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Comment by xkcd-sucks | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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.

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 $$$".

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