9 ms·

How to Learn Everything: The MasterClass Diaries

236 points by prostoalex 6y ago

roywiggins 6y ago
Compare to https://masterwiki.how https://masterwiki.how > MasterClass is an exclusive online education platform that costs $180 annually to learn (relatively ordinary skills) from A-list celebrities. masterWiki is the direct adaptation of MasterClass' video courses translated into wikiHow-style how-to guides, made available at no cost to you.
- holyjaw 6y ago
  The posted article is a fun and interesting read about the author's relationship to themself and their family as impacted by their viewing of various classes. I struggle to find a relevant comparison here, other than that both the article and your link (of a parody / theft of another company's intellectual property) are related to MasterClass.
  - kd5bjo 6y ago
    It actually serves as a nice contrast in some ways. Compare the article’s description of the experience of going through the classes with the takeaways from a sample of the wiki entries. The real benefit of having true experts teach something is all the tacit knowledge you get from hearing how they think about and approach their craft, not the explicit instructions they might give.
    - ngold 6y ago
      Getting someone that talks the syntax let's you know what questions to ask.
      - shostack 6y ago
        This is so important. I'm an intermediate coder and hit a wall on something today. I was fortunate to have a great Slack group to ask, and even though the answers weren't exactly the right solution, just exposure to the terminology used when talking about the problem let me refine my searches and find the answer very quickly.
    - donw 6y ago
      > The real benefit of having true experts teach something is all the tacit knowledge you get from hearing how they think about and approach their craft I think that's part of it, but only a part. The real value of teaching lies in tight feedback loops. Learning, as a neurological process, is entirely predicated on feedback loops. Our brains observe some system, make a prediction as to how that system will iterate, and then adjust their prediction mechanism based on the observed outcome. Maybe to give an example, I learned to dance (Lindy Hop) by working with coaches. My nephew learned to dance by watching things like Masterclass. He has spent much more time on watching videos than I have in working with coaches, and has been interested in dancing for far longer, but I am the better dancer. By a wide margin. And that is not due to natural talent -- if anything, I would say that I am less coordinated than he is. The advantage I have is -- partially! -- due to my instructors sharing a bunch of tacit knowledge. The structure of music, why jazz is polyrhythmic and how you can use syncopated steps to move between rhythms and melodies, etc. But most of it comes from my instructors watching me flail about, and giving me immediate feedback on how to be less dangerous to my follow (the person dancing with me). And then watching me apply that feedback, correcting me again, and repeating that loop until I get it right -- which means than I then know what "right" feels like. Online learning -- especially through watching videos -- completely lacks that realtime feedback. It's possible to do! But most of the online course offerings that I have seen, don't. They are little more than recorded lectures and multiple-choice quizzes. Moreover, now that I have a solid foundation -- built by working with coaches, and understanding the "why" behind the techniques -- I can leverage dance videos to pick up new moves, because I know what to look for an how to apply it.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - okamiueru 6y ago
        I think you bring up very valid points. The overall takeaway shouldn't be to have personal instructors in order to learn things effectively and well. I think that will always be the case. The constraint there is mostly with accessibility and availability What you intend to learn, and whether a self-learned/video watching approach can be effective depends entirely on how to close the feedback loop, and make it accurate. For couples dancing, it's very hard to know when you're doing things right (how is it supposed to feel? What is the correct tension for proper leading? Etc). So, it makes it almost crucial to have some (semi)direct guidance in order to make the practice sessions effective. However there are many other areas in which it is easier to close this loop, as well as more correctly assess the result. This will of course never be as good as having an expert's guidance, but the cost/benefit in terms of time spent / skill gained is more amenable that it is for dancing. I'd say (I might be wrong) that this applies somewhat to art, technical skills like math and programming, and other knowledge based domains. Fields requiring physical accuracy and dexterity is a bit harder. Like music instruments or dancing.
  - bergstromm466 6y ago
    > theft of another company's intellectual property Seriously? "Theft"? Most of these millionaire 'celebrities' teaching on Masterclass are from the USA, which is the 'king' of 'intellectual property. The 'intellectual property' system, by driving artificial scarcity of information, is the root cause for global heating and social inequity. Imagine if everything was open source and we'd have Open Value Networks that measure actual material flows, instead of a 'medium-of-exchange' that is backed and enforced by the military-industrial-complex. We need Commons-based peer production and Protocol Cooperativism, and the end of Rentier Capitalism, through the use of MetaCurrency's distributed computing pattern (Holographic chain). We need it now.
- okamiueru 6y ago
  I chuckled at the "Go Premium" button. I wont spoil it for you.
phobosanomaly 6y ago
I've personally found that a necessary prerequisite to listening to an expert talking about something (at least for myself) is to read some books on it. It's boring, and it sucks, and it takes forever, but that repetition of just jamming things in your head and then going over them over and over again is a necessary prerequisite to being able to really 'get' what someone is saying at a master level. For example, I wouldn't pay to see Gordon Ramsay teaching something without first working through Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat and The Food Lab. And by the time I've worked through the books, I know if I'm actually interested in the subject, or if it's just something that I've convinced myself is interesting based on seeing someone doing it on YouTube. That's just my own philosophy on it. You gotta chop the mesquite before you can smoke the ribs.
