Increasing your practice surface area
indiehackers.com
indiehackers.com
But the reality is that many people just aren't as interested in anything as some people are interested in something. And that's okay. The real advice is to learn to accept yourself as you are, whether you're an obsessive or not.
In fact, many of them did think about it. Many of them designed, tested, experimented, and tweaked their approaches to their crafts endlessly throughout their lives.
It can be comforting (because it lets us off the hook) to think that masters of their craft all follow the "just do it" ethos while simply "accepting themselves as they are," but usually the opposite is true. At least at the margin.
My own approach to learning is very similar, and that's before I read this book. But it was not an approach that came naturally to me. I was never good at school. I was never good at paying attention to things I didn't see a _reason_ to pay attention to. But I realized early on that my propensity for "hyperactive behavior" (as they called it at school in the early 90's) meant I couldn't rely on the "standard" way of learning to work for me, and that if I wanted to learn the things I did care about, I needed to find my own way.
This is in no way me trying to brag, but to give some context to why I challenge this kind of mindset whenever I'm faced with it, including (and without much success) in my own mother who keeps bringing up "I wonder who you inherited this skill from" whenever I learn something new, let me list some of the activities other people tell me I'm talented in:
* Software architecture and design
* Indie game development, including 2D and 3D engines from scratch in multiple languages as well as game design
* Graphic design
* Playing the piano
* Multilingualism (Norwegian, English, German, Dutch, Japanese)
* Videogames -- I'm particularly good at Smash Bros. Melee
* Hiking
* Body control - I can do push-ups while hand standing
* Conversation and hanging out - I make people laugh and have a good time because I have a lot of topics of interest to keep conversation flowing, and I set aside my ego to make sure the group has fun as a whole
Again, I'm not bragging, because I'm not a master in any of these disparate activities, and I also firmly believe this is something almost everyone can do. There is no "genetic" or inherited talent here. I was terrible at all these things and had to apply myself and experiment with constantly adaptive reinforcement techniques to get good at every single one of them. I grew up with asthma, but started practicing martial arts in spite of it. If I have a talent, it's simply curiosity. Everything else was an uphill struggle where I spent longer getting _OK_ at every single activity than most, but because I kept at it, I eventually got better than the average.
And one of the major factors of that is increasing my practice surface area in everything, which often ends up overlapping existing knowledge in surprisingly deep and fascinating ways, which in turn keeps me interested and curious. It's a feedback loop of learning.
A main concept I have in mind when learning new things, no matter whether it's a language, physical exercise routines, or an instrument, is "micro, macro, meta".
Early on in my life I didn't have concrete words for these, and I'll explain what I mean by each. To me this isn't anything special, mind, and it might be extremely obvious, although based on conversations with friends and family, it doesn't always seem to be.
Micro: The fundamentals and specifics of each activity and skill. For piano, for example, it would be concepts like "where are the keys", "how does the sound differ with pressure or speed", "how does rhythm notation work", etc. The micro often has immutable principles: A specific muscle _will_ have a limit (even if that limit changes over time). Piano sheet music notation's structure works a specific way and the rules for existing sheet music is inflexible. It is often as close to "fact" as you get.
Macro: The application and combination of the micro skills. Hitting keys in the right order to make a pleasing tune is a macro skill using a string of micro interactions. To hit a key at the right rhythm, with the appropriate force, is a macro application of the micro skill of knowing what key to hit based on the notation or memory, and the learned and practiced macro skill of rapidly applying varying force.
Meta: The often surprising connection between disparate micro and macro concepts from seemingly unrelated activities. Keeping a subconscious rhythm, something I learned over time whilst playing piano -- first using a metronome, then counting out loud, then internalizing it -- is also useful when exercising or when meditating, because it helps you more effectively align different muscle groups and tendons in unison when, say, doing hand-stand push-ups, or breathing exercises to force your brain into a relaxed state during meditation. Keeping an internal rhythm that can "beat" separate from your heart and external stimuli makes so many physical acts easier. But conversely, having a body that is used to various body parts acting in unison to a beat makes playing the piano easier as well.
