12 ms·

Do the Real Thing

272 points by reedwolf 6y ago

disruptorman 6y ago
Stop these advertising schemes. Annoying as fuck
trevyn 6y ago
Also— do what makes you happy, not what you think will make you happy. ;)
- elcomet 6y ago
  How to know though?
  - kd5bjo 6y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflective_practice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflective_practice
blickentwapft 6y ago
This really hit the mark.
Kye 6y ago
After tens of thousands of photos, hundreds of songs, and millions of words, I can confirm that doing the thing is more effective than aimless research and analysis. The doing guides the learning.
Animats 6y ago
For a contrary view, see "This is It".[1] (The one from the US Navy, not the one from the dead singer.) It's the story of four pilots who didn't take their training seriously enough. [1] https://www.youtube.com./watch?v=fNBwBHTWec4 https://www.youtube.com./watch?v=fNBwBHTWec4
- teddyh 6y ago
  Reel 2: https://www.youtube.com./watch?v=a7pH6CQcGMU https://www.youtube.com./watch?v=a7pH6CQcGMU
abraae 6y ago
As with all good advice, this reads well and makes sense but the devil is in the details. > Eric Barone, who went on to sell millions of copies of his game, overcame his struggles at creating art by making and remaking the art assets for his game dozens of times. To someone else, frigging around with their art assets and remaking then over and over again could be the very definition of not doing "the real thing".
- eebynight 6y ago
  I think you missed the entire point of the article. The "real" thing is subjective and varies from person to person depending on their experience with the subject. If someone else had no trouble creating art then this situation simply doesn't apply to them. That person might have a different part of the process that gives them trouble that they SHOULD be practicing. For Eric, practicing the thing he had trouble with over and over was the best way for him to get over his struggles. Now he can move onto the next thing he needs to work on and continue to make progress.
- gridlockd 6y ago
  ...not if your crappy prgrammer art is the only thing standing in the way of shipping a game that could actually sell.
- hunterloftis 6y ago
  Agreed. Following the article’s own advice of “ask someone who knows how your industry works” would certainly lead to “pay an artist” rather than “churn on your programmer art” if your goal is shipping a successful game.
gfodor 6y ago
You gotta do both. Research, analyze, digest, and then execute. With time, you can reduce the duration of the cycle. Taking the first step often requires a lot of research and thinking, and then a lot of execution to go from zero to one. Then, iterate, with shorter cycles. Failing to think is as much a problem as failing to execute, you have to balance it.
- travisjungroth 6y ago
  > Taking the first step often requires a lot of research and thinking I generally agree with your comment, but strongly disagree with this part. You will have much more success if you take this first step as soon as possible. No research, no thinking. And a “real thing” first step. You want to start running? Put on some shoes and go for a run. Don’t sign up for a race, don’t look up running tips, don’t buy nice shoes. Just go run for a bit. Coding? Pop open repl.it. Scuba? Get your head under water. Even for things that might be out of reach like flying an airplane, read up on something specific like how to land. With your very first step out of the way, you can then start thinking a bit more.
  - jkhdigital 6y ago
    I tend to agree with this line of thinking... reminds me of Mike Tyson’s admonition “everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” You want to take that first punch as soon as possible.
  - Kye 6y ago
    As someone who digs inversion as a way to get started on things and avoid the big blockers: at least look up basics of how to avoid and recognize injuries while running. Injuries will stop you more firmly than analysis paralysis. You'll mostly discover the right things by doing, but the wrong things can hold you back, and they're often well-documented. Example: guitar players who discover music theory by plucking and poking until things sound good, but mess up their hands with bad form.
  - superhuzza 6y ago
    >You will have much more success if you take this first step as soon as possible. No research, no thinking. I'd be careful with this advice. Almost every time I climb outside I see groups who clearly have very little idea of what they're doing, because all the small but deadly details are wrong - no stopper knots, not backing up rappels, building weird anchors, having 1 point of failure, etc. From their perspective, they're just getting out there and taking those first steps - but with an inadequate understanding of how much risk they've taken on. They don't even realize they're doing anything wrong. It's really bad and regularly leads to serious accidents. To actually climb outside they need mentorship or a bunch of research and practice, both of which take a while to acquire. They should definitely not start by doing the thing.
zomglings 6y ago