- superhuzza 6y ago
  I think I'd prioritize doing the actual thing over reading books, whenever possible. For your Gordon Ramsay example - Let's say you can prepare by spending 5 hours trying to cook 5 really nice dishes. Or, you can spend 5 hours reading about cooking. I think the cooking approach to preparing will make you much more "ready to learn" than the reading approach. Obviously in some cases you can't easily do it at home, but there's often a better proxy than reading, even if that's just a conversation about the topic with someone more knowledgeable than yourself.
  - phobosanomaly 6y ago
    I 100% get what you're saying. I guess where I differ is, I've been cooking food my entire life. Most of it sucks. I still eat it. But if you were to ask me how to make one of the foods I cook any better I really wouldn't even know where to start. However, if I picked up one of the those books, all of a sudden I would start to understand how meat cooks, the different ways you can tweak the process, and how to achieve the best results. From there, I would be prepared to actually start cooking well. But without reading, I would still be shooting in the dark with the same terrible dishes I've been cooking terribly for decades.
    - 6y ago
webmaven 6y ago
Despite the au courant reference to the global pandemic, this seems very familiar (particularly the bits about Wintour, Gladwell, & Ramsay), but I can't recall where I read it (sometime 5-10 years ago, maybe), and a cursory google search doesn't pull up anything. Still, the deja vu was pretty darn strong. Perhaps the writer had a blog that has since been deleted, and she recycled an old post.
- philoclea 6y ago
  Hmmm... this has me wondering. I've been writing about teaching and learning for a while (my dissertation and book were on the topic in the early Middle Ages). MasterClass has only been around for five years though, and the Wintour course came online last year. It's possible there were review pieces out. I did do a bunch of searching on MasterClass last year, because I was tempted by it but found it a bit pricey and wanted to know if there was any substance to the courses. Most of what I found were very brief reviews though.
milchek 6y ago
‘...By this point, I have realized that there are two kinds of teachers. Some focus on transmitting their skills. They seem to be saying to the student: “this is how to do what I do.” Others offer themselves as models to be imitated: “this is how I became who I am.”‘ This part struck me. For topics like computer science (or any science) we need more of the former, for anything related to the subjective experiences of creativity or even life, we need more of the latter. Even then, “this is how I became who I am,” can only get you so far, because you need to learn to become who you are and not someone else.
- josephg 6y ago
  I spent a couple years as a programming teacher, and really struggled to find the right balance there. As an example, about 9 months in I had a student ask how they should approach a problem. I'd say "What are all the ways you can think of to do it?" and together we'd brainstorm a few viable approaches. "So which one should I do?". What do I say to that? Do I tell them which approach I think is best? I was originally self taught, and I got good in part thanks to those moments. When you pick something yourself but you aren't sure if its the right choice, .. well, thats when learning happens. Next time you choose differently and over years explore the space. But at the same time, getting advice can really help a novice improve. Despite being pushed I didn't answer the student about which approach I recommended, and I still wonder if it was the right choice. I'd like to think that my teaching approach resulted in my students spending more time gazing into the belly of the beast. But maybe I just didn't give them much as much instruction as they needed. I can't tell.
  - heymijo 6y ago
    From someone versed in teaching, here's my unsolicited analysis of your teaching: On the spectrum from direct instruction (I tell you/show you what to do) to inquiry (I set up a situation for you to use some of your prior knowledge to learn something new) it sounds like you leaned towards inquiry here. You experienced the power of this yourself when you were younger so it's no surprise it informed how you chose to help/not help. You used a mix of collaborative and cognitive questioning to both engage the learner in the problem and help them think through it. ------------------------ Next I'd like to ask you some questions to help you think through two important teaching concepts: 1) Productive struggle 2) Feedback Was the student at a complete loss with what to do? Given time to take a break, maybe even sleep, and revisit the problem, do you think they still would have been at a loss? If no, then give them time and space to think through it on their own or use cognitive questioning as you did to help them think through it. This gets us to the concept of productive struggle. It is just as the name sounds. This concept has well researched benefits for learners. If the student had no idea what to do and you suspect would merely get frustrated then that's struggling and its not productive. It's the kind of situation that leads to poor first order outcomes and has second order outcomes like making someone hate the thing you are trying to help them learn. In that event it would be best to either help them through the problem with advice or find a different problem for them to work on that they have enough prior knowledge to productively struggle with. Next up is feedback... Did the student get any feedback after they made their choice? If it was programming could they run their code and see if it worked? Was it a binary right/wrong? If it didn't work did the student have enough prior knowledge to work around any roadblocks they might encounter? These questions take us back to the concept of productive struggle. 1) productive struggle is good 2) feedback or advice should be timely and based on what a learner needs to keep them from struggling unproductively There are related ideas...some lessons you may have a focus and so you tell the student certain things that aren't the focus of the lesson instead of putting them in an inquiry situation. This is another skill needed for effective teaching: creating, selecting, and sequencing a curriculum. Implied in all of this is the importance of knowing the content, how you want to teach, your learner's prior knowledge, and how they are reacting to the problem.
