31 ms·

The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

• mysticllama 5y ago
  Life kept throwing various curve balls at me: I got married, had a daughter, lost a loved one after a prolonged battle, underwent major health issues, battled COVID… ^this made me cringe a bit. personally, it makes me sad when i hear someone describe family or commitments as obstacles to work. i'm sure i've done it in the past, but personally, i think it warrants examination.
• JoeyBananas 5y ago
  that's how I graduated college
• kimchidude 5y ago
  I got a government job about 10 years ago by simply showing up to work every day, even though I didn't yet formally work there. It was incredibly awkward, but I'd just find people to have coffee with each day. Many of them would ask, 'So...I'm sorry to ask, but do you work here?' and I would just hit them with brutal honesty: 'No, but I would like to.' After about 5 weeks of this, a department head had a vacancy and I naturally came to mind and was offered the job. I'm not typing this out as life advice for anyone, but more as a case study that supports the argument that showing up can be an extremely effective way of producing results.
• jstrebel 5y ago
  That piece reminds me of my doctoral thesis and its creation. It took me quite some time as I had a full-time job during the day, but in the evenings, on the weekends, I worked on my research. It was long, it was tedious, and I had my share of detours and fuck-ups, but I managed to finish it, defend it and graduate. Please note: this approach is not for the faint of heart - working on one topic for years means that you can never really relax. There is always something to think about. So you should really consider if that's your cup of tea.
• scarmig 5y ago
  Is it generally easy for people to get permission from their day job to code on the side, without assigning all rights to the employer?
  • Clubber 5y ago
    Depends on the state. You definitely shouldn't use work computers or do it on work time.
  • MattGaiser 5y ago
    Depends on your specific contract. Mine just bans me from machine learning related work.
  • wizzwizz4 5y ago
    Depends on jurisdiction. In places with reasonable copyright laws, you'd have to do weird things to end up in the “employer takes rights” situation in the first place.
    • scott_s 5y ago
      I live and work in NY. It was standard in my contract with my former employer.
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    • walshemj 5y ago
      Copyright isnt really important here this is labor law
  • veonik 5y ago
    These days, many companies are cool with it as long as you use your personal machine, on your own time, avoid using any work resources, etc. Usually it's baked into your employment contract.
  • ntrz 5y ago
• tut-urut-utut 5y ago
  This is excellent advice. Just by doing something, the habit gets created and the longer it gets, the easier it is to get started.
  • kiba 5y ago
    That is effective, though I found that ramping up the amount of work being done is even more effective, provided that it can be sustained.
  • aidenn0 5y ago
    This has literally never worked for me with any habits I've tried intentionally cultivating. I'll pick something and do it every day for several weeks. Then I stop. Am I doing it wrong? Am I just weird that I can't seem to form good habits? I sincerely think I wouldn't remember to brush my teeth in the morning if my mouth didn't feel so gross, and I've been doing that every morning for over 30 years!
    • KittenInABox 5y ago
      Have you considered you might have some disorder that affects your executive function capacity like ADHD and therefore requires alternative strategies to organize and cultivate habits?
      • aidenn0 5y ago
        I am, in fact, diagnosed with ADHD, and my previous therapist says I'm a fairly extreme case. I do have alternative strategies for organization, but have not heard anything about problems with cultivating habits (indeed, many people have recommend cultivating habits as a coping mechanism).
        • KittenInABox 5y ago
          It may be difficult to cultivate habits with ADHD because of the need to do it consistently, and the struggle to perform something consistently while getting consistent necessary associative dopamine if I understand it.
• tajul7 5y ago
  Excellent advice.
• Clubber 5y ago
  Joel Spolsky said something similar. Paraphrasing: You find motivation by just committing a little bit every day: 10 minutes, 30 minutes. Once you get into it, you'll most likely do more.
  • ModernMech 5y ago
    I heard this advice in relation to doing chores-- don't think about the pile of dishes you need to do, then you'll never do the dishes. Just motivate yourself to do a single dish. Once you are in the context of doing dishes, the second dish comes much easier, then the third, and before you know it the dishes are done.
    • rjh29 5y ago
      I take some dishes out of the dishwasher and put them on the table. Then I feel compelled to take out the rest and then put them all away, so it's easy.
  • digaozao 5y ago
    This works for me with workout. I commit to workout 10min everyday. Sometimes I and up doing more like 40m, sometimes only 10m, and it's ok. And of course, I reduced the start energy for it. If it's only 10m, probably I will do it at home with some equipment.
  • papito 5y ago
    You are referring to Fire and Motion. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• threeboy 5y ago
  20 minutes a day is over 100 hours a year. 0 minutes a day is 0 hours a year.
  • WhompingWindows 5y ago
    To add meat to these bones, I've played piano on average 20 minutes a day for 22 years. That means ~2700 hours of piano practice. Probably an underestimate but it does match my intuition of thousands of hours.
    • nkingsy 5y ago
      I’ve lately been playing through the “real book”, sketching out each song quickly and doing a run through, maybe 8 songs per day. In just three months I’m on my third time through and have discovered probably 100 songs I just love to play that I’d never heard before (Ellington is a genius songwriter. “Cottontail” is one that I get excited to see when I flip to it, and I just have to play at least three times). Not actually a big jazz fan. I like simple consonant sounds and cute melodies, so I skip the bop, Mingus etc. My absolute favorite is when the whole song is cute and tidy except for one accentuated bit of dissonance that comes smashing in when you’re not expecting it, then waltzes right back out, transitioning perfectly into the next section and leaving you shaking your head in awe. The Beatles were masters at this. My sight chording/inverting and rhythm reading has gone through the roof. It’s like an endless jigsaw puzzle.
      • joshhogg 5y ago
        Are you using the leadsheets to improvise accompaniments on each pass or, just enjoy the melodies as written?
        • nkingsy 5y ago
          On a song like cottontail, I still can’t play it perfectly at speed, so I’ll stick to what’s written until I can. I fudge together a metronomic base line in the left hand and voice all chords with the right hand so the melody note is at the top (I don’t play the root in the right hand unless it’s the melody note). Once I can do that easily without any halting or mistakes, I’ll start to improvise. Wouldn’t dare to play with “real” players as I often haven’t heard the recording and am blissfully unaware of the missing comping, licks, etc. Most of the time when I finally listen to the recording of a song I love, I don’t even like it. No one plays the melody and everyone’s showing off. It’s fun to experience live, but often sounds too busy and aggressive as a recording. I guess that’s a matter of taste. I enjoy sparse music unless it’s rigorously orchestrated (eg I love listening to Cuban music, which is quite busy, but everything fits together perfectly)
• andrewtbham 5y ago
  Reminds me of the book atomic habits. It emphasizes the compounding gains of small wins.
  • deregulateMed 5y ago
    If you liked that book, Power of Habits is the 10x better version. It's less of a 20 year olds book of lifehacks and more of a science based approach. Power of Habit book changed my life, quit all drugs and video games. Now I just read nonfiction books.
    • criddell 5y ago
      Why don't you like video games or fiction anymore?