The meta aspect is also observing myself as I'm learning new skills. Listening to when I get frustrated or lose motivation, and analyzing why. I learned early that losing interest didn't mean I'd lost interest in wanting to get good at the activity itself; it simply meant I was hitting a specific wall in the micro or macro, and I needed to change my approach. This is a key insight: I was told by teachers that when I lost interest, I just needed to "focus and apply myself". But it felt _wrong_ to force myself to repeat something that felt like it was going nowhere. When I realized it was my brain and/or body effectively telling me "we're going in circles by repeating this right now", all it took was to change the activity. For example when learning Japanese; when I hit a wall during kanji memorization study, I'd shift focus to how I could combine the kanji and kana I knew into sentences, and test it out. The next day I'd usually be much better at kanji memorization again. If not I'd shift to something else, like re-reading the literature on language structure, to give myself macro applications of the micro specifics.
These three concepts are something which my focus will flow between as I learn something new. I'll often ping pong my focus from day to day between micro and macro, while always being conscious of the meta aspect. And the interesting thing to note is that as you get good at things like the piano, often macro skills turn into micro skills as the brain and body optimizes memory and nerve signals. For example, playing a sequence of notes at great distance that requires one hand to jump between distant keys while the other is playing a steady tune will at first be a series of micro skills executed in order, slowly, as part of a macro series of maneuvers requiring great focus. But over time, it becomes a micro tool to skip all of those keys without requiring any focus at all -- in essence what we often call muscle memory, although it goes deeper than that.
Finally, I'd say that for the brain and body to most effectively optimize learning, it needs constant reinforcement, but it doesn't need to be for long. You just need to indicate that this activity is the new normal; then the body and brain will go out of their way to optimize so that it becomes easier and easier to do, expending less energy.
When I'm learning something new, some days I might spend a lot of time on it. But many days I'll spend fifteen minutes, and that'll be that. Life gets in the way, but usually not so much that we can't spend fifteen minutes at _least_ every other day or so. Even five minutes is better than nothing. It's enough to signal that this is the new normal, so best keep optimizing for it, because we'll keep doing it until it's cheaper energy wise.
No, genetics is a crucial requirement. Not everyone can do those things.
My point was, there's nothing genetic about my ability to teach myself the skills. In fact in many cases -- including being born with asthma -- I had to work around weaknesses many of my peers didn't have. I've always had weak balance, so it took me much longer to get used to acrobatics to build up to handstands than my friends. I have innate low blood pressure which means I more easily get dizzy when I handstand if I'm not very particular about how I breathe. In most things, I'm slower to learn them, but I'm generally better at perseverance and structured learning.
You want to force yourself to the very precipice of uncomfortableness. This is an ongoing process since our brains are designed to ruthlessly optimize any skill that you are learning.
Let me give an actual specific example. When I was a teenager I became interested in learning the piano. I quickly found myself plateauing where sheet reading was concerned. In an effort to scale the difficulty up, I used to take the organ sheet music from our local church and try to play it on the fly on a piano. The challenge? There is an extra bottom staff representing the notes to be played on the pedals - thus you had to transpose that bottom staff up while you were playing and merge them together in a pianistic manner.
Another example? I used to play a LOT of Tetris for the NES. As soon as I could feel my internal system optimizing - I wrote a tiny little program that would use text-to-speech to read out random arithmetic problems that I would try to answer while playing. I remember the first time I tried this it felt like somebody had poured miracle-gro on the dendritic trees within my mind.
It's not about joyless grinding or forcing yourself, more like putting yourself in a space where you engage with the thing and deciding to go just one step further than the point where your attention initially starts to drift. Or just putting yourself back in the space of thinking about it when you have a free moment, like waiting in a queue. You can use that time to, for example, make up a few sentences in the language that you're learning (perhaps about how annoying the queue is), or playing music in your head.
It is slightly more difficult in the moment, but in the long term it makes your life experience richer and more fulfilling than if you pulled out your phone and started scrolling (which you can still do afterward). You don't have to be mercilessly beating yourself about productivity, but if you develop these kinds of habits you tend to naturally start doing it more often.
> It should go without saying that the best way to increase your practice surface area in a given field is to be obsessed with that field. Obsession makes quick work of formal and bounded training sessions, and it doesn't need "tips" on how to do so.
> So the question then becomes, "How do I increase my practice surface area if I'm not already obsessed?"
Telling people to dive into something even if they don't feel it is dangerous advice (especially for kids) -- people will just get burnt out.
Of course, there is nuance here -- you don't necessarily want to achieve world-class in something, and sometimes pushing is indeed worth it.
Accepting yourself as you are is the opposite of practicing to get better at something.
