Hacker News Reader

Comment by ang_cire | Hacker News Reader

> A writer needs readers. An entrepreneur needs customers. An athlete needs competition. A lover needs someone free to reject him. Any worthy pursuit needs a mat.

Nah. I judge myself by how I progressed from yesterday, not by whether what I am or what I built is useful to others.

Is keeping a diary pointless if you're not planning to make it a memoir?

Is staying healthy pointless if you aren't using that health to compete with others?

It's hilarious to me that the author calls the cave "grinding", when to my eyes the "grindset" guys are the ones always trying to very visibly compete with others about wealth/status/women.

I've never heard of some guy trying to build the best Rimworld colony (in what is probably a very cave-like setting, no less) try to portray it as grinding.

View on HN

Despite my other comment in this thread I strongly agree with this! I have "stupid" schemes and do "useless" side projects purely for their own sake and for my own enjoyment, and I am very happy with them. Those things are expressed freely, and never came from a cave.

But I think this article is for people who may not be introspective and self-aware enough to know the difference between private, self-satisfied enjoyment and private, self-inflicted suffering. Some people fool themselves into thinking they do something for the joy of it, and remain unsatisfied, because they harbor higher hopes they never admit to themselves.

For Rimworld: some people like making hyperoptimized minmax colonies for their own satisfaction (haven't played it myself, but I do play Factorio so I get it). But you can imagine that some people who _think_ they play for fun, but also really want the validation of posting their killbox on Reddit and having people acknowledge how good it is, and if they don't get that then they retreat to their cave and work on an even "better" colony, and maybe this one will be the one that people will praise [0, maybe? looked for an example]. And so they get wrapped up in a whole meta-argument about their playstyle and how they choose to enjoy the game and can't just simply... enjoy it?

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/RimWorld/comments/1v0nwg4/alright_y...

Thank you! The author makes one large assumption about why people do what they do. If I'm doing something for the fun of it, I don't think I need anyone else to see my results in order for me to get exactly what I wanted out of it.

I told my mum about all sorts of projects I'm working on. She stared at me with pity then said, "but who knows about it?"

You do mom!

I think the warning in the article is a little more subtle.

The author isn’t placing a moral judgement on certain goals or whether the result of reaching that goal has a large enough audience.

They are warning against doing things that work against achieving our goals in ways that are hard for us to notice by ourselves.

I think they needn't be so subtle in that case.

If the take away is supposed to be only other people can set meaningful metrics for you, then their wrestling history had nothing to do with said lesson, because the author offers no evidence that an external metric-setter would have made them more successful.

Ironically, the author deciding on their own that an external mentor/ reviewer is what they needed to succeed (without evidence proving the difference), is the exact same thing as them deciding that they needed technique or conditioning.

My side projects all take forever and meander indefinitely. Completing them means they're over. I do them to do them. I pretty much never make anything useful.

The mat is the objective (or at least distinct from your own personal judgement) measure of your goal. If your goal is important to you, an objective measure of your progress towards it is more valuable than your own flawed and biased opinion.

The mat for the diary might be the times you consulted back to it for useful introspection and came out better for it, the mat for your health goal could be your blood test from the doctor, etc.

The point is that the mat doesn't care what you think of yourself. I would ask you: when you judged your progress from yesterday, was it with a mat - a brutally objective test - or was it with something less honest?

Whatever your goals are, if you really, truly care about them, and you understand what your true objective is, you'll value the mat. The mat is not about what other people think, it is about undeniably simple and real feedback on your objective.

I get the intention, but this is still ultimately turning it into a sort of, "only progress towards a fixed goal matters, and progress requires metrics, ergo only things that require metrics matter" view of life.

Sometimes the process is the objective. Put another way, some goals are only achieved by not reaching a terminus.

But that aside, there's an even more important point:

> I would ask you: when you judged your progress from yesterday, was it with a mat - a brutally objective test

There is no such thing.

Even in the author's example of wrestling, their conclusion is incorrect (or at least, not supported by the data they have). Their circuit could have been far above the national average in participant skill, so losing there and concluding "I'm not skilled" is an assessment based on where they subjectively drew their line of comparison.

And given that they never actually gained their supposed "heart" they believe they needed, how do they even know that would have changed anything? They could have fixed their attitude and still always lost!

Anyone who works in IT knows that metrics and measures are anything but objective truth.

So, one thing I do that might be directly relevant to this analogy is to lift weights. My goal when I started was to get stronger. I measure that by whether I can lift more weight today than I did yesterday. The barbell doesn't lie.

Sometimes I can, sometimes I can't. Sometimes I even regress a bit. But over time, I have gotten stronger.

Some people at my gym urge me to "compete" but I can't see a reason to do this. I am achieving what I set out to do, by objective measures. Why is what someone else can do in comparison at all relevant? I am stronger than some people. Maybe stronger than most people my age. But there are always going to be people stronger than me. It doesn't bother me, because my goal and motivation was never about that.

For you the barbell itself is the mat.

Even for this, I still need outside perspective, especially when I (currently) fail at it badly. Do I fail to increase my barbell by 1 kg because I haven't tried enough, or because it's what only 0.001% people managed to do and I'm likely not one of them? I guess this may make me solve one or two unsolved math problem that I don't know is unsolved, but I don't want to count on it.

I've gone from amateur punter to moderately competent athlete (think d3 college team, though my sport has no such metric), and my thought is this: The only way to get better if you've plateaued is to change something. The external reasons you fail matter only because they tell you what to change internally. I've done things that surely not more than 100 people have done, and I'm not, by any metric, in the top .000001% or whatever. I just decided to do them and fought hard, it really was that simple.

This also relates to my interp of the article. There's grinding/training and then there's "having that dog in ya". He's trying to remind people to do the latter.

As best I can tell, the stoics argued against exactly this. The parable of archer[1] is the best summation of this philosophy - that one’s ultimate aim is to do all in one’s power to shoot straight rather than hit the target.

1. https://www.thelatinlibrary.com/cicero/fin3.shtml

What activities are you engaging in where you can make progress with no interaction with other people?

Speaking for myself: working out, reading, composing music, and journaling.

Learning a language not spoken around you is very solitary experience.

Also, jogging and swimming, drawing, playing musical instrument.

Learning a language in this way is some sad boi stuff

Why? Or I mean, how do you imagine language learning to be? There is a lot of reading, listening, watching, memorizing and writing involved. And grammar study. All of those are done alone.

Studying, programming, meditating, reading, writing, thinking, lucid dreaming...

I'm a grindset man.

I never advertise my grind details.

A couple years back I came up with a morning routine, designed to compensate for the fact that I am extremely lazy and have a barely functioning prefrontal cortex.

Not long afterwards, roughly the same recipe was being heralded as some hardcore millionaire stoicism business, which amused me to no end.

could you share the routine? or the hardcore millionaire stoic routine.

https://nekolucifer.substack.com/p/just-make-it-really-hard-...

thanks for sharing! So much in common with my workflow. Great reading.

For me this one is the most important, which I always suspected but only now being able to follow through:

- Rule 1: Work every day. No skipping days. But I only need to work 1 hour.

Show up everyday.

Agree. A good reminder that people project their thoughts as fact in the writing, and our brains accept it faster than coming to our own conclusion.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com