Definitely agree with the article, and would like to offer a useful supplement to "doing the real thing": "watch someone very skilled do the real thing". Watching a pro can really accelerate skill acquisition because it will expose you to high quality ideas that would have been difficult to develop on your own. Want to get better at Backgammon/Chess/Go? Play a lot of games (at various time controls). Yes. But also watch professional players and read their analyses of games. Want to get better at programming? Write a lot of programs. Yes. But also read a lot of high quality code written by others. Want to become a better mathematician? Spend your time mastering mathematical knowledge and techniques. Yes. But also spend some time trying to get in the heads of the masters - learning their patterns of thought at the mathematical and meta-mathematical levels. The increased accessibility of this kind of content is one of the greatest achievements of the internet.
- kalonis 6y ago
  Just watching someone doing the real thing is one of the most prominent strategies to avoid doing the real thing. It is not enough to watch someone very skilled do the real thing. You have to imitate them: Reading a lot of great novels will not make you a better writer. Instead write a story in the style of any writer you admire and you will learn a lot while still doing the real thing. The same is true for almost any art you want learn.
  - zomglings 6y ago
    Very true. I don't mean this as a strategy for procrastination, but rather as a strategy for finding patterns/modes of thought that would otherwise have been difficult for you to discover on your own from first principles. It is very important to test out first hand by "doing the real thing" the ideas you discover by watching skilled people.
  - empath75 6y ago
    I play a lot of hearthstone, and I’m quite good at it, but to remain good at it, I absolutely do have to spent a fair bit of time watching streamers and reading strategy articles. There’s a lot to know about the game and you absolutely cannot get everything you need to be a top player from only playing. Even the top professional players spend a lot of time in coaching sessions with their peers or just watching streams.
aazaa 6y ago
> People trying to get in shape who buy fancy workout gear instead of exercising. Translating this idea to learning a programming language, the best way to learn a language is to apply it to something real, almost immediately. Following tutorials has a use, but you'll get a lot more out of it after having flailed around trying to make the most ridiculously minimal version of something you really want to build. This is one of the main problems with science education. In most cases, there's nothing like the "flail around" stage while you try to do something applied but which you are desperately underqualified to do.
zexodus 6y ago
This article reminds me that I don't really know what I want to do in the first place.
- jkhdigital 6y ago
  Yeah I think that’s something Mr. Young glosses over in his book—it’s hard to muster the courage to suffer through this kind of direct approach when you’re anything less than absolutely committed. I think it takes a certain personality to be able to just pick some random skill and convince yourself that it’s do or die.
jkhdigital 6y ago
I’m in the middle of listening to Scott Young’s book Ultralearning, and honestly this article captures the most important idea. 90% of becoming an “ultra learner” is having the courage to tackle the real thing immediately; the rest is just tactics.
emsal 6y ago
This kind of writing makes me upset. * It's really self-important. Not only is it selling you on a particular strategy for attaining success, it also tries to sell success in things like public speaking and doing architectural work as an absolutely important part of one's life, and that implicitly a person's existence is invalidated if they aren't constantly trying to achieve this kind of success. It doesn't do it explicitly but the very notion of "real" and "fake" and other words like "wasted" complete with the trite diagrams showing that "hey, all your efforts are going into this small circle" give a very strong implicit value-judgement of the reader. * There's no proof. I don't know if I'm on the mark with this one, but I think that the act of omitting any sort of data about measuring the outcome of success when taking different approaches seems to imply to the reader that the argument should just "make sense" i.e. it's a truth that the reader already knows, they should just find it within their own observations in order to understand it. Here, have a handful of anecdotes to top it all off in case you weren't convinced. Overall this just feels like it's made to make the reader feel a certain way (motivated) rather than actually teach them any solid information. * What even is real and fake? The readers are given a bunch of examples and then we're left on our own to figure out what falls into which category. Someone commented on the article saying that if someone wanted to watch and understand anime in Japanese, they could just do that and that'd be the real thing, with the fake thing being taking the time to learn Japanese. This is obviously not going to be successful, so at this point the author's prescription has failed as a framework for achieving success. --- This kind of fiery motivational content could be harmful as much as it is useful. It'd be fine if an article, devoid of substance as it may be, was only meant to make readers feel motivated, but the problem is that this kind of fiery motivational content does different things for different readers. A person in a bad, self-loathing emotional state could be rendered feeling even worse, thinking that everything that they're doing at present is fake while everything that their peers are doing are more real, even when that's blatantly untrue. The devil's in the details and personally, I'm not going to let myself get affected by this personal philosophy if the case for it is this weak.
