Never mind talent: Practice, practice, practice
philly.com
philly.com
The point is, if you're really determined, working hard can go a long way. The key is to try not to worry about the other people that make it look easy. Later I heard this quote:
"If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it would not seem so wonderful at all." - Michaelangelo
The greatest problem with our educational system is to neglect the fact that students begin to forget immediately after graduation. All these years in k-12 education gradually turns to dust until only reading, writing, and some basic agelbra are left, and some career related knowledge.
Trignometry? Biology? Chemistry? These are subjects that all adults once know in their high school years, now all forgotten.
Instead of documentaries assuming we know chemistry, or trignometery, or biology, they introduced "DNA" as if we never been in a biology class. They only skims the top of the scientific knowledge cake because they never assume everybody knows.
Imagine the complexity and increased believablity of fiction and non-fiction if they have to wrestle with an audience that know those things by heart, even if they only took a chemistry class that single semester?
Alas, we forgotten and our educational dollars disappeared in a puff of smoke.
The real tragedy is that many educational programs emphasize the kind of rote learning you seem to want everyone to aspire to instead of critical thinking faculties which, properly instilled, will assert themselves for a lifetime.
I don't particularly care about English literature or any <subject x> for the sake of building a well rounded education. The more important thing is retaining what you learned and building on that.
The real tragedy is that many educational programs emphasize the kind of rote learning you seem to want everyone to aspire to instead of critical thinking faculties which, properly instilled, will assert themselves for a lifetime.
To think memorization is bad is incredibly short sighted and stupid. Would you like to look up a book every time you do programming? No. You remember certain methods and certain part of the standard library so that you don't have to spend 10 minutes googling method x to accomplish result y.
Principles is nice and all, but what make you an efficient problem solver is because you have access to an inner world of factoids and knowledge.
Sure, memorization for the sake of memorization is useless. That's why you learn critical thinking skills that you love so much so that memorization will be useful.
I disagree that what makes people efficient problem solvers is having an "inner world of factoids". Knowledge isn't irrelevant, but knowing where to look is key. Sometimes the knowledge is internal, but the CS whiz who jumps into coding his own libraries for everything without having the wisdom to browse the standard documentation first is surely not a model of efficiency.
Of course it does matter, because latency of lookup matters. He could spent it one hour googling things up or he can spend one minute remembering something and using it. That requires memorization.
The wisdom part to use the standard library instead of implementing something something from scratch is just extra efficiency.
Of course, deep learning is difficult to teach and assess on a large scale, so it is easier to test for knowledge of facts and procedural skills and teach children to perform well on these kind of tests.
This property of brain to forget less use facts to make room for what you use more often has been acquired over a very long period of evolution. I don't know what schools can do to make sure that the students NEVER FORGET what they learn in a class. And imo to expect that is completely unreasonable.
It's possible, if you practice.
I don't know what schools can do to make sure that the students NEVER FORGET what they learn in a class. And imo to expect that is completely unreasonable.
You can't do this, but adults could take some time out of their days to practice what they learned. That way, they will keep retaining what they learned over decades, and the amount of practices should keep going down.
This process works well enough, there's little that you've learned a long time ago that you can't pick up again in a relatively short amount of time.
Those residual knowledge help make practicing and maintenance of our existing knowledge much easier. We could take advantage of it.
Anyway, if you want to retain everything you learned, you should take a look into spaced repetition which is a learning technique that help make knowledge maintenance an efficient process.
All that is left is our educational system to recognize that knowledge maintenance is important.
Well, don't let five years go by without touching the subject. Occasionally practice the things you once learned, integrate them into your larger body of knowledge, and you'll never forget how red-black trees and quickselect work --- even if you never implemented them from scratch.
"You will be fooled by a trick if it involves more time, money and practice than you (or any other sane onlooker) would be willing to invest."
http://www.esquire.com/features/teller-magician-interview-10...
"Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect"
[1] http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/Teller-Reveals-Hi...
At the end of the talk he actually breaks down. Its one of my best TED Talks, I watch it almost every week to remind that even the most magical thing is hardly magical when you look at the effort that goes behind it.
