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>Start sloppy >Another trick to start sloppy - you might have high expectations of your finished work. >You want to write a great book, not just a good one. O

>Start sloppy >Another trick to start sloppy - you might have high expectations of your finished work. >You want to write a great book, not just a good one. Or create a stellar artwork, or start a great business. >All those expectations can put more pressure on you than you can bear, leading you to avoid it by procrastinating. >Instead, you can escape those expectations by starting deliberately badly. I use this one a lot. I always heard it called a 'vomit draft'. It really works. It's easier to see how truly terrible thing could be improved than it is to just start working from a blank slate.

andai 7y ago
You can't clean up a blank page. Gotta foul it up first!
ramblerman 7y ago
This idea is captured nicely in the book "Art and Fear" with the following anecdote: "The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay."
- SiempreViernes 7y ago
  Was this book some sort of dystopia about teaching?
- zupa-hu 7y ago
  how cool, thanks for sharing!
- onion2k 7y ago
  Maybe this works for potters but I don't think it'd work for developers. If a compSci lecturer suggested one group would get an A for writing a perfect, bug free app and the other group would get an A for writing 50,000 lines of code, I wouldn't expect the group writing as much code as they could to make the best app.
  - selectnull 7y ago
    In this hypothetical scenario, instead of counting final lines of code, maybe we should count lines of affected code: take each commit and count how many lines were added, modified or deleted. That matches "the quantity trumps quality" idea above more closely in our industry.
  - cozos 7y ago
    Group B would be assigned to write 50 apps in this case. In your example 50000 LOC would be like making a really giant pot.
    - onion2k 7y ago
      In the pottery example Group A were marked by weight ("fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on."). Making a single giant pot could get you an A if the lecturer wasn't pedantic about the meaning of "pots".
      - Drakar1903 7y ago
        Well, if you're making "pots", you're not making "vases", "pans" or "thimbles". The experiment doesn't work if you don't set any acceptance criteria.
  - pure-awesome 7y ago
    I think it could potentially work! Consider someone with little to no experience with programming trying to build a single app and planning it out and refactoring and refining it continuously, compared to constantly creating and archiving multiple toy prototypes of the same app and then considering the best among those. (The app's size and complexity should be commensurate to a single clay pot in a ceramics course.) It requires the students to actually try to make something of quality, sure, but only to the same degree that the students in the original (apocryphal) story did- after all, those students could easily have shown up with a pile of baked misshapen clay instead of proper pots.
- Ma8ee 7y ago
  I don't find it now, but I've read that anecdote is made up. And I don't think it make sense. Except for when you are an absolute beginner, you won't improve if you don't put in any effort in the quality of your work. See deliberate practice etc..
  - ramblerman 7y ago
    I think you are missing the forest for the trees. The point is to get over that mental hurdle of achieving perfection, which blocks a lot of people from getting started.
    - Ma8ee 7y ago
      I understand the point they are trying to make, but I still think the anecdote is harmful. It gives the impression that it is more important to put in the work than any real effort. The only thing you’ll be good at after producing 1000 crappy pots is producing crappy pots.
      - imtringued 7y ago
        High quality crappy pots.
      - kortex 7y ago
        It's also tinted by the fact that learning a skill is usually logarithmic. If you are a student with no pot-making skills, those first few pots are gonna give a lot of XP. I think it'd be a different outcome if done with more experienced potters.
      - bityard 7y ago
        I think you are over-simplifying the situation. Malcom Gladwell's book Outliers popularized the notion that a person needs on average 10,000 hours of practice to truly master a given task. A lot of people took this to mean, "if you put in 10,000 hours of practice, you will become a master." This is not true. The 10,000 hours of practice is necessary, but not sufficient. The practice has to be _intentional_, guided, goal-oriented practice. Not just playing the same song or making the same shot over and over.
- mourner 7y ago
  There’s exactly the same anecdote in the popular book “Atomic Habits” but instead of pottery, it’s a photography class.
  - loco5niner 7y ago
    Man, I could get an A in like, 20 seconds.
- cymantic 7y ago
  I can’t remember the name of the ceramicist, but hearing him interviewed on Radio 4, his apprenticeship in (China|Japan) involved every pot he made being deliberately smashed at the end of the day for a year. A way to get over a fear of failure and to learn to keep repeating the process of learning.
- rudesoil 7y ago