- eebynight 6y ago
  I think for your first point, you're definitely reading into it too much... As for you second point, what kind of proof do you need? Do you want scientific studies that dive way too deep into specifics and are not applicable to real life? This article is targeted towards learning, which varies heavily from person to person and can be very subjective. Think about it from your perspective and see if the ideas apply to what you do. Simple as that. For your third point, yeah sure real and fake are pretty subjective. In the end it's obviously up to you to decide or come to a decision about what is and what isn't. Our gut instinct usually fails here thought... However, to address the point about learning Japanese, I would argue that taking the time to learn before doing so is the "fake" way. How do children learn a language if they can't use a computer or phone to get on Duolingo or go to a community college to take a course? They literally just are exposed to it and pick it up over time. People may not know his background but he is a prominent figure when it comes to language learning and his strategies are to replicate natural learning methods and ignore the canned courses like Duolingo that don't do you any good...
deleted 6y ago
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ookdatnog 6y ago
This is the kind of advice that, for one person, might be exactly what they need, and for another it might be the exact opposite of what they need. For example, Christopher McCandless dove head-first into the real thing (that is, surviving without help in the Alaskan wilderness), without proper preparation and training, and died. He didn't have to, he could have built up to it gradually by training various survival skills (aka "faking" it). Also, the author claims that the difference between "doing the real thing" and faking it is what success largely boils down to. That is a completely wild claim, with of course not a shred of evidence to back it up. Does the author really believe that this is a necessary and largely sufficient condition for success?
- war1025 6y ago
  > For example, Christopher McCandless dove head-first into the real thing (that is, surviving without help in the Alaskan wilderness), without proper preparation and training, and died. He didn't go straight from normal life to Alaskan wilderness though. He spent a good bit of time traveling and being homeless. If anything, he was in the uncanny valley of being skilled at most aspects of living in the wildnerness, but unaware of the specifics of being in Alaska and how the environment would change between seasons.
closeparen 6y ago
C25K does not start with a marathon. Skiing lessons do not start on a black diamond. Intro CS does not start by writing an OS. Skill development is an incrementalist game for patient people. I've made much more progress by finding a sustainable pace and chipping away over time, than by trying to conquer something in a weekend. Natural language acquisition is kind of a special case here, in that you are actually wired to do this one from scratch.
- imgabe 6y ago
  "The real thing" does not mean the absolute hardest iteration of whatever you're trying to do. C25K doesn't start with a marathon, but it does involve actually getting your ass out the door and running. It does not involve shoe shopping, reading about stretching techniques or tinkering with your training schedule in Excel. Running is the real thing.
hymnsfm 6y ago
Possibly an over-simplification. Take this example: I want to sight-sing hymns. I know a bit of music theory but it's been cobbled together over the past year in an haphazard fashion. I pick up a hymnal to sing the first hymn and immediately need to look up the key signature (I never memorized them). Then I see the hymn is 12/8 time and realize I only superficially covered rhythm and time signatures. I go on YouTube to refresh my memory. This is before being able to sing a single note. When I do attempt to sing, my mind's ear says I'm way off (even when I've never heard the hymn before). I'm not hitting the notes. So now I need to learn solfège and music intervals. Doing the "real thing" requires having the tools and basic skillset first. I suggest the opposite of this article: break the goal down into manageable parts and work the periphery. Get some small wins. Then you can realistically take on the "real thing". There may be no other way.
- cortesoft 6y ago
  I think this is actually a good thing, though... you have something real you are trying to do, which guides you to what you need to learn. I find it is a lot easier to learn in the pursuit of something I actually want to accomplish rather than studying in a vacuum. So your approach, for example, is better than if you had just picked up a book on key and time signatures and started reading. You first tried to do something, ran into something you didn't know, so started to learn that thing.
  - hymnsfm 6y ago
    True. I wouldn't have known I don't have the competency to sight-sing if I didn't try it first. That said, doing the "real thing" is out of my reach until I level up in other areas.
    - wallflower 6y ago