I noticed something similar happens when I want to pickup some basic skill I wish I had, like juggling, shuffling decks of cards, or emacs or walking the slackline: first it seems impossible, then I insist for a few days, many hours per day, sleep on it, and then its trivial.
But most people won't go to youtube to learn how to shuffle a deck of cards, and probably consider that very nerdy.
(The crazy tricks I won't even try, because that kind of agility doesn't go well with my body weight/motor coordination - I'm one of those kids who could never do ollies :P)
While I have no doubt that this is a carefully considered evaluation, I think one has to be careful making this kind of remark; just imagine the student who says "The crazy mathematics I won't even try, because that kind of thinking doesn't go well with my mindset --I'm one of those kids who could never do algebra."
The truth is people learn at different rates, and compensating intelligence with effort works a lot of the time.
Practicing violin since before birth is a thing that is just impossible to do for anyone here not to mention not many would really like to play violin. As such, it's hypothetical, abstract situation that can be discussed safely.
On the other hand, putting tremendous amount of work into preparation for Google interview is something everyone here could, but is not doing, and a good deal of people would really like to do (or, at least, they would like to work at Google). As such, it triggers defensive mechanisms, many of which we could see in the linked thread.
It's not funny at all.
I was someone who had it easy in HS and almost failed out of college because I simple didn't know how to study. Watching these two taught me the level of effort required to really do well.
I'm not sure what the moral of the story is.
I really think that this ability to doggedly focus, practice, and maintain this level of effort is, itself, a talent.
I mean, I can't study for 10 minutes straight, much less 10 hours. It's certainly a talent I wish I had.
'The Art of Learning' by Josh Waitzkin could be a good start for someone who wants to improve in this area.
Of course, one could also learn how to make their study technique more effective so they don't need to spend 10 hours. See 'Your Memory: How It Works and How To Improve It' by Higbee for that.
You need to cover enough material that reviewing is not quite trivial, but no so much that your mind starts to wonder.
When I was a kid, I had difficulty staying on the same task. My daydreams were (and still are) incredibly vivid. I had a lot of physical energy, and I wanted to run around as a kid. And when I can't, being stuck inside studying, I'd have near lucid daydreams of running around outside. Combined with being able to pick up many things up, I become more and more intolerant of my own mistakes and challenging situations. As I entered my early adulthood, my experiences of life started narrowing down as I avoided challenges. And when I try taking on those challenges, I'd run straight into them.
It was later in life that I learned the methods for concentration practice. There are no shortcuts to concentration. There are no clever hacks. Searching for a shortcut is precisely why most people have difficulty concentrating. Your mind does not want to accept what you are doing here and now. So you think you have to "force" yourself to concentrate, and end up burning a lot of energy keeping you on track. This is NOT how you concentrate.
Concentration grows a little bit each time you practice, and the more you practice, the more you learn about how your mind works.
Growing the raw skill of concentration as you learn your primary art is itself the reason other skills take years of practice to master. It is also why, without practice, talent does not blossom into mastery.
Someone asked me to post up a cheatsheet on how to practice concentration; maybe other people here will find it useful: http://www.quora.com/Meditation/Whats-a-nice-little-cheat-sh...
It has interesting framework, divided into two. The first part is what you can do. The second is how you can create an environment that keeps you on track.
1. The Pomodoro Technique. http://www.pomodorotechnique.com/get-to-work/
2. Reading The War of Art can help with issues of procrastination if the thing you're having trouble focusing on is a creative endeavor.
I still procrastinate like crazy sometimes though, so I'd add to this small list a book called the power of habit. This is the missing link on how to make your behaviour automatic.
I bet if you try enough you can add another 5 minutes to those 10 minutes. And then later another 5 minutes, and then later another 5... And so on and some day you will go to 10 hours.
People often ask how somebody can sleep only for 6 hours. Or get up to work at 3 AM in the morning. That's possible only after trying hard enough for weeks a little bit at a time.
I play a text based online game where activity is extremely important and I often only have 3 or 4 hours of sleep every day, and even that is broken in to chunks so I can be online every 3 hours - and this is for the past 5 and a half years.
Outside of the obvious physical and mental stress it can put you under, you are perfectly right when you say that it takes time to perfect, at first I was tired from having 8 hours of sleep, now I can have 3 hours of sleep per night, wake up and operate at 100%.
