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Comment by jaxn | Hacker News Reader

OP here.

It was not my intent to pigeon hole people based on their outcomes. Time spent doing is different than creating or implementing.

For instance, reading all of the Harry Potter books is getting something done too. Flipping channels on the couch all day, not so much. The skateboard example in my post is also a good one - that is getting something done. Standing around the ramp and pretending to skate isn't.

Also, coaching is doing something cool.

As for the comment about visionaries. Doesn't that only matter if they can sell their vision? And wouldn't "selling a vision" be getting something done. (I don't mean sales in the $$$ way, just in the sense of transferring the vision to others and maybe inspiring action)

Thinking isn't really doing, but sharing those thoughts is. Frankly, the most profound thinkers who never shared their thoughts in a way that impacted others had no real impact on the world.

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Thanks for your comment.

Visionary skills - especially in children - are often discouraged harshly as "slacking" in our productivity obsessed culture.

Like any skill, it needs to be nurtured and encouraged. It takes tremendous self-confidence and guts to voice that you see something could be improved. The world is not normally kind to these people. True visionary skill isn't often seen until the college years. Interestingly enough, it's in college that this type of skillset starts to be rewarded.

It also needs to be practiced, and this is where I think you react too heavily in your judgement.

Flipping channels on the couch all day, not so much. Standing around the ramp and pretending to skate isn't.

The fact is that in many cases, there might be a hell of a lot of activity happening in that child that isn't immediately evident to you. The child might be thinking of how it would be really cool to have a laser like that guy in the cartoon and pondering all the things that could be accomplished with such a device. The other kid might be looking at the skateboard and wondering if the board could be shortened half a foot to make landings easier.

Yet, you've discarded these kids. They are slackers that you don't want your child to associate with. They don't produce anything after all. That's a poor lesson to teach.

Be clear, this isn't to say that there aren't some kids that are just lazy couch potatoes, but the point is that you can only figure this out by getting to know the child. The idea that becomes the seed for your child's life mission could very well come from the person you've told him to avoid. How sad is that?

"For instance, reading all of the Harry Potter books is getting something done too. Flipping channels on the couch all day, not so much."

I've always found it interesting that reading, as a form of entertainment, always seems to be held on a pedestal compared to television, cinema, or videogames. It's a kind of elitism that the literati hold over everyone who doesn't find reading as enjoyable as them. Consider this: one person reads the entire Harry Potter series and another reads the entire Twilight series, both are reading but the quality of the material is completely different. Assuming that literature is de facto superior to any other form entertainment is completely ignorant and wrong.

In this case, swap "flipping channels all day", which could include watching informative shows such as Bill Nye, How It's Made, or Mythbusters, with "watching Jersy Shore all day" and confusion about entertainment quality preferences are removed.

Reading is a skill you'll use all your life, and reading books - even, say, the World Weekly News - still sharpens that skill.

Granted, I'd rather kids read something more enlightening than the World Weekly News.

I think your perception is correct. Not sure if it is justified or not.

I suspect there is a positive correlation to time spent reading with success measures like education level, test scores, etc. I also suspect the correlation to TV time is more along the lines of being overweight, unemployment, etc.

Any science behind that? Nope. Sort of a confirmation of the stereotype you are suggesting. I could look for studies to prove / disprove it, but I would likely suffer from confirmation bias.

I mostly agree with you, with a caveat: reading involves practicing an increasingly scarce skill: the ability to focus for long periods of time.

I think this quote is relevant:

“One of my mentors asked me what was better – to spend 10 hours in front of the TV or to spend 10 hours doing other activities. Of course, I said the latter – there are few things I think that are worse than just sitting in front of the TV. Wrong, he said. It makes no difference – because what matters is how intensely you do any of those activities. It’s how much intensity you inject into those 10 hours rather than how you superficially spend them. If you watch TV intensely, with purpose, for 10 hours, you probably spent those 10 hours well.”[0]

I acknowledge that watching with purpose and flipping channels are different things—the point is, maybe what you do matters not as much as how you do it.

Perhaps watching TV is an activity that by its nature discourages any purpose and intensity, while reading has opposite effect? (Although I totally can read with my mind half-off, so it probably depends on an individual.)

[0] http://thescenicroute0.wordpress.com/2011/12/10/passion-make...

One of my anecdotal observations is that people (especially children) who read more often have significantly better written communication skills. I had a number of peers that I went all the way from kindergarten through undergraduate with, and by the end, the people who had done a lot of reading as kids could write significantly more coherent papers, essays, and even emails.

Now, it's only a correlation; the kids who read a lot as children may have done so simply because they had some kind of stronger innate language skills. I'm not a psychology researcher or a neuroscientist, but it's definitely an interesting anecdote to me :)

I don't think reading Harry Potter books is a good thing. I'd rather they watched decent TV.

I learned so much from TV, watched hours of it every day, hung around with a variety of types (none of them "productive") and barely read anything until I was 16. It didn't stop me from achieving highly by conventional measures of academic, business and general "productivity".

I hate the idea that children need to be managed to have the right friends. They need to figure stuff out themselves; let them have the friends they want, provided there's no abuse or damaging behaviour.

Let kids be kids!

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