      I’m curious if you have heard about Gnu Solfege. I just read about it here recently via the recent “Ask HN: I'd like to learn vocals, any suggestion on how I can do this?” https://www.gnu.org/software/solfege/ https://www.gnu.org/software/solfege/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23359096 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23359096
SamBorick 6y ago
My takeaway from this is to always try for the thing that is just out of reach. Doing what's comfortable isn't going to lead to growth. At the same time, as others in this thread say, doing things that are radically out of reach is too likely to fail without a good foundation. Learning is in the struggle, so find something that is a little harder than you think you can handle.
deleted 6y ago
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imheretolearn 6y ago
Recently, (or maybe it's just me) I have seen a surge of articles providing advice on $Thing. Most of these articles seem to me an expansion of aphorisms which people have been saying since time immemorial. This reminds of the saying, "Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn." Such articles can be compressed into a common adage that most people are aware of.
- alexandercrohde 6y ago
  Yes. I'll take it a step further and ask, do adages actually contain any signal at all? If you have a saying "try try again" and another saying "don't bust your head against a brick wall" which one wins? When? Getting fluent in French is probably best done without a plan, but just practicing a bunch. But I'm sure you can think of several activities where "just try it" is godawful advice. Who says writing is in the former camp? Prove it.
  - imheretolearn 6y ago
    >I'll take it a step further and ask, do adages actually contain any signal at all? If you have a saying "try try again" and another saying "don't bust your head against a brick wall" which one wins? When? Yes, they do and there are certain factors you need to consider before saying they don't contain any signal. Some factors are: 1. What is it really trying to say? In your example, try and try again does NOT mean try and try the SAME thing again. It just tells you WHAT to do and not how to do it. I don't remember a single invention being invented on the first attempt egs the light bulb. On the other hand, don't break your head against a brick wall is usually used in the context of trying to change someone else. This adage is a derivative of the observation that human beings don't change unless they want to, which is the absolute truth. This adage is a corollary or a derivative based on that absolute truth. 2. Has it stood the test of time? I cannot find a source for this particular adage but it would be safe to say that it has stood the test of time. 3. Who said it and in what context? This ties in well with the second example of my first point. I could come up with a pithy saying which could be true in a very specific context. This does not make it false it just makes it irrelevant to your context. So yes, they do contain signals you just need to know how to apply them. >Who says writing is in the former camp? Prove it. As far as writing goes, you can certainly improve leaps and bounds by writing more. You write some, get feedback on your work, improvise, rinse and repeat. This is certainly true. Why you may ask? Just consider the number of authors[1] whose first language is not English but they write in English. They certainly did not start off by being great English writers, Ayn Rand being the most prolific of them which HN crowd would be familiar with. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_exophonic_writers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_exophonic_writers
m463 6y ago
I'm glad there's this internet website that can make me feel like I know what the best way to do something (without the inconvenience of actually like DOING it). (which is the problem described)
booleandilemma 6y ago
Want to learn heart surgery? Start by doing the real thing.
oklol123 6y ago
No shit that doing something makes you better at something. Hacker news turns more into an advertisement orgy every day
throw5399375930 6y ago
This makes me think of all these people wasting all that time removing "blacklist" and "master" and all that stuff and patting themselves in the back for a job well done, instead of even thinking of doing anything real to fix the real problems with inequality and systemic racism :(
- reaktivo 6y ago
  It’s not as if people pick one or the other
  - throw10382 6y ago
    I would argue people absolutely pick trivial, meaningless problems to avoid focussing on hard, meaningful problems.
hejja 6y ago
to me, it feels overly optimistic in 2 ways. 1. it makes the assumption that failure is always positive self improvement dogma: "fail faster, you learn from each failure" peter thiel: "each failure is a tragedy, it is multivariate and therefore often too complex to truly learn from" 2. dunning kruger syndrome and learning something "the wrong way" is possible in more than one field. Overall it was a nice read though
trwhite 6y ago
One variant of this is "Do the Hard Thing" and not just that but do the hard thing first.
ajani 6y ago
Also by the same guy https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/sales-pages/learn-more-study-less/ https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/sales-pages/learn-more-stud... Quite spammy.
bobthechef 6y ago
Anyone else notice how the first diagram contains the word "SEX"?
zeckalpha 6y ago
Praxis.

