How To Be Fucking Awesome | Hacker News Reader

How To Be Fucking Awesome

gilesbowkett.blogspot.com

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I found this really interesting, because we covered this exact topic in a psychology course that I took while in university, and I think that it is often mis-quoted / mis-used. The conclusion that was drawn from scientific research was that the vast majority of experts all shared a common trait - they all had at least 10,000 hours of deliberate practice (not that anyone who practiced for 10,000 hours would definitely be an expert). Deliberate practice was defined as practice which: has a goal / task that relates to improved performance, there are explicit instructions as the the best methods of improvement, there is immediate feedback on the performance, and the person repeatedly performs these actions. Obviously his isn't leisurely practice like playing catch in your backyard if you're a baseball player. The experts also didn't practice for 1 hour per day for 30 years like someone in the comments mentioned; the average was about 4 hours per day if I remember correctly. The research had also noted (much like the Matt Maroon article) that this does not mean, for example, that ANYBODY can play in the NBA. What they are really pointing out is that those who are in the NBA probably had at least 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. They also noted that some fields of expertise (such as the NBA) have built-in physical constraints (ex: height) which must be considered. Their study actual dealt with the field of music (violin playing, specifically) which has fewer constraints than something like basketball, and the results were significant.

In short, practice is necessary but not sufficient for awesomeness.

In particular, this implies: "If you have not practiced, then you are not awesome."

So to be awesome at X, you need:

1) some natural talent for X, varies based on the field

2) a love for X that will allow you to practice for 10,000 hours

3) the discipline to make 10,000 hours of your practice deliberate

I was struck a few years ago by an interview with an olympic athlete. She was asked how she found the discipline to keep a grueling practice schedule. She answered that what many see as discipline is actually passion.

If you're having trouble finding discipline, the answer may lie in finding a way to love what you're doing more.

This is very important. Having the iron discipline to work very hard for a long time at something you don't really like, in order to achieve some unrelated goal (for example getting rich) is also known as obsessive-compulsive disorder. The worst thing is that this approach sometimes works - I have met guitar virtuouses who definitely have this disorder. But if it's at the expense of your well-being, it is probably not worth it.

There is a lot of this in the startup community. I'm pretty sure the early life of Cisco is a pretty good example, but unsuccessful instances are all around you.

"1) some natural talent for X, varies based on the field"

No. The trend in the research is that "natural talent" is a MYTH. It does not exist.

Agree or disagree, I don't care, but as a summary of my post, your comment is inaccurate.

"They also noted that some fields of expertise (such as the NBA) have built-in physical constraints (ex: height) which must be considered."

Mugsy Bogues.

I fondly remember his days playing for the Hornets. But he's the exception, not the rule.

Practice makes perfect.

No, practice makes permanent.

practice perfect makes perfect

I believe it's "perfect practice makes perfect."

Another equally important thing is choosing your battles: you have to not only work hard, but work hard at the right things.

I could practice basketball for 10,000 hours, but there's no way I could do it professionally. You have to figure out what your natural abilities are, and work hard in those areas.

And be sure to avoid confusion 'natural abilities' with talents. I agree with aneesh that you shouldn't focus on something that you are inferior at genetically - obviously a seven foot tall guy will be better at basketball and a normal sized person if both play professionally - but make sure you don't give up by saying, "I can't seem to do very well at this one thing. Eh, I suppose it's just not a natural ability."

Spud Webb is only 5'6" tall. He played in the NBA for 13 years and won the 1986 slam dunk contest with a "180-degree reverse two-handed strawberry jam."

He was better than all the seven-feet-tall guys in that contest in 1986.

Assessing potential is hard. For example, one might assume that "height" is a phenotypical requirement for being an elite basketballer. But Webb proved that assumption is incorrect.

You'll likely make similar mistakes assessing your own potential. So why bother? Do what you love and let the chips fall where they may.

I met a guy one time who did what he loved for most of his life--he played the piano. Despite practicing for 8 hours a day for years, he still wasn't good enough to be a professional performer. (His situation is not uncommon, apparently). Now he's close to middle age, broke and bitter.

So yeah, let those chips fall where they may, unless they end up turning your life into shit.

PG's advice comes co mind: "Stay upwind". Playing basketball or the piano is not upwind, so it might be wise to forgo those things even if you love them.

I think the case you mention is more about having reasonable expectations than staying upwind.

