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Stop trying to ‘be original’ and be prolific instead (2016)
- DamonHD 9y agoWell, being prolific OR a genius would be fine by me. In the absence of either I do think it's valuable to try more things in parallel to see what works, and not get put off by 'failures' (experience you gained just after you needed it), or not being 'perfect' (since there rarely is such a thing, objectively).
- pnathan 9y agoI've seen this advice repeated elsewhere, with more academic analysis. And also repeated in terms of startup advice. patio11 has a phrase: "increase the luck surface", and it is kin to this as well. If % of Making It is 1 in 500, then it's much more straightforward to increase the number of dice rolls than to attempt the perfection of your roll. This also ties into the findings about grit, or perseverance through rough patches. Grit and trying over and over, learning each time, is a pretty good predictor of some decent success. In my own career, I've found that being aggressively prolific is key to getting better. Careful tweaking so as not doing the same thing over and over is hugely important as well: searching the learning hillclimb for improvement.
- patio11 9y agoThat phrase comes from the TechZing podcast ("increase one's luck surface area") and is a really valuable insight (surface area = depth of value created times breadth of people who see it), so all the credit to them.
- rizwank 9y agoCan you share which podcast it was? Nvm. Reference : http://www.codusoperandi.com/posts/increasing-your-luck-surface-area http://www.codusoperandi.com/posts/increasing-your-luck-surf...
- nether 9y agoI stopped caring about this type of ambition porn in my late twenties, and I'm a lot happier for it. I'm a lazy, average guy who will probably have a pretty average life. When I stopped being so "hungry," it opened up a world of tranquility and joy that had always been there.
- Retra 9y agoI mean, if you were trying to be ambitious only to serve your own happiness, then I'd say you were doing it for the wrong reasons in the first place. If that isn't you goal, a promise of tranquility and joy is hardly a sufficient reason to give up your ambitions.
- fenwick67 9y agoWhy else would somebody be ambitious other than the pursuit of happiness? Survival? Genuinely curious.
- obastani 9y agoFor example, because they believe in a cause -- this might still be pursuit of happiness in an abstract sense, but it's not pursuit of happiness in the immediate "I want fame/money to be happy" sense.
- pharrington 9y agoSomebody would be ambitious because they're told to be ambitious, and because they see everybody else telling everybody else to be ambitious. Primates imprint from their environment.
- cm2012 9y agoTo make sure you can help the people you love. It is horrible to watch someone else suffer from something that a little bit of inconsequential money could solve.
- JoshCole 9y agoWanting to make a contribution to something larger then themselves. Wanting to accomplish something meaningful. Wanting to test themselves. There are a lot of different reasons completely unrelated to happiness that someone might have for being ambitious. On the whole, being ambitious and being happy are likely going to be in opposition to each other before the ambition is accomplished. A lot of things worthy of being described as ambitious are extremely hard by definition. There are likely to be many failures on the way. Perhaps years worth of failure. Perhaps someone's ambition will leave them crying themselves to sleep at night because they may never accomplish the goal and they hate that. Or perhaps their entire body is a mass of bruises or every muscle is sore because of how hard they are pushing their body.
- TheHideout 9y agoOne of my favorite HN posts [1] relates directly to this. It was called "Prolific Engineers Take Small Bites". The big idea was to 1. take small bites, 2. make meaningful change, and 3. commit often. In the original article commit refers to committing to a repo. However, I treat it as commitment in a general sense. This mindset has considerably helped me keep on track with all my projects from game development, aerospace engineering day job, software contracting, learning to play music instruments, learning to draw, physical fitness, etc. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13167421 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13167421
- ThrustVectoring 9y agoThere was an interesting study I remember reading along these lines. They took two equivalent classes of pottery students. Group A was told that they'd be graded based on the number of pieces made, while group B was based off the quality of a single submitted piece. Following the given incentives involved, group A made a bunch of pottery, while group B tried really hard at making good pottery. What's interesting is at the end of the class, group A's pottery was better than group B's. Making a lot of pottery without caring about the quality of any individual piece is better at making high quality pottery. The key takeaway I got is that you're generally able to magically become better at things you do a lot of. So if you want to get good at something, just do it more, and results will generally follow.