Do the Real Thing

272 points by reedwolf 6y ago

disruptorman 6y ago

Stop these advertising schemes. Annoying as fuck

trevyn 6y ago

Also— do what makes you happy, not what you think will make you happy. ;)

elcomet 6y ago
How to know though?
- kd5bjo 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflective_practice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflective_practice

blickentwapft 6y ago

This really hit the mark.

Kye 6y ago

After tens of thousands of photos, hundreds of songs, and millions of words, I can confirm that doing the thing is more effective than aimless research and analysis. The doing guides the learning.

Animats 6y ago

For a contrary view, see "This is It".[1] (The one from the US Navy, not the one from the dead singer.) It's the story of four pilots who didn't take their training seriously enough. [1] https://www.youtube.com./watch?v=fNBwBHTWec4 https://www.youtube.com./watch?v=fNBwBHTWec4

teddyh 6y ago
Reel 2: https://www.youtube.com./watch?v=a7pH6CQcGMU https://www.youtube.com./watch?v=a7pH6CQcGMU

abraae 6y ago

As with all good advice, this reads well and makes sense but the devil is in the details. > Eric Barone, who went on to sell millions of copies of his game, overcame his struggles at creating art by making and remaking the art assets for his game dozens of times. To someone else, frigging around with their art assets and remaking then over and over again could be the very definition of not doing "the real thing".

eebynight 6y ago
I think you missed the entire point of the article. The "real" thing is subjective and varies from person to person depending on their experience with the subject. If someone else had no trouble creating art then this situation simply doesn't apply to them. That person might have a different part of the process that gives them trouble that they SHOULD be practicing. For Eric, practicing the thing he had trouble with over and over was the best way for him to get over his struggles. Now he can move onto the next thing he needs to work on and continue to make progress.
gridlockd 6y ago
...not if your crappy prgrammer art is the only thing standing in the way of shipping a game that could actually sell.
hunterloftis 6y ago
Agreed. Following the article’s own advice of “ask someone who knows how your industry works” would certainly lead to “pay an artist” rather than “churn on your programmer art” if your goal is shipping a successful game.

gfodor 6y ago

You gotta do both. Research, analyze, digest, and then execute. With time, you can reduce the duration of the cycle. Taking the first step often requires a lot of research and thinking, and then a lot of execution to go from zero to one. Then, iterate, with shorter cycles. Failing to think is as much a problem as failing to execute, you have to balance it.

travisjungroth 6y ago
> Taking the first step often requires a lot of research and thinking I generally agree with your comment, but strongly disagree with this part. You will have much more success if you take this first step as soon as possible. No research, no thinking. And a “real thing” first step. You want to start running? Put on some shoes and go for a run. Don’t sign up for a race, don’t look up running tips, don’t buy nice shoes. Just go run for a bit. Coding? Pop open repl.it. Scuba? Get your head under water. Even for things that might be out of reach like flying an airplane, read up on something specific like how to land. With your very first step out of the way, you can then start thinking a bit more.
- jkhdigital 6y ago
  I tend to agree with this line of thinking... reminds me of Mike Tyson’s admonition “everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” You want to take that first punch as soon as possible.
- Kye 6y ago
  As someone who digs inversion as a way to get started on things and avoid the big blockers: at least look up basics of how to avoid and recognize injuries while running. Injuries will stop you more firmly than analysis paralysis. You'll mostly discover the right things by doing, but the wrong things can hold you back, and they're often well-documented. Example: guitar players who discover music theory by plucking and poking until things sound good, but mess up their hands with bad form.
- superhuzza 6y ago
  >You will have much more success if you take this first step as soon as possible. No research, no thinking. I'd be careful with this advice. Almost every time I climb outside I see groups who clearly have very little idea of what they're doing, because all the small but deadly details are wrong - no stopper knots, not backing up rappels, building weird anchors, having 1 point of failure, etc. From their perspective, they're just getting out there and taking those first steps - but with an inadequate understanding of how much risk they've taken on. They don't even realize they're doing anything wrong. It's really bad and regularly leads to serious accidents. To actually climb outside they need mentorship or a bunch of research and practice, both of which take a while to acquire. They should definitely not start by doing the thing.