      • deregulateMed 5y ago
        Waste of time. At least comparatively speaking. Plus these get boring, I climb up the hedonic treadmill. Movies and video games get boring.
        • criddell 5y ago
          I can understand somebody not enjoying video games, but movies is a tough one for me. Does the same go for plays? If so, is there any narrative media you enjoy?
          • deregulateMed 5y ago
            "History is crazier than fiction" This year I read/listened to 30 nonfiction books in philosophy, History, and science. It's been extremely enjoyable and rewarding. My best advice is to put down bad books after 20 or 30 pages.
            • criddell 5y ago
• war1025 5y ago
  I don't have a side project, but this is basically the approach I take at work. Try to do one useful thing each day. Doesn't even have to be a big useful thing. It adds up. I guess that's really the whole point of the tortoise and the hare, now that I think of it.
• cweill 5y ago
  I'm taking a course on how to build and grow a YouTube channel. The main advice they give is "just commit to making a video once a week, every week, for 2 years, and you're life will change." It's a tautology, no guarantees on how well your channel will do, but it's such a simple idea, and nice motivator to build momentum and keep going.
  • ianwehba 5y ago
    The Matt D’Avella course?
    • cweill 5y ago
      Ali Abdaal's Part Time Youtuber academy course. https://academy.aliabdaal.com/ https://academy.aliabdaal.com/
  • armoredkitten 5y ago
    Tom Scott's 3-part series (on YouTube) a few years back on "How to be popular on the Internet"[0] has similar advice. There are higher-cost and lower-cost ideas, but given the amount of randomness inherent to getting popular, quantity tends to be the more important factor. He of course says it much better than I can. [0] URL of first part here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0AMaW4XRCI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0AMaW4XRCI
    • ghaff 5y ago
      It can also be really hard to judge quality (or at least popularity) a priori. I write for various publications that track traffic. Invariably I'll have posts I think are unique and interesting, which I really like. And they get middling views. So it often makes sense to not tilt too far into finely-crafting a low volume of work. Then I'll slap something together a "5 things people get wrong when doing $X." It's not bad but it's pretty cookie cutter. And it will blow up.
      • cweill 5y ago
        Agreed. It's incredibly difficult to know what the audience wants, at least until you have a loyal community following (fans). Even then it's not perfect.
• alexfromapex 5y ago
  It’s a way better mindset to just expect to work on something a few hours each day than to try to set milestones and deadlines because you won’t burn yourself out moonlighting
• laurieg 5y ago
  I like the advice but it always seems to backfire for me. I started jogging everyday. Maybe 2 or 3km. But recently I struggle to do 500m a day. Same with programming. I'll start with a few good days but then it devolves to opening an editor, writing a comment or one line then closing it straight after.
  • Benjammer 5y ago
    It's important to self-motivation to not beat yourself up over these "bad days." For example, without these bad days, you have nothing to contrast with the "good days," so it's possible it makes you appreciate those times more. It can also give you insight into what produces a good or bad day for you, personally, if you start to monitor the circumstances around good and bad days in terms of how much sleep you get, your diet, general mood/feelings, etc.
  • solatic 5y ago
    Physical exercise is an exception because the body needs rest. The "just show up" goal with exercise is to begin with 3x a week and then gradually increase that as your body grows stronger.
    • yreg 5y ago
      Why is non-physical activity any different? To me 3x a week sounds like a good idea for starting mental exercise as well.
  • brabel 5y ago
    You can try to convince yourself that the activity you want to perform is a given, just like eating and showering... you don't think whether you should do it, you just do it. It works for me. I can go to gym religiously 3 days a week, and been doing it for years. Sometimes there's a company online after-hours or something... sorry, can't go , it's my gym day. If you start allowing certain things to stop you from doing what you want, then anything starts becoming a good excuse to not do it. Don't let that happen. Regarding programming: I can keep up for months but sometimes I run into a problem that is really annoying to fix... I know I can fix it given enough determination, but then I think I am not getting paid for this, so what the heck... which results in me starting a new project and leaving that one aside until I actually need it (which happens every now and then).
• sylens 5y ago
  This is great advice and has made me think how I can squeeze out 30-60 minutes every day to do something similar. I think one area might be just making my setup more portable - instead of having a fully built out development environment that is on my desktop tethered to my desk, it may make sense to move to a laptop that I can move around the house, take with me on trips, etc. so as to not break the streak. Or even using one of the browser-based code editors or IDEs so that it's available anywhere, even from a tablet.
  • mattlondon 5y ago
    I ended up setting up a "development server" on a Raspberry Pi 4, and then using VS Code's remote tools to connect to it from anywhere (you can use tailscale etc if you fancy it to make it easy to connect remotely when not at home). I've found this to be really convenient - even just whipping out a chromebook you can turn on the chromebook and be coding in literally seconds. Makes the barrier to entry pretty low.
  • tshannon 5y ago
    This is one of the reasons why investing in learning a terminal "IDE" / editor like vim / emacs can pay off. You can ssh from anywhere and have your development environment waiting for you.
  • georgewsinger 5y ago
    Would a portable VR computer be useful here? https://simulavr.com/ https://simulavr.com/
• bgroat 5y ago
  2 Questions: 1. I see you're on v.0.21 - how stable is this? I know the point of the article is that you don't set deadlines, but I'm anxious to implement something that may have breaking changes. 2. How can I pay you? I'm implementing search now, considering Algolia or PG_Search. I want to give you a shot, but I also want to pay you.
  • karterk 5y ago
    1. Typesense is pretty stable and we are really careful about retaining backward compatibility. Our release cycles are slow (we give RC builds for people wanting a feature urgently) and we test a lot. The version number is just a number: Terraform just hit 1.0 last month :) 2. We've a hosted cloud version: https://cloud.typesense.org/ https://cloud.typesense.org/ -- and we also added a Sponsor button on Github because so many people have been asking us for it.
    • bgroat 5y ago
      I love how you work, how you communicate, and I fully expect to love your product
  • jobsort 5y ago
    I'm using Typesense on https://www.jobsort.com https://www.jobsort.com and haven't had a single crash; it's quite stable.
• munificent 5y ago
  I've written two books over the past decade as well as learning some other skills and hobbies and this is absolutely the most vital lesson I've learned. There is an incredible power in simply pouring a little time into something every day over a long period of time. It feels like a superpower when you see it start compounding. The Grand Canyon was created by little drops of water bouncing off rocks for millenia. Consistent effort over time is one of the greatest forces in the world. Persistence beats focus, inspiration, and genius 90% of the time.
  • spideymans 5y ago
    Yup. Knowledge usually works like this. When I first got into home cooking a few years ago, the learning process was painfully slow. It must've taken several attempts spread across a week just to learn how to make basic scrambled eggs the "proper" way. Now after a few years of experience, every ingredient I learn to work with seemingly unlocks a dozen more dishes that I can easily assemble. The rate of learning accelerates evermore. Software is very much the same. And the cool thing about software is that the domain of knowledge is effectively infinite. No one person can ever run out of things to know in this field. You can only learn more and get even better.