jamestimmins 6y ago
A really lovely read. I appreciate how naturally she frames her own growth in the face of professional and personal setbacks against different masterclass courses. I love seeing this kind of writing on Hacker News.
Rolpa 6y ago
"I never trust anyone who's more excited about success than about doing the thing they want to be successful at." https://m.xkcd.com/874/ https://m.xkcd.com/874/
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
johnnujler 6y ago
This was beautiful! In fact, a note to all the YouTube productivity gurus who think they are giving us a master class on productivity or VCs on twitter who sell their (obvious but apparently profound) wisdom thinking they are doing a service to humanity. At least IMO things that are best learned in the form of a class are vocational stuff and hard sciences, anything other than that like a course on confidence, productivity, loving yourself, learning to learn etc should be f*cking banned into oblivion.
- nefitty 6y ago
  If someone else has figured it out, I’d rather just get their take on the thing than try to figure it out myself, especially if it’s something like productivity or learning. I want to spend my time mastering software engineering, not reinventing the pomodoro technique.
  - johnnujler 6y ago
    Seriously? You put on a 25 minute timer every time you sit for work? Dude, I know I shouldn’t have generalised, but tell me that these things are anything but homeopathy of the mindset problem? I understand that these things can be reassuring/calming/satisfying but so can be the superstitious rituals in religion or the words of a healer, do we not condemn those when we see the fraudulent nature in them. I’ve seen with my eyes how these guys concoct stuff they call productivity hacks right out of their a and slap a polished 4K video to sell it. I understand that all our wants differ, For instance I only want to have a decent grasp over software engineering to sustain a livelihood, but even if I wanted to master all of computer science, I don’t know if I would equate using a timer(pomodoro) or recalling the answer without looking at the answer(active recall) to mastering compiler design. I don’t about you, but to recall the answer without looking at the answer while preparing for a test or studying for a stipulated time before losing focus didn’t need a overly sophisticated term at least up until a couple years ago. Most of us did pretty well through our schools and colleges. What is this all of a sudden now, if not money grabbing, avarice, charlatanry, fraudulence? In fact, I would’ve conceded if the benefits of these sophistication were extraordinary, they are not even marginal. Anyway man, be well:)
sowbug 6y ago
Now we put eggs in water with a tiny mechanical device that plays “Killing Me Softly” to let us know they are soft-boiled. You could say our standards have fallen. For those of you who had to stop and shop at this point, here's what I found: UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/BrainStream-Beep-Egg-Timer/dp/B001U0O0F0 https://www.amazon.co.uk/BrainStream-Beep-Egg-Timer/dp/B001U... US but unfortunately not featuring the Roberta Flack classic: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00WDE24G4/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00WDE24G4/
- roel_v 6y ago
  I had one of those many years ago, but they're not very good. The sound is muffled a lot by the water and it's just not accurate all together. The Android app 'Egg Timer' gives much better results. I do still see the appeal of the singing egg, though.
  - philoclea 6y ago
    I didn't have space for this in the essay, but the mechanical egg also plays "The Final Countdown" when the eggs are supposed to be hard boiled. It's honestly not a great way to cook eggs, but don't underestimate the joy of hearing those opening notes in the morning...
    - fxtentacle 6y ago
      By now, you have probably conditioned yourself to associate the sound with the pleasant experience of eating the food, not unlike Pavlov's dogs.
      - philoclea 6y ago
        Other way around: the egg is so-so, but every time I hear the song I'm a teenager again (not that I'm that old, but that's when I was getting to know a lot of classic rock & similar), so it makes me feel young and full of potential. Unlike... that egg.
    - roel_v 6y ago
comeondude 6y ago
Play. That’s how.
glaberficken 6y ago
Learning anything for me always follows this sort of structure (I'm sure someone will tell me there's some well known name for this because it seems so "self obvious"). Step0: Select the simplest achievable task in the domain of the new thing you are trying to learn. Step1: Gather all the stuff you think you will be needing to accomplish the task (tools, materials, software, instructions, time!, etc). Step2: Hit a road-block. It can be the lack of an indispensable tool or a lack of knowledge of a particular detail. Step3: Fix the blocker (fill the knowledge gap about the new detail, buy/borrow the missing tool). If multiple roadblocks: Solve the one that seems most fundamental first; If stuck at blocker: seek help from others, sleep on it, give up (some things are too hard with your present knowledge). Step4: If task still not completed GOTO Step3; If task completed: Select a new more advanced task and GOTO Step2.
- fxtentacle 6y ago
  My way of learning is the opposite. I pick a task that is incredibly cool and motivating and surely way out of my skill set. Then I try to find examples by true masters of things that turned out similar. Then I try to imitate what I can from them. In the end, my result is very so-so in comparison with the masters, but I still feel happy about having learned many useful things.