If you're studying as a musician and targeting symphonic performance as a career goal, you need to realize that you're going into a field which maybe has a couple dozen job positions open up per year world wide. Being the 200th best clarinet player in the world, despite being statistically very impressive, means that you still won't be able to work as professional symphonic performer.

On the other hand, if you set that as a nice-to-have goal, but are fine working as a studio musician or teacher, it becomes a much more attainable goal.

Fortunately, as a software developer, even if you're only one of the top several thousand you have a pretty big chance of doing impressive stuff.

My sister is about to finish a degree in music from a decent conservatory, but I'm glad she decided to double major half-way through. She's very good, but she doesn't have what it takes to be competitive in a race for maybe a dozen open positions every year for her instrument.

Anomalies aren't evidence.

The strawberry jam was awesome though:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-IoInRUjDM

Anomalies aren't necessarily evidence but in this case, and in many important general cases anomalies can be critically important evidence.

He and his career constitute evidence that "height" is not a requirement to be an elite basketball player. It's definitional and not arguable.

In science today's "anomaly" is sometimes the evidence that leads to tomorrow's breakthrough.

It's not a requirement but there's a massive correlation between the two.

It's just like when people say they shouldn't worry about monetizing because of Google.

We are discussing prediction of success. Noticing one or two characteristics thought to be shared by the successful is really quite useless; most people with those characteristics do not succeed.

Most tall people suck at basketball. Some elite basketball players are short. The fact that most elite basketball players are tall does not really help us write our basketball-success-prediction algorithm. People dedicate their careers to solving this problem. It is very hard.

Since this is hard and likely to yield garbage results anyway, and most likely only leads to worry, time-wasting and excuse-making don't bother with these thoughts. Instead, erase every doubt from your mind, get in the long boat, row west and find Valhalla. (Given Google somehow came up I had no choice but to bring Valhalla into the discussion.)

The average height of an NBA basketball players is over 6' 6''. This helps us with our predictors of success. Sure there are other variables, but knowing this is very helpful especially if you had never watched an NBA game before.

Source: http://www.nba.com/news/survey_height_2006.html

If you practiced basketball for 10,000 hours then you would be fucking awesome, regardless of having a contract.

The right things don't exist... or have we already forgotten the whole "do what you love" concept?

Loving what you do is necessary, but not sufficient.

What you do should be at the intersection of what you love and what you're good at.

How do you know you're good at something a priori without spending the 10,000 hours to find out empirically?

You do what statisticians do ... take a small sample and estimate.

Spend 20 hours each doing 10 different things, and then pick 2-3 of them to spend 200 hours doing. Then pick the one. While it may take 10,000 hours to be truly awesome, you can probably get a sense of being "good" at something in a much smaller amount of time.

You wouldn't be "fucking awesome at basketball, even after 10000 hours of practice if you were crippled, pushing 90, blind or disadvantaged in a number of other ways. It's not an easy truth to accept, but the playing field is not level and while the human will is capable of amazing feats, there are limits.

If you had spent 10,000 hours practicing basketball you would probably be better than anyone you know at the game. Granted if your short or old there are limits but a tiny fraction of the populous really focus on getting better for 10,000 hours.

I think the difference between athletic and intellectual endeavors is that the genetic factors necessary for reaching the highest levels are fairly well-understood, and also known to be very rare. By contrast, we don't know how rare potential great writers or programmers are; they might be fairly common. If there is a natural basis for greatness in these fields, we don't have any way of testing for it.

Time and awesomeness is a correlation, not cause and effect. Sure, talent and time help, but the key ingredient is passion. Without it, you've got a long, painful road ahead of you. With it, you can climb mountains. .

The article gives Bill Gates as an example. According to the article, Gates is a great programmer because he sat in front of the computer for seven years. But Gladwell has it backwards... Gates sat in front of a computer for seven years because he had a passion for programming and that's what lead him to be great.

If you get 3 solid hours of work (work you could, if you were being paid hourly, bill for) on something you're doing in a day, you'd accumulate your 10,000 hours in about 9 years, assuming you get 3 hours in every single day of the year. That's unrealistic, so bump it up to 10 years.

This has been brought up before: http://norvig.com/21-days.html

Wait, wait, wait. Bill Gates didn't program ANYTHING (at least not anything of note). He bought DOS, which made his fortune, and it was his connections through his mother which helped him in the deal with IBM.