  David Bowie and Tin Machine used this technique on their album Tin Machine. >The Sales’ also pushed for a punishing first-take philosophy, which Bowie found enticing. No overdubs unless necessary for guitar solos, no synths (the old Queen boast), and most of all, no lyric rewrites. The band would go to lunch and return to find that Bowie had written out a complete provisional lyric for whatever song they were working on. But that was as far as he was allowed to go: he was forced to keep to his first instincts. Sometimes this worked out, sometimes it didn’t (see “Crack City”). >Given these strictures, Bowie and the band stuck to music “that didn’t have too much orchestration about it,” as Bowie said in a 1989 interview. “If it got too chordy and arranged, it wouldn’t be anything what we wanted to do. The structure had to be as loose as possible so that we could improvise.” Rather than reworking songs, they just kept cutting more, with as many as 35 to 40 pieces coming out of the sessions. So most of Tin Machine is basic blues-centered rock, with the average song having no more than five chords: it lacked the harmonic ambiguity and structural games of Bowie’s older work. While the record often worked on a song level, with 14 tracks on the CD version, the album was a wearying listen. Few records are as exciting in miniature and as draining as a whole as Tin Machine. from here https://bowiesongs.wordpress.com/2012/04/25/heavens-in-here/ https://bowiesongs.wordpress.com/2012/04/25/heavens-in-here/
blowski 7y ago
Fred Brooks in The Mythical Man Month: > Plan to throw one away. You will anyway.
Lex-2008 7y ago
I also like how they mention marathon. Indeed, you don't start training for marathon by running all 42km on the first day, are you? No, for some of us in our current shape even running 5km is hard! So we should start with smaller things - those we can do - and tell ourselves that we have achieved something - and that tomorrow we probably will achieve slightly more.
mcv 7y ago
It's often easier to add to something that already exists than to start something new from scratch. And when you're the one who created the thing in the first place, it's that much easier to make the improvements. Even if the initial thing is so terrible it needs to be redone completely, at least you figured out what you don't want. All while getting into the habit of doing the thing.
- fastbeef 7y ago
  I stumbled upon this when trying to get started with my master thesis. In frustration, I threw a bunch of buzzwords and random thoughts at LaTeX and then stashed it for a day or two. After that, I picked it up, looked at it critically and went "well, this paragraph is obviously wrong, here's what it SHOULD say..." and two hours later I had a very rough draft finished.
  - sk0g 7y ago
    Currently struggling with writing a bachelor's thesis hard, so any other ideas/ tips you have, would be greatly appreciated!
    - fastbeef 7y ago
      Write out the whole thesis as headers and fill all the sections with Loren ipsums until you have the page count you want. Then, start filling in the real text
      - mcv 7y ago
        Please double check for the lorem ipsums before you hand it in.
kashug 7y ago
I agree a lot with this. A blank page is the worst - I find it hard to get started. But if I just put something (probably something bad) it is much easier to just continue improving it.
- skocznymroczny 7y ago
  For me it's different. It's easy for me to start a project. I get overly excited over a week, banging a lot of code. But as soon as I get stuck, I often get stuck forever and never come back to the project. Or I decide to "refactor" a piece of code, and then spend days thinking about how I'll "refactor" it, rather than just doing it or not doing it in the first place.
Valakas_ 7y ago
> Start in a way that you could enjoy. Start doing in in a way that you could have fun, even if it's not as efficient as other boring/normal ways, so that the fun itself is the motivator.
nonameriot 7y ago
Does this mean that, for instance, if you're writing a novel, you start without a structured outline?
- summerdown2 7y ago
  Many people do! This is the 'architect' vs 'gardener' debate. A lot of writers start out with the notion of a story, then let it develop in the writing. If I remember correctly, Stephen King writes this way.
- JonathanFly 7y ago
  >Does this mean that, for instance, if you're writing a novel, you start without a structured outline? It could, but there's no reason you couldn't start with a terrible outline instead of diving right into prose. The point is just that when you see something your brain will stark noticing all the ways it sucks and it gets things going.
hinkley 7y ago
At work I found calling this draft a 'straw man' gets quite a few more people off of the starting blocks. It's just an avenue for having a discussion about what we actually want to say.
aeturnum 7y ago
Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.
CathedralBorrow 7y ago
This absolutely works for me. I call it the 'zeroth draft'.
cloverich 7y ago
Make it work, make it right, make it fast [1]. This has helped me tremendously in my programming career and especially in my side projects, where I have very limited time and energy. Its a solid strategy for breaking down complex work. [1]: https://wiki.c2.com/?MakeItWorkMakeItRightMakeItFast https://wiki.c2.com/?MakeItWorkMakeItRightMakeItFast
closeparen 7y ago
Reminds me of an idea from Ira Glass's lecture circuit: as you learn a craft, you develop the taste to recognize that your own work is crap long before you get good enough to satisfy your own standards. You just have to push through and trust that it eventually ends.
philwelch 7y ago
As Ernest Hemingway never actually said, "write drunk, edit sober". Which I don't take to mean literally getting drunk before you start working on something, but do it as if you were drunk, i.e. with little to no inhibition.

andai 7y ago

You can't clean up a blank page. Gotta foul it up first!

ramblerman 7y ago

This idea is captured nicely in the book "Art and Fear" with the following anecdote: "The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay."

