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Comment by saulpw | Hacker News Reader

After you've spent a lot of time exerting yourself, then you can let go and let your non-doing take over. I've experienced this myself with coding and music and language. Once you've got it "in your fingers", learning to relax is a big part of the Inner Game of Whatever.

But don't tell me that Katie Ledecky didn't put in a huge amount of effort in her training before her world-class swimming performances. That's a lie, guaranteed to mislead many people to not trying anything because it feels like effort.

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I think a major problem with advice for a general audience is that different people need different advice. I agree with you that a path to mastery usually involves putting in a lot of effortful practice and then learning to operate without conscious effort, to let muscle memory and such take over. I think people fail at this in different ways, however. I'm sure a lot of people fall off of mastery because they mistake the feeling of effort for lack of an innate talent or the endeavor being futile, and a lot of people fail to achieve fluency because they're unable to let go of the effortful, conscious mode of thinking. Advice for either of those groups is probably going to be counterproductive for the other

That said, I do think this article frames its advice in a clickbaity way by handwaving cumulative effort while talking about instantaneous effort

Well said.

Reminds me of this quote from Walter Murch, from In the Blink of an Eye I think:

"Most of us are searching-consciously or unconsciously- for a degree of internal balance and harmony between ourselves and the outside world, and if we happen to become aware-like Stravinsky- of a volcano within us, we will compensate by urging restraint. By that same token, someone who bore a glacier within them might urge passionate abandon. The danger is, as Bergman points out, that a glacial personality in need of passionate abandon may read Stravinsky and apply restraint instead."

This quote gives me such pause. I came back to read it again several times today. Conversations about echo chambers and filter bubbles are everywhere, and it's hard to sort into real data-driven arguments that there is an upward trend in the tendency to consume information that reaffirms our beliefs, but it does seem like our mechanisms for doing this have gotten a lot better, and that one could stay in a bubble indefinitely and never run out of content. I wonder if Murch is even still right to assume that we search for balance and harmony with an outside world we more often interact with through our abstractions, many chosen by us, most at least chosen by something. I wonder how many glaciers to read of restraint, how many volcanoes read of passionate abandon today, whether the feedback loop of escalation of flattery drives people to disappear into cages of their own making, or to burn themselves out, to use only this one dichotomy. I wonder how many of these feedback loops anyone is in about how many things. I wonder if I can even know which ones I'm in. Even if anyone succeeds at questioning everything they believe all the time, are they actually better off being a leaf on the wind, unable to form opinions?

I guess in short, this quote brings into sharp focus how brainrotting all this information and curation is, automatic and pervasive as it's become

> Katie Ledecky didn't put in a huge amount of effort in her training before her world-class swimming performances.

Although the training takes lots of energy and time, it needn't be driven by striving towards abstract goals. Rather the training can be a playful/fun practice for the sake of doing it well in the moment. This makes it feel easier to practice a lot, and also makes the practice more "productive" by freeing up attention from distractions of purpose and self.

It's hard to say if most elite athletes are able to do this all the time, but they probably don't have as bad a time of it as normies when it comes to physical exertion.

Reminds me of when I first tried to learn guitar. I tried doing fingering practices. It was so boring. I gave up after like a week.

I thought that playing music just wasn’t for me.

Many years later, I picked up a friend’s guitar next to me and just tried to play one of my favorite songs just by ear. I got enough right that it was fun and I got hooked.

I like repeating something someone else created until I master it. Playing just a little bit better after every attempt is motivating, playing well after training is also motivating.

Creating is not motivating because I compare myself to others. You have to feel that you could do something unique enough or good enough to be motivated.

Electric guitar can be really fun but I always end up playing the piano because it's easier. The keys are in order in front of you, not arranged in weird ways on strings.

Sounds like a "train the motivation" approach.

If a person wants to do a thing then they will engage with it on their terms. But getting that initial "hook" and then growing it is the trick.

I will never go to any physical training that involves a trainer shouting "pain is gain!". If it hurts, why would I do that? Why are we focusing on how much it hurts?!

Get me hooked on the Gain, let the pain happen naturally depending on how hard I want that Gain.

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.” ― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

I do a lot of stuff that people think is "hard work", but as they say, physical pain is fleeting, and I typically have a half-dozen or more small and large goals that I am working towards, that requires such "hard work". So, perhaps I yearn for the vast and endless.... something?

That's... actually the exact opposite of what GP suggested, isn't it? They wrote that "training doesn't need to be driven by abstract goals", and you are suggesting abstract goals to work towards. Not saying that can't work too, just that it's something different...

Yep yearning doesnt work for me. But joy does. I try to enjoy the work. For progrmmers, big hint: do one thing at a time. Keep slack off for an hour. Get hooked on a task.

Well yeah, it helps to become a good (even world-class) swimmer if you actually like swimming and do a lot of it from an early age. Same as you are more likely to become a good developer if you actually enjoy programming rather than just thinking "I want to be a developer someday because I want to earn $$$".