    • tomrod 5y ago
      One of the greatest lessons I took from formerly subscribing to a high demand religion was exactly this. "By small and simple things are great things brought to pass."
    • kjerzyk 5y ago
      Would you mind sharing what you used to learn cooking? My main struggle is recipe books that teach you the recipe rather than cooking. But I'd love to learn HOW to cook, not WHAT to cook.
      • roganmurley 5y ago
        I would recommend "Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking". It has a great focus on the fundamentals rather than specific recipes.
• toomuchtodo 5y ago
  Very helpful learnings, looking forward to seeing TypeSense grow!
• hallqv 5y ago
  Good stuff! How many hours per week did you put in on average?
  • karterk 5y ago
    I used to code for an hour every week day and maybe 3-4 hours on weekend. But there was also a lot of "background processing" of what I plan to work on next and how to implement it. The more background processing I did, the faster I was in the actual implementation. So those hours I actually spent on the keyboard were really productive.
• boxerab 5y ago
  Nit pick: I think they mean "every day", not "everyday" which is a synonym for commonplace. See this person pushing back against inane Coca Cola slogan : Treat The English Language Well. Everyday. http://www.happyrobot.net/words/thewayiseeit.asp?r=3385 http://www.happyrobot.net/words/thewayiseeit.asp?r=3385
• kabdib 5y ago
  Reading one paper a week is 520 papers a decade, and there's your "Oh wait, I've seen a solution to this problem before..." superpower as a senior dev. Not your only one, but one that's easy to acquire.
  • actually_a_dog 5y ago
    Based on my experience reading academic papers, I would suggest that you would often be better off skimming 3 papers in a week than reading one closely. I would often do this in grad school: * Go search for papers that broadly had to do with some structure or other mathematical gadget I was interested in at the time, * Read the abstracts of those papers to find the ones that looked most interesting, * Take the most interesting papers, and read the statements of the theorems, * Finally, devote a little more attention to those papers that had interesting theorems that seemed to fall within the domain of what I was working on. I did this with math papers, but there's no particular reason you can't generalize this to other fields. CS in particular can use almost the exact same methods. For less mathematical fields, you'd need to make some substitutions, such as "section headers and key topic sentences" for "statements of theorems," but you can make it work there, too. Doing this, in a decade, you end up reading 1560 abstracts, which is probably more useful in terms of "Oh, wait, I've seen this before" type insights than reading 520 entire papers.
    • 542458 5y ago
      I absolutely agree with this. A lot of what’s in papers is boilerplate - stuff to say “yes, I’ve read the other relevant works. Yes, I understand how qualitative research works. No, my study is not based on the opinions of my four closest friends”. In my field I’d usually skim the abstract, and maybe from there read the description of the apparatus, conclusions, and further work if the study looked particularly interesting. But you can get 60-90% of a paper’s value from the abstract.
    • Tyr42 5y ago
      Honestly I don't think I could keep up one paper a day. I had a reading course which as 3 per week (in detail) and that was enough work for me. It could take 45 minutes to read a paper
• jnovek 5y ago
  This was exactly how we built OwnLocal before we quit our day jobs. In a sense, it was very easy because when you don't know how big the problem is, everything feels like progress. Now I see 40 barreling towards me and it's hard to just do a little bit every day. Because I have experience, I can form a much bigger picture of an idea in my head and it's hard to peel off a tiny bit and make that feel like a success. This curses me in my startup attempts but it also curses me in my work. It's hard to think like a founder anymore. I always overspec projects because I can easily guess what demons lie on the horizon. I miss my early startup days when I could just write some code every day and feel successful. I want that back.
  • Zelphyr 5y ago
    Over the last 18 months I have been working to get that back. I remind myself at the end of the day that what I did was productive and useful and so far that has worked well. I realized that it is really easy to fall into the "but what if..." trap but doing so is not spending enough time in the present moment.
  • galfarragem 5y ago
    Few things are impossible to get back once you loose them: naivety is one of them.
  • dasil003 5y ago
    On the other side of 40 here, I definitely know what you mean, but I also think you can cultivate a beginner's mind and openness to ambitious ideas while still leveraging your experience to see around corners and avoid dead ends. Two ideas: First, remind yourself that software is malleable. You don't need to build it perfectly the first time, and in fact you will always need to modify it as you go, so don't get stuck in analysis paralysis. You're good at writing code, so leverage that skill to iterate quickly. Second, don't equate growth with chasing more and more powerful abstractions. Remember, "all abstractions are leaky" in the same way that "all models are wrong, but some are useful". IMHO valuable software comes from concrete use cases. So as you get more experienced you should be able to write simpler code that provides more value. Let the abstractions emerge from practice and experience rather than obsessing over them before you understand the problem.
• spideymans 5y ago
  The trick is to aggressively dive headfirst into a project, such that it becomes unconscionable for you to give up :)
  • deepsun 5y ago
    But what to do later with that dozens of unfinished projects I dove headfirst into over the last two decades?
• EamonnMR 5y ago
  I wouldn't call the effectiveness unreasonable. I would instead say that incorporating something into your routine is the most reliable way to make sure it gets done.
• lordleft 5y ago
  The power of consistent effort over time is staggering. Small choices compound into dramatic gains.
• PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  Adding a little bit of extra productivity to every day is great advice. The challenge can be finding the time, which means you need to subtract time from some other activities. Trading sleep for extra productivity is a losing game in the long run. It’s much better to swap out some time waster activities like watching TV or, yes, browsing HN. It can be tough to reduce time spent on vices, but after the habit is established it’s much more satisfying to do something productive with that time. I found it helps to streamline other parts of my life to recoup free time. Simple things like meal planning, using flex schedules to commute during low-traffic hours, working out at home instead of the gym, and doing grocery shopping in bulk only once per week have been great ways for me to recapture 30-60 minutes every day.
  • andai 5y ago
    A few weeks ago I started unplugging my internet when I go to bed, so it's off when I wake up. Then I work for 2 or 3 hours before plugging it back in. I use DevDocs.io, which has an offline feature, to look up standard library stuff. I actually delay going online for as long as possible because I know productivity will drop off a cliff once I reconnect. This is the most productive I've been in my life, by quite a wide margin.
    • bgroat 5y ago
      I found devdocs years ago but lost the link. THANK YOU for bringing it back to me
      • mkl 5y ago
        It's the top result on DDG and Google for [offline developer documentation].
    • teddyh 5y ago
      For offline documentation, I use these in order of preference: • Info¹ documentation, which I read directly in Emacs. (If you have ever used the terminal-based standalone “info” program, please try to forget all about it. Use Emacs to read Info documentation, and preferably use a graphical Emacs instead of a terminal-based one; Info documentation occasionally has images.) • Gnome Devhelp². • Zeal³, using up-to-date documentation dumps provided by Dash⁴. • RFC archive⁵ dumps provided by the Debian “doc-rfc“ package⁶. 1. https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/info/ https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/info/ 2. https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Devhelp https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Devhelp 3. https://zealdocs.org/ https://zealdocs.org/ 4. https://kapeli.com/dash https://kapeli.com/dash 5. https://www.rfc-editor.org/ https://www.rfc-editor.org/ 6. https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/doc-rfc https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/doc-rfc
• 55555 5y ago
  Sorry to be a downer, but at this rate of speed isn't it possible that their tech will become outdated before it becomes widely used? Maybe they're 5-10 years away from being widely used? Machine learning is advancing rapidly.
