Look Where You're Headed | Hacker News Reader

Look Where You're Headed

blog.quinefoundation.com

61 pointsironmagma43 comments

> It doesn't seem like it should matter where you look when doing something unrelated to your eyeballs, such as making a salad, or riding a bike. After all, the eyes move independent of the rest of the body, right? So why is it relevant where we look when lifting a weight, if all the other parts of the body are moving properly?

Prompts to “look straight ahead” and such in a gym context are usually so you maintain the correct position of your neck and avoid injury.

that’s what the author said a bit further down.

> And if you look straight down while lifting a weight, your back and neck will do bad things they were never supposed to do.

The lesson here is the other way around: you go where you look. The author's own bike example says that and it's a standard lesson in driving school (hence "eyes on the road"). You do it while lifting bc when you look straight ahead you adopt what turns out to be the right posture for lifting (it's symmetrical and "straight" so that your lift will be symmetrical too).

This property was used amusingly in Neal Stephenson's novel "Zodiac": since drivers steer where they look, wearing bright, high-viz clothing while cycling increases the chance you will be hit by a car. Thus the only way to cycle safely in Boston is to use the "ninja approach to biking": no reflectors, paint everything black (no shiny rims, crank, etc), wear only black clothes, and no helmet so you can hear danger approaching.

Author here. Thanks for reading! The idea was to show that if we are intentional about what we look at, it can optimize our lives.

Even outside of the context of sports, sometimes we can knock out 1.5 goals instead of 1 goal just by focusing on the 1 but in a slightly different way than if we didn’t know about goal 2.

> and no helmet so you can hear danger approaching

This part was from Snow Crash, and was a bit of wisdom from Uncle Enzo about Vietnam. Zodiac had nothing to say about bike helmets - which, it should be obvious, don't block your ears at all.

Please wear a helmet when riding your bicycle.

But feel free to assume that every car on the road is out to kill you. Some of them are.

Not sure about the "life lesson" here, but it's definitely a good tip for surfing. You will tend to go where you look. So, if you're trying not to hit somebody paddling, don't look at them! And if you want to do a cutback or something, step 1 is look where you want to go.

> You will tend to go where you look.

Taught in driving/motorcycling schools:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Target_fixation

Same principle for mountain biking. If you focus on the tree on the left and try to avoid it you end up clipping the tree on the right. You should be "aware" of the obstacles but you look ahead and focus on following the easiest line.

I like this a lot. My dad had told me something similar at a kart race when we were at a much bigger track - he wanted me to look all the way to the turn instead of just in front of me. I've used that since as it is so easy to waste time over correcting along the way when you aim wrong.

This seems like “choose the straight line from point A to point B”. A lot of things in life and work are uncertain. In reality, we often lose our way, and learn valuable things in the process.

The personal trainer type to me sounds a bit like a regimented-thinking military type. Every marine, or soldier of any kind is taught and tries to live the “look straight ahead” way.

If it’s another way of saying “focus harder on the task at hand” - thats surely relevant… that is a kind of a limited scope dictum. But surely critical to effectiveness.

I have always reshaped this thought to be the destination remains the same, the paths are variable.

> The personal trainer type to me sounds a bit like a regimented-thinking military type. Every marine, or soldier of any kind is taught and tries to live the “look straight ahead” way.

nah, it's because looking straight ahead (or, when doing squats, slightly vertically above straight ahead) keeps the neck and upper back arched and supportive. looking down rounds it over.

true. Posture is all important in gym activity.

How we perceive the world and how we act in it are intertwined in ways we are only beginning to understand, upending centuries of philosophical assumptions about human cognition.

Matt Crawford discusses this theme at length in "The World Beyond your Head" which I highly recommend:

> This brings up another uncanny fact about motorcycle steering: the bike goes wherever your gaze is focused. Most important, if your eyes lock on some hazard in the road, you will surely hit it. This is not a superstitious motorcyclist’s version of Murphy’s Law; it is a reliable fact, and it reveals something deep about the “intentionality” of our prereflective sensorimotor negotiation of the world. Inhabiting the kind of bodies that we do, our gaze and our locomotion are connected in ways that work for us, and we don’t have to think about it. But this accomplished integration becomes a liability when riding a motorcycle, and must be deliberately short-circuited. You have to learn to unlock your eyes as quickly as possible from every hazard, and instead look where you want to go.

This is a very important tip if you ride motorcycles. Look at where you want to go, not what you want to avoid.

When you have a startup, you have to look towards where the growth and money will happen. Stop paying attention to other stuff as much.

That isn’t always clear though. If you rewind 5 years, the answer to that question would probably be something like self driving cars. 3 years ago it might have been crypto. Now it’s AI. But you can’t build a company by hype, as it won’t last. You need to make an actual bet on what the priorities will be in the future.

You don't need to predict the newest and hottest trend to make a startup. You just have to make customers happy. You can literally do any industry.

Is there a "bespoke life and career advice" LLM yet?

You go where you look. If you keep staring at the tree you're trying to avoid, you'll hit it. I feel like this is what happened to the US in 2016: we kept staring at Trump and couldn't figure out what else to look at.

Who takes care of the other stuff, then? Because a corollary is "ignore the trash that others more influential than you have put out there."

Someone will have to pick up the pieces later. It may be you, or it may be someone whose desired heading corresponds to those other things. If we are talking about value creation, we have to acknowledge there will be externalities we create while creating value. Those will sometimes be good (more opportunity) and sometimes be bad (crappy projects). The hope is that there is more good than bad, otherwise we have a failing startup on our hands.

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