236 points by prostoalex 6y ago

Compare to https://masterwiki.how https://masterwiki.how > MasterClass is an exclusive online education platform that costs $180 annually to learn (relatively ordinary skills) from A-list celebrities. masterWiki is the direct adaptation of MasterClass' video courses translated into wikiHow-style how-to guides, made available at no cost to you.

holyjaw 6y ago
The posted article is a fun and interesting read about the author's relationship to themself and their family as impacted by their viewing of various classes. I struggle to find a relevant comparison here, other than that both the article and your link (of a parody / theft of another company's intellectual property) are related to MasterClass.
- kd5bjo 6y ago
  It actually serves as a nice contrast in some ways. Compare the article’s description of the experience of going through the classes with the takeaways from a sample of the wiki entries. The real benefit of having true experts teach something is all the tacit knowledge you get from hearing how they think about and approach their craft, not the explicit instructions they might give.
  - ngold 6y ago
    Getting someone that talks the syntax let's you know what questions to ask.
    - shostack 6y ago
      This is so important. I'm an intermediate coder and hit a wall on something today. I was fortunate to have a great Slack group to ask, and even though the answers weren't exactly the right solution, just exposure to the terminology used when talking about the problem let me refine my searches and find the answer very quickly.
  - donw 6y ago
    > The real benefit of having true experts teach something is all the tacit knowledge you get from hearing how they think about and approach their craft I think that's part of it, but only a part. The real value of teaching lies in tight feedback loops. Learning, as a neurological process, is entirely predicated on feedback loops. Our brains observe some system, make a prediction as to how that system will iterate, and then adjust their prediction mechanism based on the observed outcome. Maybe to give an example, I learned to dance (Lindy Hop) by working with coaches. My nephew learned to dance by watching things like Masterclass. He has spent much more time on watching videos than I have in working with coaches, and has been interested in dancing for far longer, but I am the better dancer. By a wide margin. And that is not due to natural talent -- if anything, I would say that I am less coordinated than he is. The advantage I have is -- partially! -- due to my instructors sharing a bunch of tacit knowledge. The structure of music, why jazz is polyrhythmic and how you can use syncopated steps to move between rhythms and melodies, etc. But most of it comes from my instructors watching me flail about, and giving me immediate feedback on how to be less dangerous to my follow (the person dancing with me). And then watching me apply that feedback, correcting me again, and repeating that loop until I get it right -- which means than I then know what "right" feels like. Online learning -- especially through watching videos -- completely lacks that realtime feedback. It's possible to do! But most of the online course offerings that I have seen, don't. They are little more than recorded lectures and multiple-choice quizzes. Moreover, now that I have a solid foundation -- built by working with coaches, and understanding the "why" behind the techniques -- I can leverage dance videos to pick up new moves, because I know what to look for an how to apply it.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - okamiueru 6y ago