The kind of intrinsic practice is even easier today than it was back then because we carry powerful computers in our pocket. If, like Orwell, you want to be a writer, you can literally work on it anywhere at any time. If you want to learn a language, you can spend time practicing it. If you want to learn music or art, the tools for explicitly practicing those things are in your actual pocket.
“Talent” is a myth. We all have our aptitudes, but in most subjects that only gets you a small advantage. Maybe you can remember Spanish vocab better than me, but if I practice every day and you don’t, you’ll reach the limits of “talent” quickly. Putting in the reps is the most important part of learning anything. The irony is that when you DO get good at something people forget that you were ever bad at it, and they will quickly dismiss your hard work as talent.
In high school, I had an ongoing argument with my dad about this. I got really into music and practiced daily for hours, wanting to be good enough to play in a band. By the time I graduated, I wasn’t bad. My dad would pontificate about which relative I had inherited this talent from, and I would get annoyed because it undermined the 100s of hours I spent locked in a music room. It did NOT come easy; I wanted to be able to do something and worked my ass off to get there.
Experts, as a rule, augment their practice with a coach, and they never stop doing that. The quintessential example is the olympian.
So, that is how they increase their practice surface area.
I think interest is also generally relevant, but it's not the core in established fields: coaching is.
I am interested in unestablished fields too, which may be fundamentally interest driven. Although IMO that interest may be more about establishing frontiers than the specific topic.
People can change and get better at things. They do it all the time. Plenty of people _do_ actively think about things like how to increase their surface area to improve, because _they want to get better_.
There's some truth there, but Charles Bukowski said it much better and more succinctly with, "Don't try." [1]
> if it's hard work just thinking about doing it,
> don't do it
If it's hard work just thinking about doing it, it's a very good sign that it's something worth doing.
(I know I shouldn't take motivating quotes literally)
Well, except that Bukowski/Yoda quote. It's literally too short to be meaningful.
It reminds me of nights when I was a teen hacking away at some computer games or writing my first emulator. There was no class, no jira tickets, no books. Just a teen struck with a madness.
1: https://bookshavepores.tumblr.com/post/9013559249/charles-bu...
There are so many better ways to spend your time. Pushing a boulder uphill is hard. If it never gets over the hump and starts pulling, find a different boulder!
The poem suggested many many many possible when. Here's one: "unless it comes out of / your soul like a rocket,".
Unfortunately (or fortunately), in life, there is no methodology to prove that a given search problem is futile (e.g. NP-complete)... so we have to take our chances and choose. I believe that's the beauty of life: choice.
When you become obsessed with A, your whole life becomes a practice of A.
I recently watched a YouTube on cultural communication pathways, and there was a comparison of “engineered communication” being a top down approach, as opposed to a gardening approach to communication being a bottoms up approach; one being predictable with measurable outcomes, and the other being organic and unpredictable. In gardening we plant seeds, help them germinate, watch them grow. A lot of the articles on Indie hackers seem to be planting seeds, which I appreciate. I wish HN would see value in a range of articles, and not skew to preferring engineered rigid predictability. Pardon the overstatement but you get my drift.
I suppose nowadays it's probably around LLM wrappers, photo generation, video generation services... there were those niche ones in the past like the teacher with her bingo cards maker
It's still in my mind as I don't like waiting for a paycheck, just wondering how the space is doing nowadays
In fact we (the Indie Hackers founders) are bootstrapping a new B2B app now that Claude Code & Codex CLI (etc) are on the org chat.
And it only costs $1M to use them correctly!
It's honestly hard to imagine wanting to work 12 hour days to advance some of these interests. We're seeing some of the greatest minds of our generation lost to these kinds of ephemeral, short-lived projects that flame up, consume VC, and mostly burn out uselessly, having created a bunch of IP that is shelved never to be seen again. What's the point?
Maybe we really all ought to just get drafted. At least I'd be able to explain to my kids what I do for a living.
but later 'fast money / influencers' entered the space. It has become a mini ponzi sell a starter pack / template to wannabe indiehackers, sell a course to wannabe indiehackers.
For solo founders I guess if you wanna get all meat no bones stick to MicroConf
Later I became obsessed with Argentine tango. Unfortunately, I thought, "comprehensible input" won't work with dancing, especially not a couple's dance. Nevertheless, unable to dance every day due to my local scene being quite small, I instead consumed a boatload of YouTube videos during my spare time. Instructional content, performances, class summaries, and what have you. And I progressed super quickly.
