Comment by majormajor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by majormajor | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> I disagree. Innate talent / affinity and transferable experience exist. I agree with "10% inspiration and 90% perspiration"; however, given equal effort, people with innate talent are going to win over people with no or less talent by a wide margin.

I think you are misreading the person you're replying to.

They aren't saying "everybody can be equally good at everything with practice."

They're saying "don't quit just because you aren't great on day 1."

First time playing basketball even if you've played soccer a ton and have good general athletic ability? Don't expect to hold your own if joining a game being played by people who play every week.

First time doing woodworking even if you have an electrical engineering background and the methodicalness is not foreign to you? Don't expect your first table to be stunning. Still gonna be bad at it compared to people with more practice!

Honestly, if you think you're great at something the first time you try it, you probably just don't know what being great at it actually looks like. (It could even be "similar result, but better in some hidden ways, and done in 1/10th the time.")

But if you believe that you'll get better at it with practice, you'll keep doing it.

If you believe "guess I just don't have innate ability here" you'll give up and never get good.

> I think you are misreading the person you're replying to. [...] They're saying "don't quit just because you aren't great on day 1."

That's not what they're saying. They literally wrote, "you'll be bad at anything new". That's what I disagreed with. There are people who are great at something new (for them), and catch up with (and surpass) old-timers incredibly quickly. And their learning experience -- not that it doesn't take effort -- is generally enjoyable, exactly because they succeed from very early on. I've witnessed this with at least two colleagues. Entered completely new fields (one of them repeatedly), and in a few weeks, surpassed old-timers in those fields. These are the guys who tend to be promoted to senior principal or distinguished software engineers.

> First time playing basketball even if you've played soccer a ton and have good general athletic ability? Don't expect to hold your own if joining a game being played by people who play every week.

Do expect to mostly catch up with them in 1-2 months! (In my high school class, the soccer team was effectively identical to the basketball team.)

> and done in 1/10th the time

I agree with this; yes. But my point is that, for some people, approaching such a short completion time, with comparable results, is a relatively fast, and enjoyable, process. They don't plateau as early, and don't struggle from the beginning.

> If you believe "guess I just don't have innate ability here" you'll give up and never get good.

Correct, but it doesn't imply that "giving your all" does make you good (at an absolute scale). You will no doubt improve relative to your earlier self, but those advances may not qualify as "competitive", more globally speaking. Giving up (after serious work) may be objectively valid. For some people, persevering is the challenge (= lack of willpower, persistence); for others, accepting failure / mediocrity, and -- possibly -- finding something better, is the challenge.

Hah, I wrote almost the same thing in a sibling reply with one difference, plateauing for the hit-the-ground-runners may come earlier than the first-learn-how-to-walkers.

> Entered completely new fields

What fields, if I can ask?

People exist that pick up that chisel / basketball / soldering iron and do something really impressive with it after being shown 0..2 times. They might have horrible technique, not know the little tricks and shortcuts, plateau quickly etc., but their experience of doing the thing is not a series of failures until they get reasonably OK at it, rather increasing levels of wins.

Those people are still growing the limit of their ability just like you. They're just trying things slightly under their current limit* instead of slightly over.

* Not an electronics pun

Reply on news.ycombinator.com