      I think you bring up very valid points. The overall takeaway shouldn't be to have personal instructors in order to learn things effectively and well. I think that will always be the case. The constraint there is mostly with accessibility and availability What you intend to learn, and whether a self-learned/video watching approach can be effective depends entirely on how to close the feedback loop, and make it accurate. For couples dancing, it's very hard to know when you're doing things right (how is it supposed to feel? What is the correct tension for proper leading? Etc). So, it makes it almost crucial to have some (semi)direct guidance in order to make the practice sessions effective. However there are many other areas in which it is easier to close this loop, as well as more correctly assess the result. This will of course never be as good as having an expert's guidance, but the cost/benefit in terms of time spent / skill gained is more amenable that it is for dancing. I'd say (I might be wrong) that this applies somewhat to art, technical skills like math and programming, and other knowledge based domains. Fields requiring physical accuracy and dexterity is a bit harder. Like music instruments or dancing.
- bergstromm466 6y ago
  > theft of another company's intellectual property Seriously? "Theft"? Most of these millionaire 'celebrities' teaching on Masterclass are from the USA, which is the 'king' of 'intellectual property. The 'intellectual property' system, by driving artificial scarcity of information, is the root cause for global heating and social inequity. Imagine if everything was open source and we'd have Open Value Networks that measure actual material flows, instead of a 'medium-of-exchange' that is backed and enforced by the military-industrial-complex. We need Commons-based peer production and Protocol Cooperativism, and the end of Rentier Capitalism, through the use of MetaCurrency's distributed computing pattern (Holographic chain). We need it now.
okamiueru 6y ago
I chuckled at the "Go Premium" button. I wont spoil it for you.

phobosanomaly 6y ago

I've personally found that a necessary prerequisite to listening to an expert talking about something (at least for myself) is to read some books on it. It's boring, and it sucks, and it takes forever, but that repetition of just jamming things in your head and then going over them over and over again is a necessary prerequisite to being able to really 'get' what someone is saying at a master level. For example, I wouldn't pay to see Gordon Ramsay teaching something without first working through Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat and The Food Lab. And by the time I've worked through the books, I know if I'm actually interested in the subject, or if it's just something that I've convinced myself is interesting based on seeing someone doing it on YouTube. That's just my own philosophy on it. You gotta chop the mesquite before you can smoke the ribs.

superhuzza 6y ago
I think I'd prioritize doing the actual thing over reading books, whenever possible. For your Gordon Ramsay example - Let's say you can prepare by spending 5 hours trying to cook 5 really nice dishes. Or, you can spend 5 hours reading about cooking. I think the cooking approach to preparing will make you much more "ready to learn" than the reading approach. Obviously in some cases you can't easily do it at home, but there's often a better proxy than reading, even if that's just a conversation about the topic with someone more knowledgeable than yourself.
- phobosanomaly 6y ago
  I 100% get what you're saying. I guess where I differ is, I've been cooking food my entire life. Most of it sucks. I still eat it. But if you were to ask me how to make one of the foods I cook any better I really wouldn't even know where to start. However, if I picked up one of the those books, all of a sudden I would start to understand how meat cooks, the different ways you can tweak the process, and how to achieve the best results. From there, I would be prepared to actually start cooking well. But without reading, I would still be shooting in the dark with the same terrible dishes I've been cooking terribly for decades.
  - 6y ago

webmaven 6y ago

Despite the au courant reference to the global pandemic, this seems very familiar (particularly the bits about Wintour, Gladwell, & Ramsay), but I can't recall where I read it (sometime 5-10 years ago, maybe), and a cursory google search doesn't pull up anything. Still, the deja vu was pretty darn strong. Perhaps the writer had a blog that has since been deleted, and she recycled an old post.

