Hacker News Reader

Comment by eutropia | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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.

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com