You only get one chance to be a beginner | Hacker News Reader

You only get one chance to be a beginner

37signals.com

41 pointsilldave18 comments

But until then, you’re in a magical position to make great strides. To propose radical solutions, deliberately ignorant ideas that just might be brilliant.

A more general opportunity is the opportunity to document misconceptions. I'm in the process of learning Clojure, and it's the little misconceptions that hang you up. But just a little change in perspective in how you see things can totally unstuck you.

Documenting those little changes in perspective, those little ah-ha moments, could really help future travelers.

I've been recording them as much as possible, noting the "the one thing/sentence that I could have told my future self that would have helped me understand it" (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3998679). Being able to view a collection of everyone's would be enlightening.

Do you have those up anywhere? I'm also learning Clojure, and would find that very useful.

Agreed. That would be a nice resource :)

Not yet -- I'll work on putting those up somewhere. Until then, I can tell you this: Stuart Halloway's "Programming Clojure" (http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Clojure-Stuart-Halloway/dp...) is the best book (I've read through them all).

Stu works alongside Rich so he understands Clojure at a deep level, but he's still in tune to the beginner's mind and is able to clearly explain concepts and provide the context you need for the ideas to resonate.

I think that's a really good point.

You may only get one chance to be a beginner, but you can cultivate "Beginners Mind" or "Shoshin" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoshin)

Edit: "Saadat A. Khan suggests that "Beginner's mind embodies the highest emotional qualities such as enthusiasm, creativity, zeal, and optimism. If the reader reflects briefly on the opposites of these qualities, it is clear to see that quality of life requires living with beginner's mind. With beginner's mind, there is boundlessness, limitlessness, an infinite wealth."

Reminds me of Neil Gaiman's recent commencement speech at the University of the Arts. I definitely recommend checking it out if this little tidbit of advice from 37signals was inspiring at all.

EDIT: forgot to link to the speech: https://vimeo.com/42372767

That commencement speech was awesome, but I really wish 37s would take a break from blogging for a while. They jumped the shark like 2 years ago when they stopped saying new things.

You're behind the times. We jumped the shark seven years ago: http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/have_we_jumped_the_shark.....

It would be awesome to collect some concrete examples of complete beginners coming in with revolutionary ideas - both in business and coding.

Examples? Data? That might stem the flow of rubbish fifteen-sentence posts coming out of 37signals these days. Long on philosophizing and short on substance. Like the one the other day that basically shat all over capitalism at a very basic level (a worthy enterprise, perhaps) without offering up any actual arguments or alternatives (booo).

How about this: you only get one chance to be a beginner, so make sure you spend it learning quality shit so that you can make awesome contributions once you're a veteran. Oh but that's much less adversarial.

I've posted a few times that when I entered an industry I'd never worked in before, I saw a problem, learned some programming I knew almost nothing about, I managed to make changes that saved the company $2MM/year in about 8 months.

I didn't really have any knowledge that others didn't possess. I just assumed that a lot of things that people were doing manually could be automated, then figured out how. This might not qualify as "revolutionary", but $2MM/year was a pretty big accomplishment for me.

"I once asked Ivan Sutherland, how could you possibly have done the first interactive graphics program, the first non-procedural programming language, the first object-oriented software system all in one year? He said, well, I didn't know it was hard!"

-- Alan Kay, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOZqRJzE8xg#t=3m45s

... you have the clarity to make things drastically better. You won’t miss the non-sense the veterans have long since accepted as the norm. Once you’ve acclimated to the temperature of the pot, you’ll get boiled alongside all the other frogs.

The message of this one paragraph is kind of ok but the rest and in particular DHH's choice of words is as usual awkward and feels like flatulent talk from a self-help book—too many adjectives and over-zealously constructed metaphors.

What he is talking about is not about being a beginner or that you only get one chance to be a beginner, it's just about change:

- That you face change all the time

- That you should always be prepared for change

- And that you should actively seek for change the entire time and see change as something beneficial

Thus, you get a chance to be a beginner more than once with every change.

>You won’t miss the non-sense the veterans have long since accepted as the norm.

I couldn't help but think "Isn't this one of those things veterans accept as the norm? That you can only do this once, and, after that, your view is tainted forever?"

I refuse to accept this.

It is true that you can make quick progress as a beginner but there are other areas where is can be painfully slow. Launching a new product while dealing with the growing pains of a new business can cause a lot of wasted time. Having someone with more experience around can be invaluable to a new start up, especially if you are doing something other than software where the start up costs are prohibitively high (tooling, patents etc)

I wonder if DHH feels like Rails was his best work and that's now behind him (at least the revolutionary capacity).

http://www.thomasgray.org/cgi-bin/display.cgi?text=odec#99

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