philoclea 6y ago
Hmmm... this has me wondering. I've been writing about teaching and learning for a while (my dissertation and book were on the topic in the early Middle Ages). MasterClass has only been around for five years though, and the Wintour course came online last year. It's possible there were review pieces out. I did do a bunch of searching on MasterClass last year, because I was tempted by it but found it a bit pricey and wanted to know if there was any substance to the courses. Most of what I found were very brief reviews though.

milchek 6y ago

‘...By this point, I have realized that there are two kinds of teachers. Some focus on transmitting their skills. They seem to be saying to the student: “this is how to do what I do.” Others offer themselves as models to be imitated: “this is how I became who I am.”‘ This part struck me. For topics like computer science (or any science) we need more of the former, for anything related to the subjective experiences of creativity or even life, we need more of the latter. Even then, “this is how I became who I am,” can only get you so far, because you need to learn to become who you are and not someone else.

josephg 6y ago
I spent a couple years as a programming teacher, and really struggled to find the right balance there. As an example, about 9 months in I had a student ask how they should approach a problem. I'd say "What are all the ways you can think of to do it?" and together we'd brainstorm a few viable approaches. "So which one should I do?". What do I say to that? Do I tell them which approach I think is best? I was originally self taught, and I got good in part thanks to those moments. When you pick something yourself but you aren't sure if its the right choice, .. well, thats when learning happens. Next time you choose differently and over years explore the space. But at the same time, getting advice can really help a novice improve. Despite being pushed I didn't answer the student about which approach I recommended, and I still wonder if it was the right choice. I'd like to think that my teaching approach resulted in my students spending more time gazing into the belly of the beast. But maybe I just didn't give them much as much instruction as they needed. I can't tell.
- heymijo 6y ago
  From someone versed in teaching, here's my unsolicited analysis of your teaching: On the spectrum from direct instruction (I tell you/show you what to do) to inquiry (I set up a situation for you to use some of your prior knowledge to learn something new) it sounds like you leaned towards inquiry here. You experienced the power of this yourself when you were younger so it's no surprise it informed how you chose to help/not help. You used a mix of collaborative and cognitive questioning to both engage the learner in the problem and help them think through it. ------------------------ Next I'd like to ask you some questions to help you think through two important teaching concepts: 1) Productive struggle 2) Feedback Was the student at a complete loss with what to do? Given time to take a break, maybe even sleep, and revisit the problem, do you think they still would have been at a loss? If no, then give them time and space to think through it on their own or use cognitive questioning as you did to help them think through it. This gets us to the concept of productive struggle. It is just as the name sounds. This concept has well researched benefits for learners. If the student had no idea what to do and you suspect would merely get frustrated then that's struggling and its not productive. It's the kind of situation that leads to poor first order outcomes and has second order outcomes like making someone hate the thing you are trying to help them learn. In that event it would be best to either help them through the problem with advice or find a different problem for them to work on that they have enough prior knowledge to productively struggle with. Next up is feedback... Did the student get any feedback after they made their choice? If it was programming could they run their code and see if it worked? Was it a binary right/wrong? If it didn't work did the student have enough prior knowledge to work around any roadblocks they might encounter? These questions take us back to the concept of productive struggle. 1) productive struggle is good 2) feedback or advice should be timely and based on what a learner needs to keep them from struggling unproductively There are related ideas...some lessons you may have a focus and so you tell the student certain things that aren't the focus of the lesson instead of putting them in an inquiry situation. This is another skill needed for effective teaching: creating, selecting, and sequencing a curriculum. Implied in all of this is the importance of knowing the content, how you want to teach, your learner's prior knowledge, and how they are reacting to the problem.

jamestimmins 6y ago

A really lovely read. I appreciate how naturally she frames her own growth in the face of professional and personal setbacks against different masterclass courses. I love seeing this kind of writing on Hacker News.