- ghubbard 9y agoWhile a nice story, I have been unable to find any citations that would indicate that this was ever an actual study.
- ThrustVectoring 9y agoI may be mis-remembering the level of rigor, it may have just been a thing a professor tried because they were curious.
- TheBiv 9y agoit looks like it was a class https://blog.codinghorror.com/quantity-always-trumps-quality/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/quantity-always-trumps-quality...
- draw_down 9y agoIt appears in the book "Art & Fear: Observations On the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking" by David Bayles and Ted Orland. PROTIP: Google will often tell you these things!
- ghubbard 9y agoAnd where in that book are the references to an actual study? PROTIP: Books are often filled with creative writing.
- melling 9y agoQuantity trumps quality. https://blog.codinghorror.com/quantity-always-trumps-quality/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/quantity-always-trumps-quality...
- scandox 9y agoWinston Churchill produced 51 volumes of history and is generally regarded, in this pursuit, as having drank a cup and pissed an Ocean. I doubt they will continue to be read much once his personal historical aura has sufficiently faded. Gibbon on the other hand in 6 volumes wrote a work that will probably be in print until Western Civilisation sinks into the dust. So - kinda depends I would say.
- munificent 9y ago> having drank a cup and pissed an Ocean I've never heard this figure of speech and Google isn't turning anything up. What does it mean?
- pharrington 9y agoJudging from context, it's the act of relentlessly and consummately bullshitting.
- obastani 9y agoFrom the context, I think it means that the 51 volumes (the ocean) contains very little content (the cup). I also don't think the grandparent comment reflects the intent of the original post -- prolificness is the number of attempted works, not the length of any single work.
- maldusiecle 9y agoChurchill didn't write 51 volumes as one work; he was very prolific in the sense of many attempted works. Gibbon's six volumes were in a single work, and he wrote a few other shorter works. By the standard of number of attempted works, Churchill and Gibbon are good examples.
- tomc1985 9y agoI've never seen this either but judging purely from the wording it sounds like someone has produced an excessive amount of output from very little input, aka bullshitting
- vijayr 9y agoAlexander Dumas wrote a total of 277 novels over his lifetime – six every year of his working life Woah, that is insane.
- gallamine 9y agoIsaac Asimov wrote 500 books in his 72 years of life. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Asimov#cite_note-3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Asimov#cite_note-3)
- anigbrowl 9y agoTrue...but while his ideas were great, his writing hasn't aged well. I picked up a Foundation novel in a thrift store a few months ago in a moment of nostalgia and found myself cringing so much that it was a relief to reach the end. Television soap operas are also impressive in purely quantitative terms, but that doesn't make them good, does it?
- jogjayr 9y ago> I picked up a Foundation novel in a thrift store a few months ago in a moment of nostalgia and found myself cringing so much that it was a relief to reach the end. Leaving out the tacky technology (nuclear-powered kitchen knives? really?) and society seemingly in a 1950s stasis, what did you find cringeworthy, if you don't mind me asking? I re-read Foundation last year and nothing else obviously bad popped out.
- ideonexus 9y agoMy wife is a 3D print-designer, who takes her prints to craft shows. We've quickly learned that the best way to increase sales is to have a large variety of designs rather than a smaller selection of high-quality designs. She can make $30 selling one high-quality replica of a historic landmark that took her weeks of painstaking modeling time, but she has to find the one person who wants that print. Alternatively, she can mass-produce refrigerator magnets of birds, flowers, and animals that take just a few hours of modeling time and output them in such a variety that she can easily sell dozens in a day at $5 each. It's what makes Amazon so profitable and AliBaba such a threat. It's the "longtail" business model, but for ideas. Like Linus Pauling said, "The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas."