I'm not sure when, but somewhere along the line I lost the need for sleep, I don't get tired any more or yawn and even on nights where I can sleep as long as I want, I find myself only wanting 4 or 5 hours anyway.
I'm without a doubt the highest ranked player on the game, fought for through perseverance and a refusal to let my ego take a hit, but was it worth it? I'm not sure.
>>but was it worth it? I'm not sure.
I won't comment on your habits and whats important to you. But speaking objectively. I would say its bad use of time.
If you are in need of entertainment, which demands a lot of engaging activity I would advice you start to learn playing a music instrument. Again not risking your health in the course of it, but music is a liberating experience. Especially if you learn how to play yourself. It can be very joyful.
And its generally a good skill to have and a lot better than fighting for internet points.
"after just a few days, the four- and six-hour group reported that, yes, they were slightly sleepy. But they insisted they had adjusted to their new state. Even 14 days into the study, they said sleepiness was not affecting them. In fact, their performance had tanked. In other words, the sleep-deprived among us are lousy judges of our own sleep needs. We are not nearly as sharp as we think we are."
So, although you can get used to being sleepy, it's unlikely you're performance isn't being impacted. You could argue that the 2 week study wasn't long enough, but it still seems to show that you can't really judge your own cognitive performance, so any anecdotal evidence to the contrary wouldn't hold much water.
Just out of curiosity, how old were you when you took up calculus, and did you go back to college full time?
Lately, I weave in and out of painting, coding, and studying mathematics. The switch between the fields often has me feeling lost when initially starting back up into one or the other, since I sort of go through these manic cycles of learning rather than something continuous and balanced throughout. When I switch from painting to math or coding, I usually feel very dumb for a while, relearning all of the new terminology I have missed. It is often a significant blow to my ego, and over the years it has required me to develop sort of a thick skin to approaching sets of people who are technically minded, while my mind is still in the la-la land art world, and vice-verse.
But I mean, out of everything I have approached to learn to do or learn about, the one thing I know that is true for all of them is that nothing is actually simple. Doing calculus and memorizing formula to apply to a very specific set of a problems requires a strong memory, which younger people tend have the advantage on (not myself though, 26 and my memory is garbage). But actually understanding the concepts, and being capable of applying them after you take the class, that's different.
I surprised someone, in grad school I think, explaining how to calculate how large a container we would need to clean the espresso machine (it drips water through), based on some simple dimensions of the input container, and the flow rate. That's calculus. I knew a lot of students in engineering who did really well in the class, and are doing really well in their specific sub-field. But to actually understand what one is learning, that is different. Everyone can do it no matter what age, it just requires dedication and actually being able to think about what confuses you. And it is often a person's ego or fear of their ego appearing 'less than' that hinders progress in learning and doing. Or probably, it is always the case that that is why people stop learning and doing.
It is not difficult to ask simple questions. I mean last night I spent about 6 hours thinking about what a point on a number line actually is. Had anyone seen my notes, they would probably look like they came from a 1st grade maths class. But I'm connecting it to many other topics I understand - and that is something those people don't see, the tangential thought process that develops along with my learning and questioning. So when someone asks a simple question that may seem trivial, instead of scoffing at the fact that that person does not know the answer, I prefer to ask myself "Why did they ask that question?", or, "Why is it important that this thing is so clearly defined or understood - what about this thing is necessary or important to understanding of the whole?". And those are my favorite kinds of questions to ask in learning, because it keeps every topic interesting.
Let me share with you an anecdote: In undergrad, I took an intro computer networking class. Everyone else could understand what was going on. There was no assigned reading material and lectures didn't follow from any text. I always was the lowest student in the class, no matter how hard I tried. Everyone else could understand it quickly. I worked hard on that class but it didn't matter. Not everyone who works hard will show positive results, I guess. I more or less flunked my way through school. Sometimes I'd work hard, sometimes not. It didn't seem to matter.
Or, if I'm facing someone who has worked hard and is also very intelligent? I don't have a chance.
The rhetoric of these articles and the rest of these posts here have a coded meaning behind them: there are no disadvantaged people or students -- only stupid or lazy ones. It's a corollary of Survivor Bias. If you work hard, everything will be peachy-keen OK and nothing will go wrong. If you work hard and fail, you deserve only scorn.