  • karterk 5y ago
    True, but when we started we bet on certain trends that are just getting mainstream now. Having said that, large markets tend to have a lot of niches. You can certainly carve your own. It might not be a billion dollar niche, but that was never the point :)
• deeviant 5y ago
  This type of sentiment generally makes me feel that literally nobody understands why business work or don't. I remember pitching the idea of a fantasy financial league to a friend who is a teacher, as a way of teaching kids about the stock market and finance. His reply instantly gelled with me and let me know they actually understood much more than I about both teaching and finance: He said it will teach exactly the wrong lesson. Even if you do it for an entire school year, there can be really only one type of winner: the investor that stuck all their money into a stock that happened to blow up, the opposite of a solid investment strategy. I bring up this example to point out that feedback can be a poisoned apple. Start-ups are basically this exact scenario. The only optimum strategy is to go "all in". Either in the short term by quitting your job and warming up your pitch deck, or in the long term by have some multi-year side project draining all available free time. So that's the bar, the vast majority of start-up likely had founders that went all in, it's table stakes. So what's the secret sauce? It is the equivalent to the fantasy financial league of picking an overperforming stock, it's not going all in.
  • cjsawyer 5y ago
    I’m no business expert, but this approach seems like a huge gamble to me. Why spend years building a project before the usefulness and public reception is quantified? I’d rather spend a hard few months building something that fails rather than an easy 6 years.
    • zwkrt 5y ago
      That's not the dichotomy though. Most businesses start with one or a few people making someting useful and building a larger business around it. Like a plumber who learns to specialize in new urban construction and makes enough connections as clients that he decides to hire two people to help with his work.
    • karterk 5y ago
      I don't disagree with you, and which is why I qualified my thoughts with a filter of a "large and growing market". Impossible to fail in such a market if your goal is not to be a billion dollar company.
• simonw 5y ago
  Duolingo taught me this. I started doing ten minutes of Duolingo a day... 959 days ago. It showed me the enormous power of doing something small every day. Since then I've tried setting myself other streak targets. My most successful has been publishing weeknotes (just published number 92) since that forces me to focus on what I've got done - and through that incentivizes me to get stuff done, so I can put it in my weeknotes.
  • OJFord 5y ago
    Me too, about half that. But I'm painfully aware it's no longer getting me anywhere (I completed the 'tree' hundreds of days ago) - what I really need to do is sit down with my textbook in order to progress further with the grammar, and widen my vocabulary beyond what's in Duolingo. But that requires more time commitment, so I do it much less often, and do Duolingo instead.. fairly pointlessly - sure it probably helps stop me slipping backwards.
    • presentation 5y ago
      Depends what your goals are - but if you wanna be very capable at talking you’d be better off listening to a lot of native content intended for natives (as well as talking with live people). I recommend Language Learning with Netflix, or the more heavy duty/Anki driven Migaku family of tools (can use with Netflix, YouTube or any video with subtitle files), for studying in that form; plus language teachers through something like iTalki (encourage the teacher to not dumb down their speaking for you even if you get lost); as well as talking with random people on services like HelloTalk/immersing in the place that speaks your language/finding a native speaker to befriend and talk to in the language. Duolingo is a beginner tool in my opinion (there are far more beginners to sell to and the barrier to entry is low).
      • OJFord 5y ago
        Absolutely agree it's a beginner tool, and through studying a textbook/Wiktionary, films, talking to a bilingual speaker I've surpassed it. But just as you say the barrier to entry is low, so is the barrier to practice. Thanks for the tips though, I will give them a go. Especially the Netflix one I keep meaning to; I watch a fair bit in target language (Hindi) but always with (only) English subtitles. Keep meaning to give it a go. (I do sometimes go back and put Hindi subtitles on if there was something I was particularly interested in / wanted to check, but it's a pain to do often.)
• foobarian 5y ago
  Reminds me of our attempts to get various contractors to come and do tasks. Sometimes they keep promising to come and don't show up repeatedly. Other times they show up, write down our requirements, plan the work, and then vanish. My builder friends who are actual general contractors also complain of this about their subs. Makes me think if I wasn't already doing well in software I would kill it in the trades just by showing up when I say I will!
• TheAlchemist 5y ago
  Reminds me of these equations: 1.01 ^ 365 = 37.78 0.99 ^ 365 = 0.03
  • BurningFrog 5y ago
    This is my life in unemployment. I really do start doing all those things I didn't have time for. But each day I get 1% lazier... Lesson: Never take more than 6 months off.
    • glouwbug 5y ago
      I voluntarily quit my job once and had the 8 most productive months of my life working on side projects. But, I can see being laid off as doing the opposite. Depression can be a real bitch
  • nly 5y ago
    Yup, and the difference between putting your 401K in a fund charging 1% instead of 0.25% a year, over 30 years, is having about 20% less in retirement.
    • jdhawk 5y ago
      If the funds have equal performance*
• mattjaynes 5y ago
  If you haven't read or listened to this book yet, I highly recommend it: Daily Rituals: How Artists Work[1] It's a collection of daily routines of many famous and prolific artists. The surprising thing about so many of the artists is that they only work 2 or 3 hours per day, then spend the rest of the day walking around, socializing, etc. But they consistently show up and put in the work and it adds up to some amazing things over time. This reminds me of another great book about beating procrastination: The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play[2] In that book, the author talks about his extensive work helping graduate students complete their dissertations. I can't cover all the great points here, but when working with these students he has them create an "unschedule" where they have to schedule guilt-free play activities as the top priority. Then he actually limits the amount of work they are allowed to do on their dissertation to only a couple of hours per day. The effect is quite amazing at turning students around from dreading and avoiding their dissertation to really trying to maximize the limited time they have to work on it. And having guilt-free play lets them really disconnect from the work and have true recovery so that they have the motivation and energy to hit the project again and again every day. Seems counter-intuitive at first, but as I've applied this to different projects, it's amazing how much more I'm able to accomplish. [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15799151-daily-rituals https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15799151-daily-rituals [2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/95708.The_Now_Habit https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/95708.The_Now_Habit
  • nemo44x 5y ago
    You have to do it every day - creativity comes in bursts and you don't know when it's going to show up so you need to be the one showing up every day to work on it. Hemingway would write (sober) every morning and then be drunk by lunch and for the rest of the day and early evening. But he worked every day for a few hours. People like to focus on his appetite for drinking but he got his work done first.
    • andai 5y ago
      “I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o'clock sharp.” — W. Somerset Maugham
• pcbro141 5y ago
  See "Turning Pro" and "War of Art" by Steven Pressfield. Good books on this topic.