SiempreViernes 7y ago
Was this book some sort of dystopia about teaching?
zupa-hu 7y ago
how cool, thanks for sharing!
onion2k 7y ago
Maybe this works for potters but I don't think it'd work for developers. If a compSci lecturer suggested one group would get an A for writing a perfect, bug free app and the other group would get an A for writing 50,000 lines of code, I wouldn't expect the group writing as much code as they could to make the best app.
- selectnull 7y ago
  In this hypothetical scenario, instead of counting final lines of code, maybe we should count lines of affected code: take each commit and count how many lines were added, modified or deleted. That matches "the quantity trumps quality" idea above more closely in our industry.
- cozos 7y ago
  Group B would be assigned to write 50 apps in this case. In your example 50000 LOC would be like making a really giant pot.
  - onion2k 7y ago
    In the pottery example Group A were marked by weight ("fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on."). Making a single giant pot could get you an A if the lecturer wasn't pedantic about the meaning of "pots".
    - Drakar1903 7y ago
      Well, if you're making "pots", you're not making "vases", "pans" or "thimbles". The experiment doesn't work if you don't set any acceptance criteria.
- pure-awesome 7y ago
  I think it could potentially work! Consider someone with little to no experience with programming trying to build a single app and planning it out and refactoring and refining it continuously, compared to constantly creating and archiving multiple toy prototypes of the same app and then considering the best among those. (The app's size and complexity should be commensurate to a single clay pot in a ceramics course.) It requires the students to actually try to make something of quality, sure, but only to the same degree that the students in the original (apocryphal) story did- after all, those students could easily have shown up with a pile of baked misshapen clay instead of proper pots.
Ma8ee 7y ago
I don't find it now, but I've read that anecdote is made up. And I don't think it make sense. Except for when you are an absolute beginner, you won't improve if you don't put in any effort in the quality of your work. See deliberate practice etc..
- ramblerman 7y ago
  I think you are missing the forest for the trees. The point is to get over that mental hurdle of achieving perfection, which blocks a lot of people from getting started.
  - Ma8ee 7y ago
    I understand the point they are trying to make, but I still think the anecdote is harmful. It gives the impression that it is more important to put in the work than any real effort. The only thing you’ll be good at after producing 1000 crappy pots is producing crappy pots.
    - imtringued 7y ago
      High quality crappy pots.
    - kortex 7y ago
      It's also tinted by the fact that learning a skill is usually logarithmic. If you are a student with no pot-making skills, those first few pots are gonna give a lot of XP. I think it'd be a different outcome if done with more experienced potters.
    - bityard 7y ago
      I think you are over-simplifying the situation. Malcom Gladwell's book Outliers popularized the notion that a person needs on average 10,000 hours of practice to truly master a given task. A lot of people took this to mean, "if you put in 10,000 hours of practice, you will become a master." This is not true. The 10,000 hours of practice is necessary, but not sufficient. The practice has to be _intentional_, guided, goal-oriented practice. Not just playing the same song or making the same shot over and over.
mourner 7y ago
There’s exactly the same anecdote in the popular book “Atomic Habits” but instead of pottery, it’s a photography class.
- loco5niner 7y ago
  Man, I could get an A in like, 20 seconds.
cymantic 7y ago
I can’t remember the name of the ceramicist, but hearing him interviewed on Radio 4, his apprenticeship in (China|Japan) involved every pot he made being deliberately smashed at the end of the day for a year. A way to get over a fear of failure and to learn to keep repeating the process of learning.
rudesoil 7y ago
David Bowie and Tin Machine used this technique on their album Tin Machine. >The Sales’ also pushed for a punishing first-take philosophy, which Bowie found enticing. No overdubs unless necessary for guitar solos, no synths (the old Queen boast), and most of all, no lyric rewrites. The band would go to lunch and return to find that Bowie had written out a complete provisional lyric for whatever song they were working on. But that was as far as he was allowed to go: he was forced to keep to his first instincts. Sometimes this worked out, sometimes it didn’t (see “Crack City”). >Given these strictures, Bowie and the band stuck to music “that didn’t have too much orchestration about it,” as Bowie said in a 1989 interview. “If it got too chordy and arranged, it wouldn’t be anything what we wanted to do. The structure had to be as loose as possible so that we could improvise.” Rather than reworking songs, they just kept cutting more, with as many as 35 to 40 pieces coming out of the sessions. So most of Tin Machine is basic blues-centered rock, with the average song having no more than five chords: it lacked the harmonic ambiguity and structural games of Bowie’s older work. While the record often worked on a song level, with 14 tracks on the CD version, the album was a wearying listen. Few records are as exciting in miniature and as draining as a whole as Tin Machine. from here https://bowiesongs.wordpress.com/2012/04/25/heavens-in-here/ https://bowiesongs.wordpress.com/2012/04/25/heavens-in-here/