For me, it was, never mind if you work so hard that ignored everything else, worked so hard to not get beaten by your parents, worked so hard to get mastery of material -- I must be still too lazy or stupid since I failed.
I don't know what it is that I don't have that everyone else does. I'm likely to not ever know.
This is a topic that I'm very familiar with so that's why I wrote a lot about it and sound perhaps a little crazy.
Should be easy for you, working smarter is easier than working hard.
You have to know how it feels when you have tried all you can and you still come up short.
Two recent articles in Current Directions in Psychological Science
criticize deliberate practice and argue that, while it is necessary
for reaching high levels of performance, it is not sufficient, other
factors such as talent being important as well.
I think your primary need is to be more comfortable in your own skin. That book talks about how. After that, you'll still fail at some things---like the rest of us---but it won't hurt so much. Then, because quitting won't have so much meaning to you, it will be easier for you to give up on something that isn't going anywhere which, ironically, is crucial to eventual success.
I ask because I've mentored folks who have similar feelings and one thing that correlated with them was that they didn't actually enjoy learning new stuff. In particular they almost had a mental block when it came to learning something first in order to achieve a secondary goal.
One story I heard was a student who was failing English composition repeatedly. The person failing's attitude was "I have to have this to get my degree, but frankly I don't give a flying f*ck about English composition." Absolutely no amount of work, practice, tutoring, or study helped. The only thing that worked, was getting past the 'I have to do this but don't want to' attitude was to find some small way that learning composition could become an interesting thing to do.
Thus the question, and now a corollary, is there any subject area you know really well? And by "any" I mean "any" from an academic subject like Math to the back story of all the characters on "Twilight." If so how does that subject matter differ from the subject matter you aren't good at?
1) You have keen analytical and writing skills, intelligence is not a lack for what you want to achieve.
2) You suffer from victim mentality being too concerned about the abilities of others while easily dismissive of your own. No matter how much/hard you work, without being able to chuck this aside, every failure will be magnified and your successes will be mitigated to an irrational degree.
The fact of the matter is the road to mastery is paved with tons of mistakes, tons of situations where you will feel like an absolute moron. You have to learn to reframe those moments and treasure them, because they are signals that you are encountering moments of true growth. Learn to compete against your own competence and not others. You don't know what they've been through to get where they are.
Whenever something seems unreasonably tough, break it down into simpler problems to digest. Hack the art of learning itself. Don't look at the same problem until you're blue in the face, change it up so that there is a measurable degree of progress.
Your blockage is more emotional than intellectual.
> The fact of the matter is the road to mastery is paved > with tons of mistakes, tons of situations where you will > feel like an absolute moron.
This is so true. Feeling like you're stupid is just part of the process. Try to ignore the temptation to worry about how it appears to be so easy for everyone else. You may have to work twice as hard as the next person, but do it. They say it's darkest before the dawn, and that totally applies to learning for me.
When I learned Windows SDK programming back with Windows 3.0, I really felt like I was not smart enough for this. When I learned functional programming in Erlang, I really was quite confident that this was too much for me to be able to cope with. I've felt stupid so many times trying to learn things that I finally identified it as a pattern, a sign that I'm about to break through as long as I don't give up.
Feeling like you are stupid is an attitude. I find it is one of the biggest barriers to learning. If you feel stupid, you are less likely to try "stupid" things that teach you a lot. Also, feeling stupid leads to anger, and anger prevents learning.
Aaron Hillegass said this best in the beginning of Cocoa Programing for Mac OS X, and I'll never forget it. You can preview it on Amazon under "How to learn."
Looks like a great book.
1. Don't give up. 2. Never complain. Take the 30 day no complaining challenge[1]. Not complaining is about focusing your mind on positive things, because complaining and thinking about negative things is self-reinforcing and makes you more sad. The only way to go for 30 days straight without complaining is to re-form how you think, and it worked wonders for me. 3. Read Letters from a Stoic.
If it's one big goal - "I want to be an X" - well guess what, you're going to have to have a thousand smaller victories to get there. And by the time you do get there you're most certainly going to have bigger goals beyond that on the horizon. Otherwise life will get very boring.
