Do ten times as much (2023)

This is the unfortunate truth, and it highly bothers me. I started college pretty terribly but had a few friends who excelled. They finished before me and when the situation got dire I simply emulated what they were doing and "magically" got on their same level. It was just a question of work, constant and focused work. Not to mention that the more I worked on the material the more I got interested in it (I did many other things but this reply is not an essay on academic excellence).

After graduation I started reflecting on my experience and I soon realized that in my first years from an outsider's point of view I was indistinguishable from the mass of bored, passive students that crowded the classrooms every day, and yet I managed to escape the invisible prison and rose to the very top.

Is what I did something that would have produced the same results if applied to the majority of the students I initially appeared so similar to? This is the question that haunts me. Do most people in a certain field remain in mediocrity because they are mediocre by nature? Or is it because deep down they aren't actually interested and driven but are too scared to admit it to themselves? Or is it because nobody has taught them the truth about hard work?

Personally I believe (without much evidence) in the latter. I like to think that that silent majority of mediocre students truly wanted to graduate and would have done so with straight As if they faced the reality of the hard work they needed to do. I like to believe, perhaps too optimistically, that the bell curve of performance is not a statistical reality of the world but something that can be skewed to the right.

The key lesson here is not the amount of effort to do something, but rather being clear eyed about what your priorities really are.

Want to be an okay programmer because you want to have a rich life outside of work? Great! That is a totally valid life choice, but don't think you can be great without putting in the work.

I've seen several peers become way wealthier than I will ever be. Some of it was luck, to be sure, but a huge part of it was grinding and hard work and focus.

A way to steal ten times as much from foreign language learning, especially for languages with orthography that matches spoken language, is what they call "extensive reading."

After you get Spanish verb conjugations memorized, for example, all you need is a dictionary to read. Reading an hour or two a day is powerful immersion - you'll notice yourself looking at the dictionary less and less, and the material that you're reading becoming more and more like the material you read in your first language. After a while you'll realize that you haven't looked up a word/phrase in days, and that you're annoyed when English language results come up when you know the coverage is better in your target language. You'll have your 2000 hours in a couple of years.

This reads like standard "rise and grind" Hustle Culture. [Doing more | Working harder | Busting more ass] might help, but doesn't necessarily lead to success. You can do everything right and still fail, just like you also can accidentally blunder into success. You can buckle down and practice programing for 10 years and just not end up good at it, while someone else might wing it for a year in a bootcamp and be great. Life isn't fair or deterministic.

These articles really need to at least acknowledge the outsized role that luck and chance play.

There’s a few things that usually need to come together in various ratios for success - hard work, efficiency, talent, and luck. A person can still be successful with any single trait, but it’s less likely. What’s more, with multiple traits, the additional advantage is multiplicative.

Hard work and efficiency are the two that are most easily under our own immediate control, though talent can be developed over time. (Some might argue luck to be a thing that’s made, but I’m using luck as purely uncontrollable outside influences.)

If you already in the path of _seriously_ learning something, there's nothing new here.

But also there's this interesting and imho the most important part of the article that I learned the hard way:

>> immersion is the best method of foreign language acquisition

If you really want to deeply learn X (language, music, instrument, martial arts), you need to immerse yourself. Learn the history, the culture, you name it.

He's not wrong. Of course, it depends on how well you want to learn something. Just to mess around a bit? Or really seriously?

Just as an example: I learned German from zero, at the age of 30ish. It was serious, because I was moving to a German speaking country. After an intro college course (with extra tutoring) to get the basics, I moved. Then I took two 2-hour private lessons per day, plus homework, plus watching TV and generally living there.

On the other hand, just for kicks, I took weekly Spanish lessons, plus a bit of Internet practice.

I'm fluent in German. I can read a bit of Spanish, if it's simple.

Meh, more productivity porn. There are only so many hours in a day, so doing 10x as much isn't realistic, unless you sacrifice other things.

I suppose the lesson is to figure out what non-essentials you're willing to sacrifice and set realistic goals that won't affect your health.