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Disagree, strongly. Gonna learn to lift? Read starting strength. Set yourself up for success by structuring an environment for habit formation. Take the steps

by gfodor 6y ago

Disagree, strongly. Gonna learn to lift? Read starting strength. Set yourself up for success by structuring an environment for habit formation. Take the steps to ensure you are getting good nutrition before you start. Don’t just run to the local gym and staring trying to mess around in the squat rack. Going to build a new app? Get up to date on tech stack choices so you don’t make a dumb decision. Look at prior art and understand the work that has come before you can learn from. Trying to learn a new skill? Do some research to find out what the best, most high quality resources there are first. Determine what level of mastery you’ll be happy with before diving in unprepared to know how to assess opportunity costs, which can This doesn’t mean get stuck in analysis paralysis. I feel pretty strongly those who give advice like the advice you mention do not think it’s possible to avoid this obvious trap. It is if you are disciplined and have enough self awareness to know when you have hit the point of diminishing returns. Literally one day of focused thinking can outflank a week or more of pointless execution, even at the beginning. Thinking is underrated, execution without preparation is overrated. The most effective people know how to prepare the mind for execution and not get bogged down doing so. Taking an immediate first step can lead to a bad first impression: a bad lift, a mess of a prototype, or a garbage online course. That can be hard to unwind, since it forms busted initial mental models - and can undermine long term success. There is no hard rule, but aversion to pre-emptive research and analysis is an anti pattern unless you know yourself to be unable to do so.

travisjungroth 6y ago
I agree with every activity you recommend, even down to suggesting Starting Strength. > Literally one day of focused thinking can outflank a week or more of pointless execution, even at the beginning. This (and the many other replies) make me think I did a poor job of expressing myself. I absolutely, 100%, do not think people should screw around for a week before figuring out the right way to do things. I am a huge fan of thinking. I write out long, detailed syllabuses for my students and myself. I am constantly trying to improve both my skills and my process. And I think most people would be well served to do more of that. I only see one real difference between your comment and what I suggested. I think when someone wants to start weightlifting, they shouldn’t reach for a book first. Do a tiny workout first. Maybe what you remember from PE, maybe life that heavy box in the garage 5 times. Then, with one shitty workout under your belt, open the book and do better next time.
- gfodor 6y ago
  It sounds like we are in more agreement than it seemed - for a full throated defense of thinking over execution, I like Rich Hickey’s talk “Hammock Driven Development” https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc
bonoboTP 6y ago
There are people on both sides and they need opposite advice. The overanalyzers may be overrepresented on HN, and maybe the mindless doers are more in the general population. Still, just as in startups the minimum viable product is important, you should get to the point of a simple but complete thing. Think of it as breadth first, not depth first. You want to go through all main stages, see a simplified full experience. Then you can tweak each part. Instead of reading and never finishimg Starting strength and researching the best squat shoes and the other details, just go to the gym, do something lightweight and something you understand, then go home, feel some of the burn. You just had a full gym experience, a simple one, but full. I recently made a website I've been endlessly procrastinating on. I was paralyzed by choice of static site generator, template style, hosting provider etc etc. Then I decided to go ahead and make a simple version. A single HTML file and a single CSS file, like in the old days, no framework. It is a complete website. It's alive on Github pages. I can now tweak it in many ways. If it becomes tedious, I can switch to a site generator. The main thing is, I've written the bulk of the content now. Take the time to reflect and research every once in a while, experiment with different setups and ways of doing things, sure. But going ahead and doing an imperfect but functional first version is hugely important. Writers say you should write a draft in a totally non-judgmental way. Consciously accept it will be bad. But often there just isn't a way around it. The road to good involves passing through the not so good, so you see the feedback of reality, you can update your mental model of how this whole thing works so that the next thing you read already has a place to go in your mind. You don't know what you don't know. You know what you need to look up once you have a bit of experience. The thing gets demystified.

by gfodor 6y ago

travisjungroth 6y ago

I agree with every activity you recommend, even down to suggesting Starting Strength. > Literally one day of focused thinking can outflank a week or more of pointless execution, even at the beginning. This (and the many other replies) make me think I did a poor job of expressing myself. I absolutely, 100%, do not think people should screw around for a week before figuring out the right way to do things. I am a huge fan of thinking. I write out long, detailed syllabuses for my students and myself. I am constantly trying to improve both my skills and my process. And I think most people would be well served to do more of that. I only see one real difference between your comment and what I suggested. I think when someone wants to start weightlifting, they shouldn’t reach for a book first. Do a tiny workout first. Maybe what you remember from PE, maybe life that heavy box in the garage 5 times. Then, with one shitty workout under your belt, open the book and do better next time.

gfodor 6y ago
It sounds like we are in more agreement than it seemed - for a full throated defense of thinking over execution, I like Rich Hickey’s talk “Hammock Driven Development” https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc

bonoboTP 6y ago

There are people on both sides and they need opposite advice. The overanalyzers may be overrepresented on HN, and maybe the mindless doers are more in the general population. Still, just as in startups the minimum viable product is important, you should get to the point of a simple but complete thing. Think of it as breadth first, not depth first. You want to go through all main stages, see a simplified full experience. Then you can tweak each part. Instead of reading and never finishimg Starting strength and researching the best squat shoes and the other details, just go to the gym, do something lightweight and something you understand, then go home, feel some of the burn. You just had a full gym experience, a simple one, but full. I recently made a website I've been endlessly procrastinating on. I was paralyzed by choice of static site generator, template style, hosting provider etc etc. Then I decided to go ahead and make a simple version. A single HTML file and a single CSS file, like in the old days, no framework. It is a complete website. It's alive on Github pages. I can now tweak it in many ways. If it becomes tedious, I can switch to a site generator. The main thing is, I've written the bulk of the content now. Take the time to reflect and research every once in a while, experiment with different setups and ways of doing things, sure. But going ahead and doing an imperfect but functional first version is hugely important. Writers say you should write a draft in a totally non-judgmental way. Consciously accept it will be bad. But often there just isn't a way around it. The road to good involves passing through the not so good, so you see the feedback of reality, you can update your mental model of how this whole thing works so that the next thing you read already has a place to go in your mind. You don't know what you don't know. You know what you need to look up once you have a bit of experience. The thing gets demystified.