You /can/ be awesome with practice. But Bill Gates isn't an example. (And, yes, I know he wrote an early Basic interpreter, but he was also considered a mediocre programmer by many who knew him.)

Sorry, he's not a mediocre programmer. I knew him in college and he was darned good. We took the same grad CS courses as undergrads together, and he did well.

you can call billg an awesome businessman, after all it takes a lot to be the richest man on earth. I haven't heard much about his programming skills, so I don't think he was a great programmer.

exactly. And he didn't spend 10,000 hours practicing business.

I'm not trying to be snarky by pointing this out; I'm trying clarify that, while we should remember that in order to be great, we require dedication, effort and patience, the example chosen of Bill Gates shows that, sadly, this is often irrelevant.

Microsoft was founded in 1975. 10k hours is 5 years of 40 hour weeks. I think it's fair to say that he was working more than 40 hour weeks, so by the time MS rose to dominance, he'd almost certainly spent over 10k hours at it.

Gates was brilliant because of his business decisions in which m$ partner up with IBM and dominated the PC operating system market. He was also brilliant in taking the risk in dropping out of Harvard and starting a business with Paul Allen. Gates is not famous for his coding skills. His coding ability is just one part of the foundation that led to his success.

Need to season this with a little http://mattmaroon.com/?p=583

4 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, you will be fucking awesome.

No. At 4 hours a day, you'll need 2500 days. [6.8 years]

If you did it full time (40 hours a week), you'll supposedly be fucking awesome in 4.8 years.

If this were true, I should be an awesome programmer. But I know I am not yet one. Far from it. So I call bullshit. (Some popular 'fucking awesome' programmers for reference: Steve Yegge, RMS, John Resig)

"Finally, deliberate practice is an effortful activity that can be sustained only for a limited time each day during extended periods without leading to exhaustion (effort constraint). To maximize gains from long-term practice, individuals must avoid exhaustion and must limit practice to an amount from which they can completely recover on a daily or weekly basis." (K. Anders Ericsson)

"A number of training studies in real life have compared the efficiency of practice durations rangingfrom 1-8 hr per day.These studiesshowessentiallyno benefit from durations exceeding 4 hr per day and reduced benefits from practice exceeding 2 hr (Welford, 1968; Woodworth & Schlosberg, 1954). Many studiesof the acquisition oftyping skill (Baddeley & Longman, 1978; Dvorak et al.. 1936) and other perceptual-motor skills (Henshaw& Holman, 1930) indicate that the effective duration of deliberate practice may be closer to 1hr perday." (K. Anders Ericsson)

projects.ict.usc.edu/itw/gel/EricssonDeliberatePracticePR93.pdf

I consider myself to have about 1.5-2 hours of "genius" per day. I don't know if it really is genius, but during it, I'm operating at an intellectual level where I feel that I'm really making progress, and am able to grasp things, formulate clear questions and goals, and notice new connections.

After that time, my own thoughts start to elude capture, as if someone else's dream...

I can work longer, but I need to have a structured task - i.e. that doesn't require original thought, but is just a slog.

It's great to have a study to support my experience, and encourage me to value and nurture this "genius" time, with recovery time and activities.

EDIT at 1 hour per day, 10,000/365 = 27.4 years; say 30 years. If you are blessed with a naturally stronger constitution, enabling you to do 3 hours per day, you could do it in 10.

http://projects.ict.usc.edu/itw/gel/EricssonDeliberatePracti...

Ok, I have no idea how I came up with the 365 days instead of 52 weeks.

Are you really spending that much time trying to get better or are you mostly doing the same things over and over again. One of my favorite sayings: "I don't want someone that has the same year of experience repeated 10 times I want 10 different years of experience."

PS: If your in the top 5% of coders most people will consider you fucking awesome.

I've been coding since I was 11 (like many people here). I am 29 now. I'd say that I've been trying to get better than myself all the time. I don't think one would do the same things again and again unless it is a sad day job.

All I am saying is that may be 10,000 hours is not enough.

Ok, I am 28 and I started coding at 8 (my father was a programmer) but I don't think I really spend more than 100 hours coding before 12, and 1500 by 18, in collage I may have added 2000 hours of real effort, but once I started working I have spent little time learning and more time jumping though hoops. I just started working with the J2EE / Spring / Hibernate world and within 200 hours of effort it seems fairly easy and it's mostly grunt work at this point in time.