zomglings 6y ago

Definitely agree with the article, and would like to offer a useful supplement to "doing the real thing": "watch someone very skilled do the real thing". Watching a pro can really accelerate skill acquisition because it will expose you to high quality ideas that would have been difficult to develop on your own. Want to get better at Backgammon/Chess/Go? Play a lot of games (at various time controls). Yes. But also watch professional players and read their analyses of games. Want to get better at programming? Write a lot of programs. Yes. But also read a lot of high quality code written by others. Want to become a better mathematician? Spend your time mastering mathematical knowledge and techniques. Yes. But also spend some time trying to get in the heads of the masters - learning their patterns of thought at the mathematical and meta-mathematical levels. The increased accessibility of this kind of content is one of the greatest achievements of the internet.

kalonis 6y ago
Just watching someone doing the real thing is one of the most prominent strategies to avoid doing the real thing. It is not enough to watch someone very skilled do the real thing. You have to imitate them: Reading a lot of great novels will not make you a better writer. Instead write a story in the style of any writer you admire and you will learn a lot while still doing the real thing. The same is true for almost any art you want learn.
- zomglings 6y ago
  Very true. I don't mean this as a strategy for procrastination, but rather as a strategy for finding patterns/modes of thought that would otherwise have been difficult for you to discover on your own from first principles. It is very important to test out first hand by "doing the real thing" the ideas you discover by watching skilled people.
- empath75 6y ago
  I play a lot of hearthstone, and I’m quite good at it, but to remain good at it, I absolutely do have to spent a fair bit of time watching streamers and reading strategy articles. There’s a lot to know about the game and you absolutely cannot get everything you need to be a top player from only playing. Even the top professional players spend a lot of time in coaching sessions with their peers or just watching streams.

aazaa 6y ago

> People trying to get in shape who buy fancy workout gear instead of exercising. Translating this idea to learning a programming language, the best way to learn a language is to apply it to something real, almost immediately. Following tutorials has a use, but you'll get a lot more out of it after having flailed around trying to make the most ridiculously minimal version of something you really want to build. This is one of the main problems with science education. In most cases, there's nothing like the "flail around" stage while you try to do something applied but which you are desperately underqualified to do.

zexodus 6y ago

This article reminds me that I don't really know what I want to do in the first place.

jkhdigital 6y ago
Yeah I think that’s something Mr. Young glosses over in his book—it’s hard to muster the courage to suffer through this kind of direct approach when you’re anything less than absolutely committed. I think it takes a certain personality to be able to just pick some random skill and convince yourself that it’s do or die.

jkhdigital 6y ago

I’m in the middle of listening to Scott Young’s book Ultralearning, and honestly this article captures the most important idea. 90% of becoming an “ultra learner” is having the courage to tackle the real thing immediately; the rest is just tactics.

emsal 6y ago

This kind of writing makes me upset. * It's really self-important. Not only is it selling you on a particular strategy for attaining success, it also tries to sell success in things like public speaking and doing architectural work as an absolutely important part of one's life, and that implicitly a person's existence is invalidated if they aren't constantly trying to achieve this kind of success. It doesn't do it explicitly but the very notion of "real" and "fake" and other words like "wasted" complete with the trite diagrams showing that "hey, all your efforts are going into this small circle" give a very strong implicit value-judgement of the reader. * There's no proof. I don't know if I'm on the mark with this one, but I think that the act of omitting any sort of data about measuring the outcome of success when taking different approaches seems to imply to the reader that the argument should just "make sense" i.e. it's a truth that the reader already knows, they should just find it within their own observations in order to understand it. Here, have a handful of anecdotes to top it all off in case you weren't convinced. Overall this just feels like it's made to make the reader feel a certain way (motivated) rather than actually teach them any solid information. * What even is real and fake? The readers are given a bunch of examples and then we're left on our own to figure out what falls into which category. Someone commented on the article saying that if someone wanted to watch and understand anime in Japanese, they could just do that and that'd be the real thing, with the fake thing being taking the time to learn Japanese. This is obviously not going to be successful, so at this point the author's prescription has failed as a framework for achieving success. --- This kind of fiery motivational content could be harmful as much as it is useful. It'd be fine if an article, devoid of substance as it may be, was only meant to make readers feel motivated, but the problem is that this kind of fiery motivational content does different things for different readers. A person in a bad, self-loathing emotional state could be rendered feeling even worse, thinking that everything that they're doing at present is fake while everything that their peers are doing are more real, even when that's blatantly untrue. The devil's in the details and personally, I'm not going to let myself get affected by this personal philosophy if the case for it is this weak.