It's the messy room syndrome, for you only have two hands you can't will the whole thing into becoming clean at once. You have to pick some part of it that you can handle and make it clean, then move onto another part. As you make your way through interesting patterns will emerge that will allow you to clean smarter, so the first act of cleaning will go much slower than the last act. You still only have 2 hands, but you have something else - wisdom.
sown - quit. Not everything is possible. Stop beating your head against a wall and try and enjoy your damn life
However, it does not follow that "everyone can be a computer programmer for Google" or "everyone can be a professional quarterback." If you want to make it to a high-level in a high paying or high status field, you must compete against other people who are also practicing really hard and who also have great natural talent.
Personally, I have around natural athletic ability. I play flag football, and am likely in the top 95th percentile of QB ability. When I throw the ball around with friends at a BBQ, I can hit people in stride with tight spirals. But I could never, ever be a pro-QB, or even a QB in a competitive amateur league. My body simply does not have the appropriate build, and I simply cannot build the muscle strength to make the passes needed to be a great QB.
On the flip side, I have always had an innate knack for cognitive problems, I was always that guy in math class who got A's despite barely doing homework and not studying for tests. Now another person could also get A's in that class with only mediocre natural talent by studying very hard. They might think that, "Hey, I've worked hard, I got A's, I can do anything, I can get a job at Google some day." But if they go into the most cognitively demanding career, they will find themselves competing against the most naturally talented people, who also now have a financial incentive to work extremely hard, and the less naturally talented people will simply not be able to compete.
I find it unfortunate and self-serving, that so there are so many commentators and intellectuals, who are above average cognitively and (likely) mediocre athletically, who assume that the other people's failings at cognitive skills are due to lack of practice or lack of sufficient schooling. Meanwhile they assume their own lack of athletic ability is due to accidents of birth.
That said, it can be very difficult to determine if your having difficultly in a subject is really due to innate talent or due to lack of practice. When I took an intro computer science course, I noticed the professor was a completely horrible teacher (and lectures are generally a horrible way to teach math, computer science or any technical subject). The textbook sucked too. The people who did well in that class already had been programming on their own during high school. The people taking the class expecting it to be an actual introductory course, who expected that if you just followed the lectures and textbooks that you would know how to do the assignment, ended up doing very poorly. Even if they worked very hard, their total hours dedicated to understanding computer science was far below that of fellow classmates.
One piece of advice that might help you: when you're trying to measure your progress, instead of looking at the people who are ahead of you all the time, sometimes look at the people who are behind you. The people who you've exceeded, who you have done better than. It's an important part of motivation that's often overlooked. (This and a bunch of other really excellent advice I got from Seneca in Letters from a Stoic.)
Also, don't give up. You've only truly failed when you quit learning or give up.
I would:
-start a blog.
-start working on a personal project in another hacker or designer. Find some at some mailing list near you.
Your repeated references to hard work stood out:
> I worked hard on that class but it didn't matter.
Hard work doesn't count for anything of itself. Only when you're pursuing effective strategies.
> I'm likely to not ever know.
I mean, it's also possible you're struggling against some kind of mental handicap. But if your IQ was really 75 or something, I don't think you'd be able to write such long sentences.
The author rightly belittles the concept of talent but it seems to have found its way in through the back door: “Two of our four turned out to be musically gifted and before long were shuttled out of Suzuki to hard-core classical violin teachers.”
(Talent is just the way we describe people who have some competence in a field which is inexplicit; nobody knows why they are good, otherwise one could learn it.)
Another thing to point out is that apparently none of the children have developed careers in music or composition (yet), so it remains to be seen if they have any creativity intact.
Why might they have lost creativity in adulthood? Because of childhood coercion. Those long hours of practice -- children don’t do that without being forced. It can be subtle, such as the worry of a slight loss of parental affection, sibling rivalry encouraged, etc.
Children will play for hours on end and this is where true learning occurs. Some children are bright enough to make their ‘practice’ a form of play, so they manage to improve despite appearances.