So while I am still closing in on those 10,000 hours it's going to take a lot more stretching for me to get there. There was plenty of time I could have spent getting better, but I have written ASM, high and low level networking code, Multi-threaded Apps, desktop apps, code parsers, scientific number crunchers, websites, and mostly I just wonder why other people find it hard.

I don't think of my self as Fucking Awesome but I do think I am close to that point.

Cool!

It's 10000 hours of deliberate practice, not mere activity, that's necessary according to this theory. Deliberate practice requires that you're constantly challenging yourself and attacking more ambitious goals. The conversion ratio on paid work for very few jobs is anywhere close to 1.0; a job where it's 0.5 would generally be considered excellent.

I understand. I was not talking about 'day job' type of hours. However I agree that I may not have put in 10k hours of intensive coding.

I can't believe it took me so much time to notice:

365 days a year already includes 7 days a week. So you'd actually need 27.4 hours of practice a day to make it in a year.

Short and sweet read says... if you want to be awesome. Put it time. I believe it.

I agree.

If you believe it takes 10,000 hours to become Fucking Awesome, it will take 10,000 hours to become Fucking Awesome. Of course it must take many hours of practice at a given activity, but 10,000 is just a number (and Fucking Awesome is vaguely defined).

There is one important thing: some of those hours should come before certain age. For many disciplines/fields it is under 18 and for almost all it is certainly 25. In other words, if you start practicing basketball at age 37, you are not going to make it to NBA even if you put in 20000 hours of deliberate practice. While this principle seems obvious for largely physical pursuits, it holds true for purely mental fields, as well, be it chess, programming or piano playing.

Flagged: it's a fun little post, but it's repeating the key claim that Gladwell made in his new book, which appears here in 3 other top-page stories right now, and it's not adding anything new other than the title.

those are reasons not to upmod it, but I thought the flag was for spam. do I misunderstand? am I to flag everything I consider a waste of time??

I flag anything that makes me think, "I could have spent those X minutes/seconds of my life reading something worthwhile." This screams of a plug for Gladwell's book, which may well be worth reading, but doesn't really offer anything interesting beyond "Bill Gates spent lots of hours programming and made a successful software company so practice a lot."

Well, yeah, duh.

Your summary didn't match with what I read in the NYTimes article. The point seemed to be that people have advantages in certain endeavors that are not attributable to their skill or talent. Bill Gates is a offered as a case of someone who had the advantage of privileged access to and time on computing systems (which is not a knock on his genius). Another case cited has to do with age cutoffs for Canadian youth hockey leagues. Basically, anyone born right before the cutoff tends to be the older, bigger, stronger kid in that bracket and this advantage increases over time. They practice, yes, but they also have a significant advantage stemming from a factor totally outside of their influence. The other point being that you can analyze these factors and reduce that influence, supposing you wanted to do that.

I think your assessment of what the book offers is actually more of an assessment of what Giles zeroed in on. I'm not defending the book--I have no interested since the concept can be summed up in a twitter post--but thought I'd point out that I think there's a different thesis at work.

I have no interested since the concept can be summed up in a twitter post

You can summarize anything in a Twitter post: any concept, no matter how complex. Gladwell's advantage is that he tells really fascinating stories that explore his ideas in a real-world context.

I think that TDavis was trying to say was what I wanted to say, but he said it more concisely: this post wasn't really saying anything interesting. It was essentially saying "If you want to be fucking awesome, practice a lot." There wasn't very much more quantitative than that.

I don't know. I very rarely flag things. But today, for whatever reason, Hacker News seems flooded with extremely similar articles. Today is Gladwell Day. And this post didn't seem to be adding anything relevant to the conversation. I saw it as spam. But it's still here, so I guess my flag wasn't a good one.

this is why these sites are doomed, dude. any site built on this model of news dissemination is doomed. putting out a flag button makes your site vulnerable to the tragedy of the commons. it's in everybody's group interest to only flag spam, but it's in everybody's personal interest to flag anything they don't want to see again. these sites are so intrinsically vulnerable to tragedies of the commons that we might as well call them sheep pastures.

they make the same mistake here that everybody else makes with tagging. if you look at the research on tagging, the big tagging success story was delicious - which leveraged SELF-INTEREST in its tagging system and produced a useful public resource as an emergent byproduct. this is not coincidence! read James Surowiecki. seriously. economics 101 for social software.

