painting and writing are no different. (Maybe painters don't grind their technique as much nowadays as they once did, but the decline of technique in painting over time reflects that.)

As Picasso said: 'Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working'.

Maybe painting is not that great an example.

And maybe it's not either or, maybe when you're composing music or thinking about your new book or project you need to be in a creative state and that is very different from a grinding disciplined state that requires you to actually execute on your vision.

But I still hold that you can not ” grind” vision

"Vision" is what happens in your brain after you grind 10,000 hours on a skill that is improvable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eW6Eagr9XA

At that point, you no longer have to grind, because your brain has hardwired decision paths that are automatic and produce correct results for extremely complex problems like "is this character likeable and understandable by the reader", and you can effortlessly add a few high value paragraphs to their backstory. But it's foolhardy to think that level of "flow" can be achieved out of thin air, without writing hundreds of characters before them, re-reading them, getting feedback from other readers, studying other briliant authors with a eye for their technique etc.

I don't agree with the 10k hours bullshit popularized by Gladwell, google a bit about him and you will see he admitted that all his "non-fiction" books were actually insight porn more than teaching you anything useful. I liked his books too until I realized he just made up nice pop-culture stories and pretended to tell you the truth.

That said of course you have to have some level of practice and knowledge about whatever you want to create before you can be inspired to create something new. That doesn't mean you can be creative just because you've had practice. I remember Huberman and others talking about circadian rythms and how people are more creative at night, can't remember the exact reasons, might've been something about cortisol being lower then. I do believe cortisol levels are a hint as usually you are less creative on "uppers" like caffeine or adderall than you are without them because you always want to do things while on them and not actually think deeply about your problem.

You should really watch that video, it goes into great details, backed by scientific research, into how and when the 10,000 hours trope works and where it fails.

Creativity and skill are somewhat orthogonal, you can be an exceptionally well read and educated person yet never publish anything. But it's extremely unlikely you will create anything out of thin air without good technical skills. We like to to obsess about outliers like Beethoven, the deaf composer, but in reality the vast majority of famous musicians are recruited from accomplished instrumentalists.

Leonardo didn't do the Sistine chapel, he didn't even have the focus to finish the Mona Lisa and deliver it to his patron.

And yes, Leonardo was probably the occasional doodler, as he was the occasional inventor, scientist and horseshoe bender.

> Do you know of any painters that grind painting like you can grind exercise?

I think absolutely most of them do, at least in figurative painting (the kind of painting that tries to resemble reality).

>If you are enjoying it and having fun, then you are in your comfort zone, and that means you are _improving_ at a much lower rate than your potential. [...] If you are in zone dominated by System 1 thinking and System 2 is on pause, then you are not building _skill_.

[My emphasis on "improving" and "skill" to highlight a misinterpretation.]

I understand your point but you've still misinterpreted her essay. (This is mostly the author's fault because of her short title that tries to be contrarian and the long body of text that's not written forcefully enough to break the readers' preconceived about "discipline" that was shaped by hundreds of other essays about the same topic.)

Her particular essay is not about "doing work" or "improving skill". Yes, many other essays about "discipline" are intertwined with work+skill but that's not her essay's main idea.

An example of non-work non-skill activity she wrote about is the joy of being in bed. She's wondering if attaching the concept of "discipline" to "going to bed early" is sabotaging the brain from going to bed early. If she likes the sensation of being in bed, why doesn't she just go to bed?!? She then wonders if "discipline" brings out the inner rebellious child that makes pleasurable activities hard to start. That's the meta-analysis her essay is trying to convey.

> If you are enjoying it and having fun, then you are in your comfort zone, and that means you are improving at a much lower rate than your potential.

This is not obvious at all. Improvement is dependent on focused, deliberate practice, and being "in the zone" makes it easier to sustain such practice over time. Willpower is a scarce resource; it seems especially silly to waste it on things that can be successfully "gamified" or made enjoyable.

Play and exploration are not mutually exclusive, in fact they seem intertwined. Children discover by playing. Exploration and staying in your comfort zone do seem mutually exclusive however, I wouldn't think playing prevents you from learning or doing new stuff. Or that any kind of joy is actually detrimental to your personal development.

> Disciplining myself is in a way like dealing with a child.

Exactly! And while the entire person appears "self-disciplined" from the outside, it does not mean that the inner conversation between the adult and the child amounts to scolding the latter.