eebynight 6y ago
I think for your first point, you're definitely reading into it too much... As for you second point, what kind of proof do you need? Do you want scientific studies that dive way too deep into specifics and are not applicable to real life? This article is targeted towards learning, which varies heavily from person to person and can be very subjective. Think about it from your perspective and see if the ideas apply to what you do. Simple as that. For your third point, yeah sure real and fake are pretty subjective. In the end it's obviously up to you to decide or come to a decision about what is and what isn't. Our gut instinct usually fails here thought... However, to address the point about learning Japanese, I would argue that taking the time to learn before doing so is the "fake" way. How do children learn a language if they can't use a computer or phone to get on Duolingo or go to a community college to take a course? They literally just are exposed to it and pick it up over time. People may not know his background but he is a prominent figure when it comes to language learning and his strategies are to replicate natural learning methods and ignore the canned courses like Duolingo that don't do you any good...

deleted 6y ago

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ookdatnog 6y ago

This is the kind of advice that, for one person, might be exactly what they need, and for another it might be the exact opposite of what they need. For example, Christopher McCandless dove head-first into the real thing (that is, surviving without help in the Alaskan wilderness), without proper preparation and training, and died. He didn't have to, he could have built up to it gradually by training various survival skills (aka "faking" it). Also, the author claims that the difference between "doing the real thing" and faking it is what success largely boils down to. That is a completely wild claim, with of course not a shred of evidence to back it up. Does the author really believe that this is a necessary and largely sufficient condition for success?

war1025 6y ago
> For example, Christopher McCandless dove head-first into the real thing (that is, surviving without help in the Alaskan wilderness), without proper preparation and training, and died. He didn't go straight from normal life to Alaskan wilderness though. He spent a good bit of time traveling and being homeless. If anything, he was in the uncanny valley of being skilled at most aspects of living in the wildnerness, but unaware of the specifics of being in Alaska and how the environment would change between seasons.

closeparen 6y ago

C25K does not start with a marathon. Skiing lessons do not start on a black diamond. Intro CS does not start by writing an OS. Skill development is an incrementalist game for patient people. I've made much more progress by finding a sustainable pace and chipping away over time, than by trying to conquer something in a weekend. Natural language acquisition is kind of a special case here, in that you are actually wired to do this one from scratch.

imgabe 6y ago
"The real thing" does not mean the absolute hardest iteration of whatever you're trying to do. C25K doesn't start with a marathon, but it does involve actually getting your ass out the door and running. It does not involve shoe shopping, reading about stretching techniques or tinkering with your training schedule in Excel. Running is the real thing.

hymnsfm 6y ago

Possibly an over-simplification. Take this example: I want to sight-sing hymns. I know a bit of music theory but it's been cobbled together over the past year in an haphazard fashion. I pick up a hymnal to sing the first hymn and immediately need to look up the key signature (I never memorized them). Then I see the hymn is 12/8 time and realize I only superficially covered rhythm and time signatures. I go on YouTube to refresh my memory. This is before being able to sing a single note. When I do attempt to sing, my mind's ear says I'm way off (even when I've never heard the hymn before). I'm not hitting the notes. So now I need to learn solfège and music intervals. Doing the "real thing" requires having the tools and basic skillset first. I suggest the opposite of this article: break the goal down into manageable parts and work the periphery. Get some small wins. Then you can realistically take on the "real thing". There may be no other way.

cortesoft 6y ago
I think this is actually a good thing, though... you have something real you are trying to do, which guides you to what you need to learn. I find it is a lot easier to learn in the pursuit of something I actually want to accomplish rather than studying in a vacuum. So your approach, for example, is better than if you had just picked up a book on key and time signatures and started reading. You first tried to do something, ran into something you didn't know, so started to learn that thing.
- hymnsfm 6y ago
  True. I wouldn't have known I don't have the competency to sight-sing if I didn't try it first. That said, doing the "real thing" is out of my reach until I level up in other areas.
  - wallflower 6y ago
    I’m curious if you have heard about Gnu Solfege. I just read about it here recently via the recent “Ask HN: I'd like to learn vocals, any suggestion on how I can do this?” https://www.gnu.org/software/solfege/ https://www.gnu.org/software/solfege/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23359096 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23359096