blowski 7y ago

Fred Brooks in The Mythical Man Month: > Plan to throw one away. You will anyway.

Lex-2008 7y ago

I also like how they mention marathon. Indeed, you don't start training for marathon by running all 42km on the first day, are you? No, for some of us in our current shape even running 5km is hard! So we should start with smaller things - those we can do - and tell ourselves that we have achieved something - and that tomorrow we probably will achieve slightly more.

mcv 7y ago

It's often easier to add to something that already exists than to start something new from scratch. And when you're the one who created the thing in the first place, it's that much easier to make the improvements. Even if the initial thing is so terrible it needs to be redone completely, at least you figured out what you don't want. All while getting into the habit of doing the thing.

fastbeef 7y ago
I stumbled upon this when trying to get started with my master thesis. In frustration, I threw a bunch of buzzwords and random thoughts at LaTeX and then stashed it for a day or two. After that, I picked it up, looked at it critically and went "well, this paragraph is obviously wrong, here's what it SHOULD say..." and two hours later I had a very rough draft finished.
- sk0g 7y ago
  Currently struggling with writing a bachelor's thesis hard, so any other ideas/ tips you have, would be greatly appreciated!
  - fastbeef 7y ago
    Write out the whole thesis as headers and fill all the sections with Loren ipsums until you have the page count you want. Then, start filling in the real text
    - mcv 7y ago
      Please double check for the lorem ipsums before you hand it in.

kashug 7y ago

I agree a lot with this. A blank page is the worst - I find it hard to get started. But if I just put something (probably something bad) it is much easier to just continue improving it.

skocznymroczny 7y ago
For me it's different. It's easy for me to start a project. I get overly excited over a week, banging a lot of code. But as soon as I get stuck, I often get stuck forever and never come back to the project. Or I decide to "refactor" a piece of code, and then spend days thinking about how I'll "refactor" it, rather than just doing it or not doing it in the first place.

Valakas_ 7y ago

> Start in a way that you could enjoy. Start doing in in a way that you could have fun, even if it's not as efficient as other boring/normal ways, so that the fun itself is the motivator.

nonameriot 7y ago

Does this mean that, for instance, if you're writing a novel, you start without a structured outline?

summerdown2 7y ago
Many people do! This is the 'architect' vs 'gardener' debate. A lot of writers start out with the notion of a story, then let it develop in the writing. If I remember correctly, Stephen King writes this way.
JonathanFly 7y ago
>Does this mean that, for instance, if you're writing a novel, you start without a structured outline? It could, but there's no reason you couldn't start with a terrible outline instead of diving right into prose. The point is just that when you see something your brain will stark noticing all the ways it sucks and it gets things going.

hinkley 7y ago

At work I found calling this draft a 'straw man' gets quite a few more people off of the starting blocks. It's just an avenue for having a discussion about what we actually want to say.

aeturnum 7y ago

Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.

CathedralBorrow 7y ago

This absolutely works for me. I call it the 'zeroth draft'.

cloverich 7y ago

Make it work, make it right, make it fast [1]. This has helped me tremendously in my programming career and especially in my side projects, where I have very limited time and energy. Its a solid strategy for breaking down complex work. [1]: https://wiki.c2.com/?MakeItWorkMakeItRightMakeItFast https://wiki.c2.com/?MakeItWorkMakeItRightMakeItFast

closeparen 7y ago

Reminds me of an idea from Ira Glass's lecture circuit: as you learn a craft, you develop the taste to recognize that your own work is crap long before you get good enough to satisfy your own standards. You just have to push through and trust that it eventually ends.

philwelch 7y ago

As Ernest Hemingway never actually said, "write drunk, edit sober". Which I don't take to mean literally getting drunk before you start working on something, but do it as if you were drunk, i.e. with little to no inhibition.