Things I wish I knew the day I started Berklee (2008) | Hacker News Reader

Things I wish I knew the day I started Berklee (2008)

sive.rs

35 pointstosh19 comments

> For example: How much does the world pay people to play video games? Nothing, because everyone does it.

> How much does the world pay people to make video games? A ton, because very few can do it, and lots of people want it.

Well things may have changed a bit, I see many gamedevs not paid much and many rich streamers youtubers play videogames (even if by person you're more susceptible to be paid writing videogames than playing them still)

Exactly. You can gain a big audience as a game streamer. And it’s not necessarily about skill. Just have a great personality. Some great streamers/let’s players are hilarious but are very average in terms of skill. In fact that can be part of the charm!

Something in the tone put me off. It's the standard american "MAX EFFORT" mentality/tone that's fine if you want to get pumped and try for a chance of becoming great at something, but maybe you want to have fun and make sure you don't burn out on the thing you like.

Semi-relatedly, I don't know what the better method is: Have discipline, practice all day, study, get better, or like something so much that it's just the thing you'd always rather be doing.

I guess the former works when you don't have the latter, but I don't know how many succeeded with each.

I agree with your assessment, (most of) the most successful people that come from Ivy League schools are successful not because of their talents int their respective fortes (though that doesn’t hurt either) but mostly because of the huge amount of connections they made with others who ended up in powerful positions after attending the school.

It’s the one thing that many, including me despise. The human factor of it all, people getting raises / better chances because they are smoother socially instead of their skill for their job.

Now lately I feel like there’s been kind of a change in collective worldview, at least on the internet, where social aspects of jobs that deal with facts (math, programming, etc) are also starting to be considered important because of said human aspects of jobs.

Of course this change in online worldview is heavily skewed because influencers are the ones with a big enough audience to broadcast their opinions and influencers are often very social people.

Being smooth socially IS a skill. We should stop dismissing the talent/ability to interact with other humans.

People have to make trust decisions with limited and imperfect information. The world is full of danger and risk. Being able to develop trust through relationships skills enable others to make choices regarding who they should associate and spend time with.

Then you say: a lot of these people just pretend to be something they are not for personal gain. Well, sure, ANY skill can be used for personal gain at the expense of others.

I've worked with amazingly competent, but unpleasant (not an asshole) people. And with mediocre, pleasant people. While I recognize that the amazingly competent, unpleasant people are also deserving of a portion of our riches, I would rather spend my day with pleasant people. And, more often than not, so do customers.

If I'm dealing with another company, I'd rather work with people with good communication skills and let them sort things out with the unpleasant ones. No wonder the people with good communication end up becoming the bosses.

My own career really took off when I stopped focusing solely on technical minutia (I had always been a "hardcore" engineer) and spend time, instead, learning about behaviors for developing trust and smoothing personal interactions. That when I became the boss.

Berklee is a music school. There are some fields where being average at a decent school can still result in being pretty successful. By and large, music is not one of them. Being an average music school graduate probably means not getting to work in your field (or doing something auxiliary in it, like doing e.g. booking at a club or something). Like, if you get a degree in computer science from a top school, it's almost certain that you can find work as a computer programmer if you want to. That's not true if you get a degree in jazz guitar performance.

I suspect you would hear a "MAX EFFORT" mentality equivalent anywhere you have elite vocational training for a highly competitive field based on performance not credentials (e.g. a professional team's footballing academy)

I appreciate Derek Sivers. (And he is active on HN, so - hi)

Derek does though tend to act in, or advocate for, the absolute extreme.

I remember an old story where Derek micromanaged CDBaby knowing how to do every thing including write all the code in Rails. Burning out, he then trusted his employees to run his company completely without him. Derek became painfully disillusioned when his employees betrayed him under zero oversight, and sold the company. My thinking reading this years ago was the wise path was probably more reasonable delegation with reasonable oversight.

It is ok to reject the shiny extreme. Moderation is beautiful.

I also appreciate Derek and his writing. But his style is like catnip to the 20-something-single-guy part of my lizard brain: sometimes he's missing a degree of duty, responsibility and community consciousness as he approaches situations. You've got to read his stuff with a critical eye, because a lot of it ignores the responsibilities that a mature grown person has.

Sounds like perfect advice for maximum intensity training, but did he ever manage to write a good song that people appreciate?

I'm not at all convinced that this is all there is to it, or that a 5 year boot-camp results in greatness.

I agree it’s more about networking. Practice is important but plateaus are only passed if you get advice in the right way or exposed to the right thing. Being loose is important too.

In my musical world, when someone comes along who studied at Berkelee you almost know they will be bad and not get the vibe: playing over people, rigid timing, no feeling.

Frankly the article is terrible advice for everyone.

Derek is great, he's had a very interesting life and accomplished quite a bit. But if this is supposed to be advice for aspiring songwriters and musicians, I think you have to at least consider that he was not an especially successful musician. This is great advice for someone who wants to quit music and run a record label.

> #1 : Focus. Disconnect. Do not be distracted.

People are hating on this, but I largely agree, or at least I agree more than the common advice of "just enjoy college!".

College is the one time in your life that you have all the time in the world at your disposal, purely to focus on your studies and (in the case of Berklee) master your craft. You might as well make the most of it. Obviously you don't want to become a complete social hermit, but I think most people swing way too far the other direction.

There's an old proverb:

> it is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.

which I think is kind of applicable here, albeit to academics/craft, rather than physical strength.

> Nobody will teach you anything. You have to teach yourself.

100%.

I don't think it's hate, exactly. Derek is a well-loved guy around here for good reason. I just think people are tired of hearing that the key to success is to work themselves to death.

A point that I would retain from this: That sometimes your teachers have very different tastes from you, and sometimes you have to fight your impulse to please them by absorbing their tastes and giving up your own.

Like Sivers, I've tried to learn about how you are "supposed to write songs." And then I've realized that a lot of songs I love do not actually do any of the things that you're "supposed" to do. And that is OK.

I would also agree that rotely learning jazz songs from 50 years ago... is not the spirit in which these songs were originally invented, and isn't what 60s/70s jazz musicians were doing at all, as they were trying to invent new things... That being said, if you start reading about that generation of jazz musicians, a lot of them were pretty conscious about what had come before, too. There is some kind of balance.

> Berklee’s songwriting courses are amazing!

Some of them are also available in Coursera.

This is a great article and a lot of things are applicable outside music

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