Rolpa 6y ago

"I never trust anyone who's more excited about success than about doing the thing they want to be successful at." https://m.xkcd.com/874/ https://m.xkcd.com/874/

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

johnnujler 6y ago

This was beautiful! In fact, a note to all the YouTube productivity gurus who think they are giving us a master class on productivity or VCs on twitter who sell their (obvious but apparently profound) wisdom thinking they are doing a service to humanity. At least IMO things that are best learned in the form of a class are vocational stuff and hard sciences, anything other than that like a course on confidence, productivity, loving yourself, learning to learn etc should be f*cking banned into oblivion.

nefitty 6y ago
If someone else has figured it out, I’d rather just get their take on the thing than try to figure it out myself, especially if it’s something like productivity or learning. I want to spend my time mastering software engineering, not reinventing the pomodoro technique.
- johnnujler 6y ago
  Seriously? You put on a 25 minute timer every time you sit for work? Dude, I know I shouldn’t have generalised, but tell me that these things are anything but homeopathy of the mindset problem? I understand that these things can be reassuring/calming/satisfying but so can be the superstitious rituals in religion or the words of a healer, do we not condemn those when we see the fraudulent nature in them. I’ve seen with my eyes how these guys concoct stuff they call productivity hacks right out of their a and slap a polished 4K video to sell it. I understand that all our wants differ, For instance I only want to have a decent grasp over software engineering to sustain a livelihood, but even if I wanted to master all of computer science, I don’t know if I would equate using a timer(pomodoro) or recalling the answer without looking at the answer(active recall) to mastering compiler design. I don’t about you, but to recall the answer without looking at the answer while preparing for a test or studying for a stipulated time before losing focus didn’t need a overly sophisticated term at least up until a couple years ago. Most of us did pretty well through our schools and colleges. What is this all of a sudden now, if not money grabbing, avarice, charlatanry, fraudulence? In fact, I would’ve conceded if the benefits of these sophistication were extraordinary, they are not even marginal. Anyway man, be well:)

sowbug 6y ago

Now we put eggs in water with a tiny mechanical device that plays “Killing Me Softly” to let us know they are soft-boiled. You could say our standards have fallen. For those of you who had to stop and shop at this point, here's what I found: UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/BrainStream-Beep-Egg-Timer/dp/B001U0O0F0 https://www.amazon.co.uk/BrainStream-Beep-Egg-Timer/dp/B001U... US but unfortunately not featuring the Roberta Flack classic: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00WDE24G4/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00WDE24G4/

roel_v 6y ago
I had one of those many years ago, but they're not very good. The sound is muffled a lot by the water and it's just not accurate all together. The Android app 'Egg Timer' gives much better results. I do still see the appeal of the singing egg, though.
- philoclea 6y ago
  I didn't have space for this in the essay, but the mechanical egg also plays "The Final Countdown" when the eggs are supposed to be hard boiled. It's honestly not a great way to cook eggs, but don't underestimate the joy of hearing those opening notes in the morning...
  - fxtentacle 6y ago
    By now, you have probably conditioned yourself to associate the sound with the pleasant experience of eating the food, not unlike Pavlov's dogs.
    - philoclea 6y ago
      Other way around: the egg is so-so, but every time I hear the song I'm a teenager again (not that I'm that old, but that's when I was getting to know a lot of classic rock & similar), so it makes me feel young and full of potential. Unlike... that egg.
  - roel_v 6y ago

comeondude 6y ago

Play. That’s how.

glaberficken 6y ago

Learning anything for me always follows this sort of structure (I'm sure someone will tell me there's some well known name for this because it seems so "self obvious"). Step0: Select the simplest achievable task in the domain of the new thing you are trying to learn. Step1: Gather all the stuff you think you will be needing to accomplish the task (tools, materials, software, instructions, time!, etc). Step2: Hit a road-block. It can be the lack of an indispensable tool or a lack of knowledge of a particular detail. Step3: Fix the blocker (fill the knowledge gap about the new detail, buy/borrow the missing tool). If multiple roadblocks: Solve the one that seems most fundamental first; If stuck at blocker: seek help from others, sleep on it, give up (some things are too hard with your present knowledge). Step4: If task still not completed GOTO Step3; If task completed: Select a new more advanced task and GOTO Step2.

fxtentacle 6y ago
My way of learning is the opposite. I pick a task that is incredibly cool and motivating and surely way out of my skill set. Then I try to find examples by true masters of things that turned out similar. Then I try to imitate what I can from them. In the end, my result is very so-so in comparison with the masters, but I still feel happy about having learned many useful things.