Comment by jack_pp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jack_pp | Hacker News Reader

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> 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).

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