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Comment by arthurofbabylon | Hacker News Reader

Author here. I wrote this after listening to my girlfriend's neice describing her decision-making process as she completes schoolwork, applies for jobs, cultivates her craft, learns life lessons, has adventures. It occurred to me that she was overvaluing a single assignment for a single needy professor, at the expense of many superior opportunities. She has a lot going on – how can she maximize her opportunity? This micro-essay is my attempt at understanding the position and abstracting it, both for my benefit and others'. I would love for readers to help improve my thinking and shed light on any blindspots.

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One thing I don't see mentioned is taking pride in your work. I see my work as an extension of myself, and I want it to be as good as possible. I could hustle and shit out a bunch of hack jobs that are "good enough", but I can't take pride in that. Also obviously I have to make compromises to get stuff done, but my fear is that by being okay with hack jobs that I lose the ability to produce polished work. When given the time I will always opt to do polished work.

Excellent point.

Being proud of your work doesn't make it better.

Expertise is applying the right amount of effort at the right time in the right place.

It is developed by the long slog of being good enough many many times, because feedback matters.

Good enough requires focus on the actual problem and avoids being proud of something that doesn't solve it.

Never said it made it better. Expertise is also having a deep understanding of a topic and being able to apply it. And you actually need to apply the feedback, not just passively absorb it. "Good enough" isn't "ideal", or "A", or "You're promoted!"

I noticed you didn’t say pride in your work would make it better. That’s why pride in one’s work is shit as a road to expertise. It triggers defending one’s honor and makes criticisms personal.

I like the essay. I find your context here helpful and I actually think it makes your point stronger. It contextualizes it with a real-world example. You might want to consider adding this context in a footnote at the end of your essay.

Thanks for adding this context.

Does your neice have competing opportunities where polishing actually blocks out?

My experience is that I don’t have 5 things I could do if I end with good enough. I rarely have 5 assignments due at the same time. So if I polish something, I’m actually just losing time that I would have spent on some marginal activity like tv, reading, etc.

It also is hard to evaluate opportunity and value, especially ahead of time. So focusing on a single experience rather than trying to increase quantity of experience may result in a lower level of impact than just polishing a single item.

Great point – how do we know when something is worth focusing on? I usually use enthusiasm for signal, but I am sure there is an effective rational approach as well.

In the case of my gf's neice, she is in an exploratory phase with a truly incredible amount of high-quality opportunities right in front of her. Losing attention/time to something low value would be "high cost," by my assessment.

Whether or not something is worth polishing is context dependent, so the context you’re giving here is pretty crucial, and the essay suffers without it.

When I write docs for my small team, I’m pretty lazy about it. If I write docs for a new joiner, I put in more work. If I write docs for external users, I’m both careful and I seek external review!

What comes to mind are the exceptions.

Writing for example, is often as much about the polish applied after initial drafting is done. Perhaps for an academic assignment in a class, that's not a big deal, but it would be a huge deal for... marketing copy, fiction writing, scientific papers, journalistic reporting, screen-writing... etc.

The other possibility, where asking for polish is an attempt to be helpful, not a power-play, is where the professor is attempting to train the student to produce better work in the field of speciality of the professor. This is actually part of the professor's job. In that case, it would be unreasonable to attribute malice, and instead it should be considered a simple case of two people optimizing for different things.

My interpretation is that school is a not a great place to learn how to act in the real world. In particular, school is way more hierarchical and command-and-control than the real world.

You might be too effective of a fiction writer, because many of us thought you were the actual student with authentic indignation (whether justified was for us to determine).

I’m going to ask an inappropriate personal question:

Did your niece recently choose to spend time on her schoolwork versus spending time with her family?

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