But not all (inner) children are born rebellious and maybe for some of them daily scolding does not lead to burnout. Who knows?

Rebelliousness is a concept about lining up with societal expectations. Perhaps some of us do our best creative work outside of those expectations. Why should we suppress that?

There’s more than one way to skin a cat. And sometimes the method that worked on one cat will all come undone another time.

Having said that the method that makes, to overly extend this macabre analogy, things feel like fun - seems like a more sustainable and wholesome ‘skin’

>The problem is I can't be creative if I can't convince my inner child that the activity we're doing is fun so I have to frame whatever work I'm doing in a playful way otherwise my inner child will go ”boooooooriiiiing”

Well, the key to life is that we also need to do things that we find "boring", and that no amount of sugar-coating would make them appear fun to us.

Not just in general as a society (e.g. menial hard jobs, etc) or for maintainance (e.g. brushing our teeth or doing the dishes), but also in our everyday personal life, and for personal development and relationship with others.

Doing only fun things, or only things we can convince ourselves are fun, is a recipe for failure...

Plus, even fun things, we often need to do beyond the fun amount, if we want to get good at them.

(For example, we might enjoy playing piano, and even practiving for a while each day, but we need to study beyond the enjoyable fun material and duration, if we want to became classical or jazz musicians).

> Well, the key to life is that we also need to do things that we find "boring", and that no amount of sugar-coating would make them appear fun to us.

A lot of successful "discipline" is merely a combination of sugar-coating and the sheer force of habit. If something actively feels "boring" to you, this is a signal that you're now drawing on your limited willpower, which should always be a last resort.

Ego-depletion theory has been running into some controversy in recent years, due to some failed experiments to measure it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_depletion

"Well, the key to life is that we also need to do things that we find "boring", and that no amount of sugar-coating would make them appear fun to us." Sounds like a mother that doesn't want to argue about clearing the dish washer. The key thing is to learn that all boring things should and can have a playful funny side and if you can't find them than you must make yourself one. So clearing the dishwasher can be playful with dancing and singing or as a game. That's why google gamified the boring crowd source activity of repairing the local search. The key is to cheat yourself a little bit.

>The key thing is to learn that all boring things should and can have a playful funny side

Not all. Life is not Marry Poppins 24/7.

But it can be if you want :)

Hey, I have no arguments with people over making hard things fun - that's great! The point is that those hard things get done well, one way or another.

Your perspective is great as long as it takes into account the fact that getting good at something, or achieving a major accomplishment, requires a lot of hard work - and that hard work is worth doing, even when setbacks and difficulties are encountered.

Effective, long-term hard work is most often done successfully by people who are enjoying a lot of it. Don't try to achieve mastery in a field you dislike!

This doesn’t sound like a realistic way to live your life.

For me, I have realized that I need to do many things that are hard/boring, and the key to motivating this action is by focusing on the completed product (“looking forward to where I’m going”) as opposed to enjoying every second of the activity (“moment by moment satisfaction”).

Whatever way you choose to make it easy for you to do it ... if you like the satisfaction at the end it's evenly good like making the way to the end more joyful.

There's a grain of truth to it.

Being too hard on yourself to the point where you're avoiding hard work because of the guilt is counter-productive.

It's productive to forgive yourself for messing up, then make realistic improvements. It's unproductive to just wallow in a lack of discipline, or to spend more time beating yourself up than actually making improvements, or to try to achieve impossible goals to make up for past mistakes.

I think a big problem with general advice is that a lot of people listen to the advice that isn't good for them, because that's the kind of advice they already follow (even though it's terrible for their situation). The partial solution is to think of yourself as a friend, and ask what you'd advise them - that cuts through a lot of the special pleading we make for ourselves.

That makes sense but in order for it to work like you say people should be applying self-discipline on things that are actually “good for humanity as a whole”.

It is quite challenging to know the full impact our actions. The best we can do is plan, hope, and adapt.

I think the best rule for life that I know of and that can apply to anyone is "love your neighbor as yourself": treat each person you run into as you'd like to be treated yourself, and when you're making decisions that will affect others (like users of your product) treat them like you'd want to be treated in your decisions.

Zooming out a bit, yes it is hard to know what's good for humanity as a whole. But I'd venture to say that the most valuable asset by far towards this end is the truth - get that at any cost.

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