- obastani 9y agoI think this article is being somewhat selective in it's evidence. Several great mathematicians were highly selective in what they published, e.g., Gauss and Riemann. I don't think Einstein published that many papers. Though it might be the case that gauging quality is easier in math and physics, so being prolific is less important.
- jjaredsimpson 9y agoGauss and Riemann may have been selective publishers, but they produced and thought about topics constantly. We can see this in their correspondence and private notes. They probably weren't making lists of topics they wanted to study one day and getting stuck not even starting.
- mangodrunk 9y ago>They probably weren't making lists of topics they wanted to study one day and getting stuck not even starting. Is that common? I have this problem of making lists of things that I want to do, but typically it doesn't get much further than that. I feel like a constantly plan, but never do anything. Also, I agree regarding those that may have selectively published, it doesn't mean that they weren't incredibly prolific.
- bluGill 9y agoWhen you are making rough drafts I agree. However once a rough draft has promise you need to spend a lot of time on it to make it good. I have observed that authors tend to go downhill once they are known. The pressure to publish (more money I guess), along with name recognition meaning they don't have to put out quality work is my theory.
- anigbrowl 9y agoThis is basically an ad for their course. I'm not very impresseed with the article. Writing comes really easily to me (many of you would say a bit too easily, considering my tendency to drop 1000 word comments on HN). I really don't think the route to quality is just churning out as much as possible; if anything, you run the risk of getting some small success and then churning out that lowish-level of quality for as long as the money keeps flowing. It's very obvious from a day reading blogs or magazines that there is a flourishing market for bad writing. In my view, the best way to improve your writing is to read. Read a lot, be snobbish about the quality of what you read, invest effort in reading stuff you find difficult to understand. Many people pursue style at the expense of learning how to write substantively; this is the literary equivalent of painting pictures with glitter. You might produce a masterpiece after a while, but more likely whatever you do is going to look really tacky. It's easier to get paid if you're prolific and can churn out lots of material on demand. But you're also putting a ceiling on the quality of your output and probably your earning power. If you want to go good work, learn to work slowly and without the validation (and dopamine hit) that comes from a quick turnaround. I paint now and have a mix of simple things that I know out quickly and large difficult pieces that I labor over for months at a time and that are likely not that interesting or easy to appreciate to the casual glance. I like both kinds, but guess which ones have priority if the house catches fire.
- cubano 9y agoSongwriters have realized this a long time ago. Most successful bands write between 80-100 songs per album release. Hard work and practice pretty much always makes one better.
- crawfordcomeaux 9y agoDepth-first search through a concept space doesn't lead to originality as quickly as performing a breadth-first search at each new level of depth. The shortest path to an idea may require disparate ideas. I know I'm only rephrasing the headline, but the article's point follows easily from this model of how thoughts are structured in Memory Evolutive Neural Systems. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pbiomolbio.2015.07.004 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pbiomolbio.2015.07.004 (to read for free, go to https://sci-hub.bz https://sci-hub.bz and search for 10.1016/j.pbiomolbio.2015.07.004) EDIT: To be clear, the point follows easily from the model, which says nothing about what's required to understand the model.
- sideshowb 9y agoI find the polarization of this debate a bit bizarre. While the article may have a point, I don't think anyone believes in pushing it to the absurdity of its logical extreme which would be to write terabytes of output using a pseudo random algorithm (plus a little learning from audience feedback). So we see there should be a minimal acceptable quality for whatever you're doing, and if this is exceeded then by all means push out the volume. The question then becomes, how to tell whether you're meeting the quality threshold? I do agree that trying to be original is a red herring though. In a sea of mediocrity, being good is an original outcome in its own right.
- jackwest 9y agoAppreciate the simple distillation of a useful analysis.
- sndean 9y agoI wonder if this has something to do with why certain comedians are so good (e.g., Carlin and Louis CK). "...[Louis] wished he could be like Carlin and do new albums and specials every year — all of them brilliant. It wasn’t until much later in his career that C.K. would get the important advice from Carlin to throw out all of his material every year and start fresh..." http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/06/louis-ck-honors-george-carlin-video_n_950134.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/06/louis-ck-honors-geo...