I've noticed that for most hobbies, there comes a point where to improve you need to do the boring part. Yes, to a certain extent, practice can be play, but unless you're the one-in-a-million prodigy who's just obsessed day and night, it's not going to be much fun drilling scales, or practicing your serve, or crimping on a hangboard, or whatever.

Once you get to a certain level, you stop being able to just easily add new skills and capabilities and have to cycle between adding skills and polishing skills. And once you get far enough, adding skills becomes a much smaller portion of time you spend on the activity than polishing, until one day you've mostly added all the skills you're going to and the only thing left to do is polish them to perfection.

And that's why I don't strive for excellence in most any of my hobbies -- they stop being as fun when I'm no longer getting to do new things and only ever pushing against my limit to improve things I'm already doing.

I don't know about that. I've only ever been properly good at one thing in my life - I'm a dilettante at everything else, including my current career - but in my experience (in common with even more talented artists with whom I've worked) is that the polishing is where the fun begins. You get to a point where you're working at such a finely detailed level that only you, and others equally invested, will ever notice, and you're pursuing perfection that you know isn't ever possible, but you get moments where it's just... Yes: that was it, and then you're chasing that feeling again. I dunno, there's maybe something egoistic about that, and you obviously have to really care about what you're working on, but I've never experienced anything else remotely as satisfying. I can easily imagine that generalizing to swimming, or writing code, or driving a racecar, or pretty much any other activity that humans engage in.

The most reliable way you get ahead is boring: small levels of effort, done consistently over time. You don't notice the progress day-to-day. You don't get much to brag about on social media. But it adds up.

But what OP is saying, and what I agree with, is that I don't think Katie Ledecky put in small levels of effort consistently over time.

Gary Player (an old golf player) once quipped that the more he practiced the luckier he got!

Sammy Hagar interviewing Eddie van Halen for Guitar World a few decades back: "Ed, what percentage of notes do you actually play consciously?"

"I guess about 30%?"

If only they had explicitly defined how they will be using the word effort for the rest of the article, to address exactly this obvious and silly reaction.

I read the article before I commented, and I reread the definition just now, and I still think that effort/exertion/tension/whatever you want to call it, is a necessary stage along the journey to mastery. Maybe Mozart or whatever preternatural prodigy from birth managed to fit this stage into preconsciousness, but I can virtually guarantee that Katie Ledecky had to over-exert in order to build herself into the powerhouse she became. There is no way she expended "zero effort", either by normal use of the word "effort", or by the definition in the article.

Yes the expert brain anticipates and thus can be more relaxed. Music doesn't sound good until it's effortless, because trying hard is hearable.

"Let me share my slightly unusual definition of “effort”: it’s the felt experience of expending energy beyond what an activity requires, like tensing your brow when you try to understand something, or the excess tension in your hand when you hold your phone...Using this definition, it’s clear that the appropriate amount of effort for any activity is zero."

This is a fallacious argument.

What is fallacious about it?

The claim seems to be that we often try even harder than is required to succeed. By trying too hard, we wear ourselves down, and might even cause us to fail in the process.

Therefore, putting effort beyond what is needed, by their definition, is excess and should be avoided.

Now I don't know if sometimes going a bit above what is needed can help in some ways, so I'm not saying it's true, but I don't see what is fallacious about it? The rationale seems to hold.

That's not the lexical definition of effort.

It's a stipulative definition that allows the author to reach a conclusion that's inherently provocative when read by people who are using the lexical definition.

> Therefore, putting effort beyond what is needed, by their definition, is excess and should be avoided.

By qualifying with "beyond what is needed" you've made it clear that you're using the lexical definition of "effort". I think that should drive home how absurd the author's definition of "effort" is. They've been careful not to make it a clearly circular definition (effort = effort beyond what is required) but they are awfully close.

The problem with this whole argument is that you can easily reframe the definition of the activity to suit any specific agenda.

Going with the swimming analogy: If you’re attempting to cross a pool, you can just dead man’s float and eventually you’ll get there. If you’re attempting to cross it using crawl stroke you can do slow slowly and lazily. If your goal is to build Olympic tier swimming fitness, well then you need to pull exactly as hard as you need to to optimally build muscle / neural pathways / whatever.

By the way, overgripping is proven to boost effective strength. Next time you’re struggling for a last rep, try squeezing the bar harder.

My point isn’t that we shouldn’t burn ourselves out, it’s just that it’s very hard to know what the amount of energy an activity actually “requires” is

Sustained effort is required for muscle memory to take over, at which point throughput increases dramatically.

>But don't tell me that Katie Ledecky didn't put in a huge amount of effort

Perhaps you should try reading the article, because it doesnt say that. Its a 5 minute read, although perhaps you shouldn't bother because most others dont appear to have either.

Edit: actually, I daresay the contention of the article is the exact opposite: its likely that ledecky put in the least effort out of anyone.

The contention of the article is premised on using a nonstandard definition.

And THAT is done to let them make a clickbait title.

One might say - by their definition? - that if you need to resort to a clickbait title to get engagement, you're putting in too much effort!

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