leveraging independent self-interest is THE key factor which differentiates the wisdom of crowds from the stupidity of groupthink. "the wisdom of crowds" is really just a reiteration of adam smith's invisible hand. to create an invisible hand effect, you must leverage independent self-interest within a shared context where independent self-interested actions are visible to other independent self-interested agents.

every tagging system that fails to leverage self-interest fails to capture that. you can't just sprinkle magic web 2.0 fairy dust on something and go "Tagging!" if you want delicious results, you have to find out what made delicious work and emulate that. what made delicious work was a fundamental principle of economics. the reason so many sites have useless tags is that their makers are ignoring this fundamental principle. it's cargo cult site design.

similarly, this flagging nonsense flat-out ignores another basic fundamental of economics. what makes it even more insane is that Paul Graham already explained in one of his first blog posts about Bayesian filtering exactly why spam filters should be tuned to an individual's preferences and not to a group's. if you had a bunch of individually-tuned spam filters, you could find a way to leverage that. since you have a group-tuned spam filter, you have nothing but a tragedy of the commons magnet.

anyway, just ranting about why Hacker News should hurry up and cease to exist already.

edit: just for the record I'm responding to Reg's comment. I don't know if that's clear from the UI. it is a non sequitur rant, but it's not a complete non sequitur rant.

if u buy that 10% improvement by 10x effort and mapping the 10000 hours:

10000 -> 99.9% 1000 -> 99% 100 -> 90%

100 hrs is about 13 weeks (a quarter) of 3 uni 1hr credits + 1.5hr practice = 13 * 3 * (1 + 1.5)

if u take deliberate practice as vector, that's only the magnitude part

the direction part is what to study and that ends up being more important

given a constraint of 100 hrs, a nonprogrammer will end up becoming more productive studying lisp compared to java

but of course, to say such programmer is 90% better than average is too much :D ... and controversial

You do realize that spending one hour daily to get good at something would still require almost 30 years, right? I love the post though. Thanks.

I think the point is that you spend much more than one hour a day at it.

Agreed. I felt like doing some math. :) Anyway, one hour a day is what many of us have to pursue other personal goals different from work, family, etc.

> one hour a day is what many of us have to pursue other personal goals different from work, family, etc.

Perhaps this lifestyle precludes being "fucking awesome"?

I'm certainly betting my wife finds me "fucking awesome" for bringing food back home, and no worries. :)

What would be your definition of being "fucking awesome"?

'I'm certainly betting my wife finds me "fucking awesome"'

In this case, the literal meaning of the phrase could be quite applicable, and well worth devoting 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to the cause.

That reminds me of Peter Norvig: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years.

Let me add: Don't waste your time reading books about trivial topics.

how would someone do "deliberate practice" with programming anyway? Music, basketball etc involve "body memory" where repetitions of identical movements help. This seems to be fundamentally different from programming.

I am guessing programming "practice" would involve writing more ambitious programs? where would the feedback come from?

I explained this in my blog a few posts ago. You write programs to focus on some particular aspect of your programming that you want to make better. I think it should be obvious. You use functional programming idioms - write programs that have using functional programming idioms well as their only purpose. You use regular expressions - write programs that only exist to make you better at regular expressions. In other words write a bunch of regular expressions and make them as good as you can.

In the Ruby community we have the Ruby Quiz. I'm pretty sure that's copied from some other community, I think Perl. Every programming language community has practices of this nature.

It's absurd to suggest that deliberate practice has anything to do with body memory intrinsically. How many times will you write a regular expression in your life? There's no element of repetition there? The literature on deliberate practice cites Mozart, Bobby Fischer, and Bill Gates. Body memory has nothing to do with it.

The feedback comes from sharing with others, as in the Ruby Quiz, or benchmarking your code, or posting it on a blog. Another form of feedback would be seeing if your programs run at all. ;-)

"It's absurd to suggest that deliberate practice has anything to do with body memory intrinsically. "

Since no one actually made that claim - the intrinsically part that is - ..... :)

Anyone read the new Malcolm Gladwell book that this is based on? Is it any good? A lot of his books seem half-finished. He points out something (Blink: your intuition is more powerful than you realize, and not well-understood) but never gets around to explaining why the phenomenon exists.

Is this one worth reading?

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