  • tonyedgecombe 5y ago
    I really disliked the War of Art. I found nothing actionable in it. I only made it to the end because so many people recommend it and I expected some enlightenment. Unfortunately there was none.
• throw1234651234 5y ago
  I feel like this notion is complete trash if you want to be anything but mediocre. In IT, I constantly have to work OT and take on challenging projects to advance and improve. This has NOTHING in common with showing up and closing tickets, which I can easily do with existing knowledge. Same with the gym - I constantly have to change up the routine, adjust to injuries, think about diet, etc. That's not even talking about doing something significant like learning a language outside of work. It's also the reason things like "atomic habits" are complete bs - you aren't going to get anything significant done in a minute OR an hour a day. --- "It feels like a superpower when you see it start compounding." Lie / marketing gimmick. There is start up time and cooldown time that people who have never done anything completely neglect. There is also the fact that one big chunk of time is far more efficient than little chunk of times. Aka you can shoot a bow for 10 mins a day or for an hour once a week and you will see zero improvement, let alone "compounding" improvement.
  • _hao 5y ago
    I'd say the manner in which you use the time is as important as the habit itself. It's not "practice makes perfect", but "perfect practice makes perfect" etc.
  • jodrellblank 5y ago
    All your comment seems rather contradicted by the article, doesn't it?
    • throw1234651234 5y ago
      I did make assumptions about the article which are invalid and replied too generally, admitted.
  • mkw2000 5y ago
    You are suggesting that working a little bit at something everyday is 'complete trash'. Do you really believe that?
    • 5y ago
• dfsegoat 5y ago
  This crosses into many aspects of life: I train Brazilian jiu jitsu and MMA. In our gym, we have a giant sign that says: "A black belt is a white belt who refused to give up" Basic translation: You can achieve the highest possible rank [Black belt] if you just keep showing up and enjoy the process.
• HPsquared 5y ago
  It's necessary, but not sufficient.
• brm 5y ago
  Everyone always writes these and yet I've seen very few ever talk about how to decide what's worth showing up for or how to get a working hypothesis of an animating principle for your own existence. It'd be remarkably useful to have a working framework for how to figure out what to want, especially targeted at smart people with top level talents in several areas.
  • SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
    If you love multiple things totally equally as a total novice(aka haven’t put a ton of time yet into it but shows initial talent), pick one (with rng if needed) and stick with it for an hour a day or so for a while. If you like it and it works for you keep doing it. And FOMO can be paid off with a therapist ;)
  • chubot 5y ago
    "What's worth it" varies so much by person that you can't generalize. Tons of people have written about that, but they all write different things, because they're different people. That said, I've noticed that there is a pretty big split between short term success vs. long term success, with this site skewing toward the latter. (Primary short term example: work hard at a safe, high-paying career) If you're reading this site, PG (original author of it) has written extensively on these things: http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html Live in the future; build what's missing I think this is a great slogan because there seems to be an implicit myth that everyone has access to the same viewpoints and knowledge (or should), e.g. media narratives. In reality knowledge is very unevenly distributed, and the viewpoints of people and communities are more diverse than you can imagine (traveling and/or listening to random people is a good way to see this). If you're not living in "the future", your idea of "new" or "good" might be skewed or simply pedestrian. http://paulgraham.com/genius.html http://paulgraham.com/genius.html Have a disinterested obsession with something that matters http://paulgraham.com/worked.html http://paulgraham.com/worked.html -- some "implicit" advice, a great read The advice in this article is good too: > Pick an idea in a large market that will always be in demand and work on a product that caters to a subset of use cases exceedingly well. I think it depends on your appetite for drama. To me, startups have a lot of drama and often fail spectacularly. They have good characters and bad characters. So if I just want to enjoy my life, then I'll work on something steadily, learn, improve my skills. After working on a bunch of things close to the state of the art, it's hard not to think of ways the world could be better. I liked munificent's statement in this thread that "humans are incredible generalizers". That is, just do things and you'll get ideas. Certain work smells good and other work smells bad. (IMO the biggest bad smell is prestige: http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html If it didn't suck, they wouldn't have had to make it prestigious.)
• domador 5y ago
  What does a "Hacker News launch" refer to? Is that simply announcing it in a Hacker News submission?
• moreoutput 5y ago
  Add a little to a little and there will be a big pile.
• dt3ft 5y ago
  I also had a failed HN launch, glad to see that pushing through pays off. I’m not giving up, that’s for sure :) Happy for typesense founders!
• k__ 5y ago
  Consistency is a super power if applied right. Most people don't do things consistently and of those who do only a few do the right things. In the long run, you outrun everyone who doesn't keep doing the right things.
• didibus 5y ago
  Just showing up everyday to work on a side project on top of a day job and your other life commitments is no small feat, and personally that kind of consistency and perseverance is not something I find easy to do. On the other hand, procrastinating from a task by overly planning and reading/thinking about the best way to get it done, now that is much more natural Seriously though, this is a hard thing to keep up, so congrats to them. Most people fail to even consistently show up each day to brush their teeth.
• arkj 5y ago
  I really am out of words to describe this article. The title should be made the first commandment in the laws of programming (or any field). It is so effective that you don’t need to read the article the title says it all. Most people fail at keeping this rule because their mind perceives it to be too simple to keep and falls prey to overconfidence.
  • AndrewOMartin 5y ago
    I sometimes tell people this idea as a the good news and bad news of learning. The good news is that you don't need to "try" to learn. Just do something, pretty much anything, for a while and the learning/remembering/synthesising happens automatically. The bad news is that there's no shortcut, it will take time no matter what you actually do. Even quicker. Bad news, it takes time. Good news, it only takes time.
• davidw 5y ago
  It's all fun and games until they take your red Swingline stapler, though.
• Kluny 5y ago
  I wonder if this is an argument in favor of the five-day workweek - at least from management's point of view.
• zerop 5y ago
  For me this habit is going to hackernews every day for sometime and it is working great!
• awillen 5y ago
  Once I was taking a weekend trip down to San Diego with my now wife, and we decided to look at some open houses. It started raining - not super hard, but a fair bit. Most of the open houses we showed up to ended up not happening as a result. One of them did, though, and I spoke to the agent showing the house for a while about San Diego real estate. When I moved down to San Diego, he helped me buy a home and find a space to lease for my new business. I'm almost certainly going to have him help me find some real estate investments in the future as well. Unlike everybody else, he showed up that day, and it's made him tens of thousands of dollars with more to come.
• reggieband 5y ago
  One of the more interesting sayings I have come across lately is: People overestimate how much they can get done in the short term but they underestimate how much they can get done in the long term. I see this all the time with friends who pick up the guitar as a hobby. Often someone practices intensely for one week or one month and then gets frustrated at their progress. That frustration often causes people to give up. Now I see it as a mismatch between short-term estimation/expectations. The frustration is caused by overestimating how much progress they think they should make in the short-term. The quitting is caused by underestimating the progress they could make in the long term.