First off, as a leader, it is good to have seen competent dancers with good musicality and how they choose their steps to fit with phrases of songs. That much fits in parallel with input-based language acquisition techniques. But I also think I gained a good amound of intuition about how to move my own body. Not perfect intuition, but more than nothing, which was very much my starting point.
I would urge caution around this - in fact - deliberate practice is probably worth 10 times this. There's a reason people tend to plateau early in their efforts to master something. Once your brain figures out how to put the skill on autopilot you're going to find your rate of improvement significantly slower.
It's not just about the time you put in - it's about the type of practice you put in.
> Turn idle time into mental rehearsal
Any psychologist would bash your head with a book for following this.
There are some tricks -- if you are already good at something, maintaining that good level is usually not that hard (you already know how and can recalibrate your level to the available time), but picking up new concepts is very time consuming.
I'd also say that the article talks about living through something, that's probably more involved than just passionate.
I can think of various high-Level activities such as analyzing systems we interact with on a day-to-day basis. However, I cannot come up with exercises that would improve my code itself.
At the top of the page, there's a link labelled Starting Up that takes you to a page with links to articles that taken together form a Guide to Starting Up. Those links, and those articles, represent the entire value of the IndieHackers website. There's a lot of value in those articles, but the rest of the website provides no value.
Members of the IndieHackers community talk about their 'shovel companies' - typically things like AI-powered marketing services, or the like. This is nonsense: the real shovel companies in the SaaS space are cloud providers and payment processors. Indie hackers claiming to have made a shovel company aren't Levi Strauss selling sturdy trousers to prospectors, they're urchins offering to help dig in plots in exchange for a bit of bread.
IndieHackers itself has become one of these urchins, exhibiting increasing desperation to show ongoing relevance. Skill at software development isn't the thing that's holding most indie hackers back; what's holding them back is that they don't know any good problems to solve. There's an awful lot of money out there waiting to be spent on simple CRUD apps that don't yet exist. You don't need to push the limit of what's possible with computers to make money; you just need to go out into the world to find an actual problem.
Burn out speedrun 101.
If you want to keep your sanity, you need to find your own passion, not try to emulate others (especially with crazy routines like the examples).
I haven't burned out. Instead, I find my work fulfilling, endlessly novel, and valuable to others.
Does this do anything to change your mental model?
My 2 cents: article like these need to be presented with a big red disclaimer for folks who tend to obsess over things like ambition, prestige, fame.
Trying to emulate the greats is like trying to emulate WW2 pilot during the Battle of Britain. Sure, you might become one, but if odds are against you then there’s nothing you can do.
Idle time is extremely important for psyche and feeding it to your obsession will eventually drive you insane if you can’t achieve what you want.
On top of that, you’re not really providing any advice. You’re not explaining why they had the drive, what motivated them to do it in the first place. How do they maintain their life’s, how did they overcome difficulties, what families and environments they come from. You’re essentially shaming the reader for not being driven enough. As is being driven and motivated are the only things that you need to succeed.
I wouldn’t say it better than https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45442479
* Breath
* Touch grass
* Breath again
* Create a plan for yourself, follow it and don’t obsess over things
Pure nonsense.
Necessary != sufficient, and honestly neither are demonstrated in the anecdotes.
It's possible to be great at something simply by practicing, assuming normal capabilities. But great here just means "better than virtually everyone". Being mediocre among people who practice regularly it makes you immediately better than basically everyone who has done it once or twice. By most definitions that's "great".
Median daily StarCraft ranked player? You're great at StarCraft.
Second, if you start young enough, you get the compounding effects of time. You're now "pretty good among lifelong daily players in their prime". That's Olympic/ world class.
Like that guy who had kids just to make them Chess masters. He did so by making chess part of the family life, so integral it wasn't working it just was. The guy from the original post actually.
So it's tempting to say things like TFA posits, and while I'm not sure it's 100% true, it's definitely not 100% false or pure rubbish.
In order to be great, indeed, you don't need to be obsessed, and very rarely you cannot achieve it -- you just need to be relatively consistent. And I 100% agree that if you start early, maintaining a skill on the "better than vast majority" level is not too hard (the hard work was done in the past).
But to achieve truly outstanding results, you definitely need to dedicate tons of time and ideally be obsessed with it (at least very-very interested).
It’s valid feedback for the author, though. I had to read the article to understand the image.
I thought it was some "Silicon Valley bro" that wanted you to drink kelp, and build your biceps or something