Creative adults continue to play, it’s just that the subject matter appears more serious. But progress remains open-ended, with stops and starts, switching between activities, and unpredictable (not ‘guaranteed’) results. The unpredictable nature of achievement follows from a law of epistemology: we can’t predict future knowledge (including our own).
http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html
". . . . In fact I suspect if you had the sixteen year old Shakespeare or Einstein in school with you, they'd seem impressive, but not totally unlike your other friends.
"Which is an uncomfortable thought. If they were just like us, then they had to work very hard to do what they did. And that's one reason we like to believe in genius. It gives us an excuse for being lazy. . . . "
In "How do Do What You Love" (January 2006),
http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html
he wrote,
"Sometimes jumping from one sort of work to another is a sign of energy, and sometimes it's a sign of laziness. Are you dropping out, or boldly carving a new path? You often can't tell yourself. Plenty of people who will later do great things seem to be disappointments early on, when they're trying to find their niche.
"Is there some test you can use to keep yourself honest? One is to try to do a good job at whatever you're doing, even if you don't like it. Then at least you'll know you're not using dissatisfaction as an excuse for being lazy. Perhaps more importantly, you'll get into the habit of doing things well."
And in "The Anatomy of Determination" (December 2009),
http://www.paulgraham.com/determination.html
he wrote,
"In most domains, talent is overrated compared to determination—partly because it makes a better story, partly because it gives onlookers an excuse for being lazy, and partly because after a while determination starts to look like talent."
Mathematician Hung-hsi Wu wrote an article more than a decade ago, Basic skills versus conceptual understanding: A bogus dichotomy in mathematics education, American Educator, Fall 1999, Vol. 23, No. 3, pp. 14-19, 50-52,
http://www.aft.org/pdfs/americaneducator/fall1999/wu.pdf
to point out that any distinction between understanding a topic and having basic skills in the topic is a "bogus dichotomy." The two go together like two sides of the same coin.
This is true in the discussion of Penn & Teller below, as well as game programming, and probably all worthy endeavors. Wish I could remember the reference...
Thank you for posting this and thank you PG for saying it.
One mantra tossed around of late is "_perfect_ practice makes perfect," meaning not to never make mistakes, but to be conscious and analytical when you do.
I am often ridiculed by my wife, and I always wondered where I got this from. This trait is something I want to teach my kids, but I never knew quite how.
Until I read this article and it reminded me that I too did the Suzuki program, into classical violin after. I remembered practicing a lot - and I remember getting frustrated frequently.
I also remember the short burst of adrenaline I would feel, and the overwhelming feeling of accomplishment, when I get that 'trill' just perfect or when I perfected my vibrato.
Even though I have since put down the violin, I feel the same accomplishment when I tackle something hard (in programming) and I eventually figure it out.
I need to remember to thank my parents for insisting that I keep at the violin, even when I was very frustrated and wanted to rage quit.
It doesn't matters if you have an IQ of 200 when you're born several thousand years too early. You never make use of your genius, except to make lot of babies and become the chief of your tribe, if you're lucky.
Granted, there's lot of people who are innately smarter than you, but chance are they're also stuck in various positions of life where they can't become a genius like a job at wal-mart, or having children too early, or is stuck in a hut in a third world country somewhere.
If you're reading this, chance are you have the money and the time to rearrange your environment and your behaviors to achieve mastery. The hard part is figuring out how to do that and how to sustain that.
If you're in a stone age tribe, that is probably the most important thing you can do. Just because some stone age chieftain can't figure out how to smelt iron doesn't mean that they failed or are wasting their talents.
That said, the best do work damned hard.
This almost hurt me phisically.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Mindset-Psychology-Success-Carol-Dweck...
In most domains, talent is overrated compared to determination—partly because it makes a better story, partly because it gives onlookers an excuse for being lazy, and partly because *after a while determination starts to look like talent*.Not everybody has the ability to practice this hard.
"Well I only have so much RAM to do this task, but if increase my computer processing power through deliberate practice..."
I was a bit offhand, I admit. I was in a bad mood when I made that comment. But I stand by the fact people on HN take themselves and their capabilities way too seriously, without any thought to the fact, say, that the internet and programming are only a minuscule fraction of our history as intelligent lifeforms. While I love the internet/programming/topics discussed on HN, I just think that people here are too hard on themselves. You're not a computer with specs, you are the results of hundreds of thousands of years of evolution.