  • joncrocks 5y ago
    People overestimate how much they can do in a day. They underestimate how much they can do in a year.
  • atulatul 5y ago
    Bill Gates: Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/302999-most-people-overestimate-what-they-can-do-in-one-year https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/302999-most-people-overesti...
  • tsumnia 5y ago
    This is actually one of the reasons I like academia so much. You are effectively paying for a scheduled practice session (ignoring discussions on tuition or the other negatives of college for the moment). Six months isn't enough to master any topic, but it is a organized timeframe in which you focus on X topic for an extended amount of time.
  • phamilton 5y ago
    Also related is how effective walking away is. 20 minutes + a good night's sleep + 20 minutes is often more effective than an hour of practice in one go. Possibly even 2 hours.
    • chii 5y ago
• jhoechtl 5y ago
  They started in 2015 and wrote their first blog post in 2021. My unreasonable admiration of remaining focused and get stuff done instead of social media bragging.
• Noos 5y ago
  One weird trick for techies nonsense. "I just showed up everyday and built this company, so can you!" All of what, 500 words of content, too.
• jelling 5y ago
  Shout out sleep, bc that ~33% of our lives is actually not wasted time in any way.
• WalterBright 5y ago
  Absolutely this works. I've been doing it for decades.
• kureikain 5y ago
  I learned this with my email forwarding app (https://hanami.run https://hanami.run) as well. I have tried to bootstrap a few ideas, and just like the ops, I got married, I got kid, family problem, change jobs. Then COVID happens and I promise myself to wake up at 3-4AM everyday to write code and ship https://hanami.run https://hanami.run during that period. I don't even worry about competitors, I just want to build a platform that I enjoyed to use and iterate every single day. Many small features were take for granted. Such as we auto refresh DNS constantly so users with like 100 domains don't have to check DNS one by one to activate domain. I then supported cloudflare auto config dns to make thing even easiser. And auto refresh DNS means we're easily to got block by CloudFlare DNS servers, but I put the cost on me to make our user's life easiser. Another effects of this showing up everyday is you are allowed an unlimited time budget and can try out cool thing. Such as I recently expriment with OpenResty autossl to make our URL redirection work with HTTPS. Other day I experiment with leaky bucket rate limiting. With a time budget, I'm probably won't work on that, but sometime I feel down, and knowing I have tomorrow I can use today's time on something that make me happy.
  • raunak 5y ago
    I'd recommend getting someone to review your site a bit - obviously not sure if English-speaking countries are your target market, but some small mistakes here and there catch my eye (great supports are our norm over great support, never "lost" your emails over lose). Sounds very cool :)
• hinkley 5y ago
  Working from home, I discovered that my evening commute was part of my shutting off the work at the end of the day. I have a set of about four things I do when I lock my computer at the end of the day. Early dinner with the family, watch entertainment, engage in a hobby, play computer games. Before it got hot out I was at about 50% for hobby stuff, and I made so much progress over the last year that it’s difficult to look at, in the sense that when something stops being a struggle you can experience feelings of loss for the past. Why didn’t I figure this out before?
• javier10e6 5y ago
  True that. Also we all plateau at it. That is where time and effort stops yielding satisfaction or usefulness. Unless, unless, you are really in love with yourself and thing that everything you know is amazing...just kidding.
• austincheney 5y ago
  I had a tool I worked on a little bit every day for over a decade and for a while it was pretty popular with a large following. Persistence is what got me from nowhere to somewhere, but after a while persistence offers a diminishing return. Persistence is necessary to build something from nothing to establishment. That is more than just working. It means you have pushed through into something that works well enough that other people will use it and strongly recommend it. That is the point where a trickle becomes a flood, but the flood analogy is a bad analogy. Actual flooding, with water, is an explosive phenomenon where a large area achieves maximum saturation in unison and so the trickle becomes a serious concern almost instantly. When all water over a large area has nowhere to go suddenly at the same time there is an immediate change like the flip of a switch. Growth and adoption don't work like that. It takes time to build adoption. By the time a product reaches critical mass many early users may have already moved on. The very thing that made your product special or unique may be gone and you probably don't know it. This means the thing that cause adoption could be code while you are still building traffic because of a lag between network effects and incentives. That means adoption could be dying while you are building traffic and you won't know and until the future once traffic catches up and begins to decline at which point you are having to catch up. If you are passionate enough, beyond mere persistence, you will figure the traffic/adoption cycle out to keep forward momentum, but only if you are properly incentivized. It takes tremendous effort to reach a large critical mass, especially for a small team (in my case a single developer). To want to pivot past your personal motivates to keep your product alive takes something more, something different. Persistence won't buy you that.
• btbuildem 5y ago
  I made a similar decision nearly two years ago when I bought a fixer-upper of a condo: just do a bit of work every day, doesn't matter if it's half an hour of sweeping, make sure you show up every day. Time will pass and work will progress. It's been a massive project (fully gutted, subfloors removed and joists levelled, whole new floor plan, the works), it's still ongoing, but what kept it moving was that simple commitment. An hour or two in the evening, each god damn evening, for 682 days in a row. New drywall is up in a few places already, and the end is in sight. I am a firm believer in this approach now. The march of time is ruthless and inevitable, the little effort that you regularly weave into it will pay off big in the end.
• slowwriter 5y ago
  I don’t see others mentioning it so I thought I should. This reminds me of DHH and the creation of Rails. He followed essentially the same method: chipped away at it over a long period of time, little by little, day by day, with no specific deadline in mind. Works like this can have a huge impact on a person’s life and the world around him.
• ineedasername 5y ago
  SEO tactic: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of using the phrase "unreasonable effectiveness" in a blog post. ;)
• kissgyorgy 5y ago
  These kind of stories should be on the front page more often! It's always about hypergrowth, hyper-everyhing, billion dollar exits, and seems like everyone chasing those dreams. To me personally, this way is much more appealing!
• Raineer 5y ago
  I highly recommend this same approach for schoolwork/studying. Just simply doing something, everyday, keeps topics fresh in your mind. It's so much better than forcing activity into giant chunks. I feel it reduces stress as well. It keeps feeding your brain to subconsciously churn over topics during downtime like showers and sleeping.
• debt 5y ago
  People hate this because it’s not the all-in-one all-nighter over-the-weekend hacker stereotype I think we all want to be; rather it’s a slow movement towards success over a much much longer period of time.
• asah 5y ago
  This is a terrific model but it's not the only model - another highly effective model is to develop useful skills+resources, then strike with full force at the perfect time. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27835163 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27835163
  • zemvpferreira 5y ago
    I hope your (really good) point gets more visible as this thread matures. I wanted to add that these are not mutually exclusive strategies: a project/business/startup can go from single focus to part-time and back multiple times. Two other strategies I'm a fan of: - Quitting before you overcommit. Sometimes it's just not worth it any more. - Taking a step back or time off. At minimum can give you perspective.