- BatFastard 9y agoI was an intellectual whore for 25 years. Personally there is more joy and satisfaction in being original than there is in the money that results in being prolific. I would rather make less and be happy.
- mi100hael 9y agoEasy to say after 25 years of making money ;)
- BatFastard 9y agoWould you rather find that out in 20 more years or now?
- theprop 9y agoYES YES YES!! More support for this! That said, be prolific and deep...try not to repeat yourself depending on what you're doing but go deeper... Aaron Levie of box.com I believe started 10 different websites and box.com was the one that took off. A friend of mine in Japan started 3 companies...and only 1 took off...initially all 3 looked equally promising. Imagine if he took 2 years per experiment and gave up after 2 of the 3. The hit rate of Beethoven between masterpiece and so-so piece was relatively steady in his middle and late periods. Often works that are pre-planned "masterpieces" slaved over fail to engage, while some things made quickly live forever...think of Leonardo's drawing the Vitruvian Man, a quick sketch that's one of the most famous drawings in the world vs. his destroyed or not-made (I forget) statue of a horse (it is being re-built by someone and the world is still not taking much notice). Google, Amazon, etc...how many failures do they have, if you look at that list they'd look like giant failures...remember Google Knol? The wikipedia killer. Or Amazon Fire Phone? Really embarrassing...do they care? Not at all! They simply don't care...but it's a little bit because despite a hundred failures, two of the more experimental things they did become $100 billion dollar businesses namely Android and AWS.
- code777777 9y agoAdam Grant whose book "Originals" is a main topic in this this article gave a great Ted Talk on "Originals" here: "The surprising habits of original thinkers" https://www.ted.com/talks/adam_grant_the_surprising_habits_of_original_thinkers https://www.ted.com/talks/adam_grant_the_surprising_habits_o...
- unabst 9y agoIf you get really really good at something, original is automatic. And if you practice really really hard at something, getting good is automatic. Passion is a simple advantage because it gives you the focus, the persistence, and the satisfaction needed to keep practicing efficiently. Maybe it'll take 10 years to do what a genius could accomplish in 1, but if the genius is working on something else, it's all you. But even if not, your body of work will be different.
- kwoff 9y agoExploiting a power law. Search it with content marketing. The article, like others on that site, also has a listicle, which you might also search with content marketing.
- CM30 9y agoYeah, I have to say I agree with this article for the most part. For example, I've spent most of my time recently as a writer, and found that it's been almost impossible to tell what works will become popular and what won't. You can throw something out in minutes and have tons of people sharing it and liking it, or spend months researching a piece and find that no one gives a toss. But (somewhat sadly), I'm not sure I'd agree with the article that: > being prolific doesn’t give you an excuse to get sloppy and start blurting out half formed ideas – that’s just going to piss off everyone apart from your mum. Your work still needs to be the very best you can do. Because somewhat unfortunately, that's exactly what search engines and social networks kind of want now. They want quick responses to breaking news and trends, not well thought out pieces that take all the facts and views into consideration. Look at YouTube for example. Many popular channels there basically cash in on whatever the latest controversy or drama is, usually within about a day of it occurring. A lot of popular games and apps are ones that literally just cash in on a recent trend, quality be kind of damned (see that Mega Man Xover 'fan game' which showed you could copy Capcom's product by spending 5 minutes in Flash or various game mods and stuff which stick Donald Trump into existing games). And when news is concerned... well, the most successful papers and sites (as far as traffic is concerned) are those that rush out stories as quickly as possible. Someone who watched yesterday's Pokemon themed Nintendo Direct would get a lot more clicks if they capitalised on the typo that said it'd released for the Switch rather than if they waited for more facts before proceeding. So being prolific definitely helps more than trying to be 'original' and focusing too much on any one piece. But I'd also say the setup on a lot of modern internet sites actually goes further and kind of advantages people who can just get stuff done quickly in general, quality be damned.