SamBorick 6y ago

My takeaway from this is to always try for the thing that is just out of reach. Doing what's comfortable isn't going to lead to growth. At the same time, as others in this thread say, doing things that are radically out of reach is too likely to fail without a good foundation. Learning is in the struggle, so find something that is a little harder than you think you can handle.

deleted 6y ago

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imheretolearn 6y ago

Recently, (or maybe it's just me) I have seen a surge of articles providing advice on $Thing. Most of these articles seem to me an expansion of aphorisms which people have been saying since time immemorial. This reminds of the saying, "Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn." Such articles can be compressed into a common adage that most people are aware of.

alexandercrohde 6y ago
Yes. I'll take it a step further and ask, do adages actually contain any signal at all? If you have a saying "try try again" and another saying "don't bust your head against a brick wall" which one wins? When? Getting fluent in French is probably best done without a plan, but just practicing a bunch. But I'm sure you can think of several activities where "just try it" is godawful advice. Who says writing is in the former camp? Prove it.
- imheretolearn 6y ago
  >I'll take it a step further and ask, do adages actually contain any signal at all? If you have a saying "try try again" and another saying "don't bust your head against a brick wall" which one wins? When? Yes, they do and there are certain factors you need to consider before saying they don't contain any signal. Some factors are: 1. What is it really trying to say? In your example, try and try again does NOT mean try and try the SAME thing again. It just tells you WHAT to do and not how to do it. I don't remember a single invention being invented on the first attempt egs the light bulb. On the other hand, don't break your head against a brick wall is usually used in the context of trying to change someone else. This adage is a derivative of the observation that human beings don't change unless they want to, which is the absolute truth. This adage is a corollary or a derivative based on that absolute truth. 2. Has it stood the test of time? I cannot find a source for this particular adage but it would be safe to say that it has stood the test of time. 3. Who said it and in what context? This ties in well with the second example of my first point. I could come up with a pithy saying which could be true in a very specific context. This does not make it false it just makes it irrelevant to your context. So yes, they do contain signals you just need to know how to apply them. >Who says writing is in the former camp? Prove it. As far as writing goes, you can certainly improve leaps and bounds by writing more. You write some, get feedback on your work, improvise, rinse and repeat. This is certainly true. Why you may ask? Just consider the number of authors[1] whose first language is not English but they write in English. They certainly did not start off by being great English writers, Ayn Rand being the most prolific of them which HN crowd would be familiar with. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_exophonic_writers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_exophonic_writers

m463 6y ago

I'm glad there's this internet website that can make me feel like I know what the best way to do something (without the inconvenience of actually like DOING it). (which is the problem described)

booleandilemma 6y ago

Want to learn heart surgery? Start by doing the real thing.

oklol123 6y ago

No shit that doing something makes you better at something. Hacker news turns more into an advertisement orgy every day

throw5399375930 6y ago

This makes me think of all these people wasting all that time removing "blacklist" and "master" and all that stuff and patting themselves in the back for a job well done, instead of even thinking of doing anything real to fix the real problems with inequality and systemic racism :(

reaktivo 6y ago
It’s not as if people pick one or the other
- throw10382 6y ago
  I would argue people absolutely pick trivial, meaningless problems to avoid focussing on hard, meaningful problems.

hejja 6y ago

to me, it feels overly optimistic in 2 ways. 1. it makes the assumption that failure is always positive self improvement dogma: "fail faster, you learn from each failure" peter thiel: "each failure is a tragedy, it is multivariate and therefore often too complex to truly learn from" 2. dunning kruger syndrome and learning something "the wrong way" is possible in more than one field. Overall it was a nice read though

trwhite 6y ago

One variant of this is "Do the Hard Thing" and not just that but do the hard thing first.

ajani 6y ago

Also by the same guy https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/sales-pages/learn-more-study-less/ https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/sales-pages/learn-more-stud... Quite spammy.

bobthechef 6y ago

Anyone else notice how the first diagram contains the word "SEX"?

zeckalpha 6y ago

Praxis.