• allenu 5y ago
  This is great advice and one that I'm using in my own side project. I have a macOS/iOS app out in the App Store and spent several months of my spare time working on it. Once it was released, I've pulled back a bit on how much time I spend on it, but I do manage to spend a few hours here and there during the week to add more features to it and to fix up bugs. I don't have specific goals, like "must release new feature X by 7/20". I just tend to ship a new version every 2-4 weeks depending on how I'm feeling and how much work I've actually done. I've been amazed at the steady progress of improvements I've made on it. This pace feels a lot better than when I was working hard just to ship the darn thing. I'm not burnt out on the project, and the lack of pressure gives me time and space to reflect on what to do next and how best to achieve it.
• d_burfoot 5y ago
  I feel like HN should have a special flag called "survivorship bias" that we can use to tag posts like this. For every project like this one, there are 1000 others where someone spent 15 hrs/week for 5 years, built something really cool, but never got any funding or traction. Now, that time was probably better spent on a cool project than on playing video games or watching TV. But you shouldn't think that consistent engineering effort alone will have any payoff bigger than personal intellectual satisfaction.
  • tryptophan 5y ago
    >For every project like this one, there are 1000 others where someone spent 15 hrs/week for 5 years, built something really cool, but never got any funding or traction. You're probably right, but care to name some examples? I can't think of a single blog or article about failed companies or projects.I think they would be interesting to read and dissect. It seems that people who have that sort of persistence and choose to do something are quite rare, making the survivorship bias of posting successes even harder to balance out.
    • AndrewKemendo 5y ago
      Ted Nelson's Xanadu is what comes to mind immediately for me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu The Bulletball guy is a close second: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOOw2yWMSfk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOOw2yWMSfk
      • sebmellen 5y ago
        Aha! But had the Xanadu folks showed up every day, they might have created something more than vaporware, and people might've used their software! From the linked Wikipedia article: > Wired magazine published an article called "The Curse of Xanadu", calling Project Xanadu "the longest-running vaporware story in the history of the computer industry".[3] The first attempt at implementation began in 1960, but it was not until 1998 that an incomplete implementation was released. A version described as "a working deliverable", OpenXanadu, was made available in 2014.
• distribot 5y ago
  I think the worst part about being clinically depressed is how it feels impossible to do a little bit for a few days at a time, and then all my context/momentum/enthusiasm burns up by the time I come back to a project.
  • hu3 5y ago
    Been there. Luckily my mother managed to drag me kicking and screaming to a psychiatrist as I didn't have the energy. If you can, try to call a parent or a friend and ask for help and be very clear to them that you can't do it alone (I know it's painful to admit). Turns out I had ADHD and Vyvanse changed my life. I did stop medicating after one year because it wasn't easy on the body (accelerated hearth rate) but medication gave the kickstart necessary to drag my ass through dark times and have impetus. Understanding my problem allowed me to manage it.
• davio 5y ago
  2 crappy pages a day is the Tim Ferris standard
• 094459 5y ago
  I love this post and the approach. It’s worked for me during my life on lots of things.
• dgs_sgd 5y ago
  I learned this lesson in a completely unrelated domain. I started lifting weights seriously about two years ago. Since then, I've averaged at least 5 days of training per week and now my physique is that of a completely different person. The lesson is if you do something everyday for years, whether it's body building, learning a skill, or bootstrapping a company, after several years you will see outstanding results.
  • jstx1 5y ago
    It's good to point out that it works with bad habits too - if you repeat behaviours that you don't want every day, you're making your life worse in a very reliable way.
    • munificent 5y ago
      They used to say "you are what you eat". That's still true, but I think it's even more true that you are what you give your attention to.
      • 63 5y ago
        "If you want to know what's important to you, pay attention to what you pay attention to."
• nathias 5y ago
  The unreasonable effectiveness of 'The unreasonable effectiveness of "The unreasonable effectiveness..."' title.
• jonnycomputer 5y ago
  Cool. But why is it unreasonable?
• johnnyApplePRNG 5y ago
  It worked for Seinfeld, too! [0] [0] https://jamesclear.com/stop-procrastinating-seinfeld-strategy https://jamesclear.com/stop-procrastinating-seinfeld-strateg...
  • rchaud 5y ago
    "Don't break the chain" is an urban myth, Seinfeld himself said in a Reddit AMA he did not follow that method, it was just attributed to him [0] The top search results on the topic are unfortunately full of links all repeating the same myth. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1ujvrg/jerry_seinfeld_here_i_will_give_you_an_answer/ceiugt5/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1ujvrg/jerry_seinfeld...
  • alex504 5y ago
    He did not actually create or do this https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1ujvrg/jerry_seinfeld_here_i_will_give_you_an_answer/ceiugt5/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1ujvrg/jerry_seinfeld...
• mattwad 5y ago
  Picasso said this, "Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working"
• temporama1 5y ago
  Counterpoint to this: a lot of the programmers I admire all have an uncanny ability to just sit and work for long periods of time. Like, sit down and hardly move for 10 straight hours. They achieve a huge amount in that time - much more in a single 10 hour stretch than they would in 10x1 hour sessions. And that applies to other things they do: playing video games, reading a book...when they do something they go 'all in'. I feel like this level of focus is much more of a superpower than small amounts every day (although that too is powerful, and both approaches are infinitely better than what most of us do, which is very little)
  • karterk 5y ago
    I certainly agree. However, many people don't have that dedicated focused time. I wanted to give an alternative perspective on what one can do when you can't find such long stretches of time.
• tester756 5y ago
  thus, consistency is a key
• galaxyLogic 5y ago
  I agree this is the way to do something, keep at it consistently. But at the same time the story tells me it took a long time, many YEARS, from 2015 to 2020. It takes a long time and but it also helps that you don't use the whole day for it every day. That means you have time to think about what you're doing while riding on a bus or doing something else. The end-produce is beautiful and simple, but it took a lot of effort to make it simple, to know what exactly it should be. Now had there been a clear spec to start with I assume it could have been done much faster. But then again creating the spec takes its own time.
• eigenhombre 5y ago
  One thing not discussed much here is time of day -- I have a few daily practices (exercise, meditation, painting) I do every single day, and I try to do them all before work. Occasionally something comes up and I have to do them in the evening, but my focus is usually diminished then. Of the people featured in the Daily Habits [edit: Daily Rituals] book mentioned elsewhere in this thread, many described doing their most important work in the morning, though there were notable exceptions (night owls, no consistent pattern, etc.). What works best for you?
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• echlebek 5y ago
  This site triggered an XSS warning from noscript for me.
• samoyy 5y ago
  No more zero days. https://www.reddit.com/r/getdisciplined/comments/1q96b5/i_just_dont_care_about_myself/cdah4af/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/getdisciplined/comments/1q96b5/i_ju...
  • Strom 5y ago
    That was a great and thoughtful post. Thanks for sharing!
• musicale 5y ago
  I just wish people on the internet would discover the difference between "everyday" and "every day." (Bonus points for "setup" vs. "set up" - a common foulup.)
