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Comment by drannex | Hacker News Reader

To become wise, do everything, fuck up on most of it, and know what works and doesn't by direct experience.

I am a minimalist (Essentialist) by choice, but a maximalist regarding knowledge and experience. Try and do everything you can, that way you know what does and doesn't work. Done. Anything else is overly reductive. You can't know how to do anything if you do or experience close to nothing.

Leisure is good, I am a ferverent advocate of Veblen philosophy, but if you want to be wise use your leisure to do the maximum you can and want to do with that time. Leisure is different for everyone, reading, gaming, sitting on the beach, making art, but if you want to be /wise/ with your leisure you have to do everything you want to do! Focus a lot, or focus a little, you just have to do everything possible to fuck up as much as possible.

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If you are too busy, you will not think of the optimal solution to your intellectual problem.

I don’t know about other people, but I often have the experience of banging away at some problem for a few hours, then going away and not thinking about it for a while then a simple resolution pops into my mind without much effort.

Continuing to push hard when you aren’t getting any where on an intellectual puzzle isn’t always the best approach.

And there are some fields of inquiry where deep concentration and deep knowledge is useful. For instance, rather than recreating all the knowledge by your own trial and error you can read and then make truly novel mistakes.

When programming, and stuck, down time rarely gives me a technical solution but very often a “why the hell ya even working on that!” kind of solution. Which is often better!

That's often the best kind of insight you can gain from having a little distance between you and the problem.

As the Agile manifesto asks, maximize work not done.

> I often have the experience of banging away at some problem for a few hours, then going away and not thinking about it for a while then a simple resolution pops into my mind without much effort.

This phenomenon is explained by focused vs. diffused modes of thinking, which I first heard about in Learning How to Learn MOOC [0]. There are many popular articles on the Web explaining the concept.

[0] https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn

This looks like a real solid course, thanks for sharing!

> If you are too busy, you will not think of the optimal solution to your intellectual problem.

Yeah, lots of people have noticed that when their brain is not busy (taking walks, taking showers (/r/showerthoughts), in a hammock), they frequently come up with creative solutions to their problems - and at least one kind of leisure that GP mentioned (gaming) generally pretty strongly occupies your mind and prevents this exact kind of (uh, "diffuse"?) subconscious thinking.

>> Try and do everything you can

Ars longa, vita brevis [1]

While I agree that experience by doing is the way to learn, the thing is we have finite resources and time while the things which we want to do are infinite. Which means when you choose to do something you are choosing not to do something else - think of it as an opportunity cost.

And merely doing without reflection is also not useful - and one can also reflect on the deeds of others too so that one can learn without a direct harm to ourselves.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ars_longa%2C_vita_brevis

I believe it was Bismarck who said

"Fools learn from their mistakes. I prefer to profit from the mistakes of others."

That used to work for me when I was younger. Just power through it. Make all the mistakes yourself. Now I am older, and I prefer learning from the mistakes of others. I ain't got time for brute force.

So you used to build wisdom, but now that you are older you don't feel like you need to become wiser so you just take the easy route.

There is a reason all education depends on students trying and failing to solve problems, that is how we learn things properly. When you stop doing that you stop learning new things at a deeper level.

I look back, and I realize I wasted a lot of time on brute force, instead of just reading the docs, in many cases.

What you are describing in the opposite of wisdom - that's just perseverance.

When you try and fail you learn a lot about what failure looks like, and that helps you identify failure modes in production etc. It is just ignorance to think you could become as effective from just reading docs.

Note, I am not saying that it is unwise to read docs, but you don't become wise by reading docs, you become wise by making mistakes. Wisdom isn't built by following wise advice.

I often find reading about 1/3 of docs / books is optimal. After that practical experience becomes more beneficial. Then when you encounter problems, search for specific information to resolve the issues most relevant to your goals.

brute forcing is rarely the best solution to a problem.

the best solution usually involves studying the problem, dissecting it in smaller problems, finding a way to do the same thing brute force does, by doing much less (work smarter, not harder).

Which also means you have to slow down at first, to be faster when you encounter the same (or similar) problem again.

i.e. become wiser

I came here to say the exact same thing.

Maybe people who do nothing and think all day assume they are wise, but it's the other way around. Experienced people are wise.

Thinking alone just creates false assumptions in your head. It's the doing part that will teach you, it's life itself that will be your toughest teacher.

Doing without thinking first is a recipe for disaster, but often doing is required to confirm your thinking. And of course, it helps to think even more afterwards, see what else you can learn that you didn't think of beforehand. Doing without thinking is probably how most Darwin award winners are made

I would say doing without thinking is better than thinking without doing. I know plenty of successful people in the first group, and plenty of unsuccessful people in the second. But opinions might differ.

What do you define as successful? Purely by financial success or does it include a good work/family life balance with kids etc?

It includes everything that you mention. I know people who constantly read books about finances, health, relationships, ... . They are broke, health is terrible, depressions, ... . If they would just apply what they read, it would be fine. But they don't.

And then there are the 'sales type'-guys if you know what I mean. They just talk and do: have their finances more or less straight, have a family, lots of social connections, ... .

I agree that both thinking and doing is best (as hopefully most here are doing). But if I have to choose, I would choose doing over thinking.

> To become wise, do everything, fuck up on most of it, and know what works and doesn't by direct experience.

One needs to be deliberate on understanding what works and what doesn't, otherwise they'll keep doing the same mistakes. Being deliberate requires slowing down, in my experience.

Some days I really feel like I embody the "fuck up on most of it" part.

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