  • TechBro8615 5y ago
    How about "login" vs. "log in?" :)
• brailsafe 5y ago
  I think probably it's better to think of this as 'reasonable effectiveness'. Unreasonable effectiveness would be better communicated with a success metric that isn't also highly dependant on luck. As in grinding vocabulary in a foreign language every day.
• thread_id 5y ago
  I'm not sure what all this pedantic nonsense is regarding the grand canyon and flooding. But I can tell you from personal experience that this indeed works beautifully well. And the more progress you accumulate, the more velocity you experience. It is a virtuous cycle.
• wly_cdgr 5y ago
  The musical instrument practice app Melodics has a streak mechanic that extends your streak if you play at least 5 minutes that day. The interval is NOT adjustable. At first I thought this inability to change the minimum practice time required to continue the streak was a UX bug, but as I started racking up long streaks and finding myself practicing for longer than the minimum five minutes on many days, I realized it was a brilliant feature
• achow 5y ago
  Effectiveness of just showing up works wonderfully for fitness as well. How much ever unfit one is, just showing up for a long period of time changes oneself. All one has to do drag oneself to the class, day in and day out, and then universe takes over..
  • zuhayeer 5y ago
    Also learning a new language
    • biztos 5y ago
      I'm doing this right now, and at about Month Four I was happy to find myself "talking" in the new language, although the conversations would probably be cringeworthy to anyone but my teachers. This is without much immersion (due to lockdown then traveling), and the instruction is online, and I've been a lazy bum about additional study. It's made me pretty optimistic about learning new languages in general, and I'm 50 so the brain isn't exactly a sponge anymore. More like a sieve.
      • agent008t 5y ago
        You probably already know this, but Anki (or other spaced repetition methods) is amazing for retaining what you have learned efficiently.
        • biztos 5y ago
          I haven't used Anki yet but I want to try -- any idea which of the many mobile apps is best?
          • agent008t 5y ago
            I just use the desktop app to create/manage the cards, and then on mobile use ankiweb in a browser. That seems to work very well for me. The best thing is that even if some weeks or even months I do not feel like studying at all, I can just continue with the Anki decks for 5-10 minutes a day to make sure I continue to retain what I had already learned. It has not become my bedtime routine/habit.
• RandyRanderson 5y ago
  AKA the war of art[0] and I'm sure there's many, many other books in the same vein. To dichotomize: those that show up every day anyway are likely doing something they love (even if the thing they're doing is showing up itself[1]). Those that don't likely perceive the way fwd as something they don't like. We can change that perception but it's hard. Likely, it's best to think in a continuum of interest and that we need to move the perception or act into a realm that is self-reinforcing. [0] https://stevenpressfield.com/books/the-war-of-art/ https://stevenpressfield.com/books/the-war-of-art/ [1] This is an illness; a life without refuge.
• may13noon 5y ago
  Every TIL runner: "See. This is the result."
• adt2bt 5y ago
  This worked wonderfully for me when prepping for interviews the last time I searched for a job. I just committed to 3 months of doing the Leetcode monthly challenge at a minimum. Some days I did more, yes, but only when I felt like it. By the end of the experiment, I'd seen the majority of algorithms and data structures problem classes that I'd likely ever see in an actual interview. Just doing the daily practice was enough to keep my muscle memory sharp, and in an interview setting, being quick to bang out an algorithm almost always gives you good marks. To test it out further, after I did my first interview (and felt I aced it), I did not do any daily practice for about 3 weeks between that and my next one. The difference was shocking. I was noticeably slower at answering very similar questions, and occasionally got stuck on things I knew I should know.
  • hn_99 5y ago
    This is pretty much exactly how my experience was. I did the leetcode monthly challenge for about 4 months and did pretty well on my interviews. I got a job but I still had some more interviews scheduled. I stopped practicing after that for about two weeks and the interviews were much worse.
• zuhayeer 5y ago
  Couldn't agree more. Tangentially, this article came to mind: http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-amount-of-detail http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-... You don't fully appreciate the details for what you're solving until you naively take it all on and show up everyday. Slowly uncovering every nook – solving an annoying bug over the course of a week, while implementing core pieces of your product you thought would take months within a day.
• nwb 5y ago
  Reminds me of a bo-jack horseman quote: "everyday it gets easier but you have to do it everyday".
• chiefalchemist 5y ago
  > Pick an idea in a large market that will always be in demand and work on a product that caters to a subset of use cases exceedingly well. Apparently, software is similar to soft drinks :) That is, the soft drink market is massive. So massive that even a small slice - and you most often have to start looking to "corner" a small slice - can be fairly lucrative.
• rramadass 5y ago
  Drops of water falling, if they fall consistently, will bore through iron and stone. -- Chinese Martial Arts saying. Nice and pithy on the importance of daily practice. The key is to not be competitive, set a time limit and focus only on the "doing" with no judgement.
• b0rsuk 5y ago
  This reminds me of what I heard of buses on Madagascar. A bus leaves not at specific time, but when it's full. Maybe we attach too much importance to the saying "time is money"? It can be money, but there are other approaches.
• begueradj 5y ago
  Interesting and inspiring story.
• angarg12 5y ago
  I used to think like this. At it's core, it's a variation of "never give up", mixed with "the power of habit". I agree with "the power of habit" part. From the "never give up" point of view, I've changed my mind, thanks to books like The Lean Startup, Blitzscaling, and my own experience. The bottom line message seems to be "keep insisting and you'll be successful". I spent 3+ years working in a game that never took off as a side project. In hindsight, I should have taken the hint of the lack of traction early on and dropped the whole thing. Instead I sank countless hours into a project that never worked out. How many prototypes could I have produced in the same time? Bottom line, habits are good, so long as we don't mix it up with the concept of "don't give up and you'll be successful".
  • mariusor 5y ago
    If you don't strongly believe in the work that you do, I doubt that any amount of discipline and punctiliousness will give you satisfaction at the end. I don't believe it's enough just having "taking off" as an incentive. You should be trying to either improve yourself, or the "world" at large with what you're doing. Also apologies if this sounds too preachy, I can't find a better way to express what I mean in the moment.
  • zhdc1 5y ago
    > From the "never give up" point of view, I've changed my mind, thanks to books like The Lean Startup, Blitzscaling, and my own experience. It depends on whether you're giving up on the process or the goal. Startups "give up" or pivot on their original and subsequent ideas so often that's it's considered a best practice. This is different from founders giving up on starting a business. Like you mentioned, the habit is what matters.
  • FriedrichN 5y ago
    There is a difference between tenacity and doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results when there are no signs of progress. Ideas like "never give up" and "the power of habit" are not universally true, they are heuristics you can apply to your daily life. In complex systems there are no absolutes. If you have an idea that can be applied to all things equally you're in a cult.
• habosa 5y ago
  Inspiring post! I am sitting here right now working on my side project, which I try to do for an hour or two before work every day. It really is amazing how much I get done in this tiny block of time vs. the 8 hours I spend at my full-time job. Just "plugging away", hoping to go from 1 user to 10 to 100.
• kaba0 5y ago
  I didn’t see James Clear’s Atomic Habits book mentioned — what’s the opinion of HN on that book?