13 ms·

How To Be Fucking Awesome

82 points by sant0sk1 18y ago

mhb 18y ago
Need to season this with a little http://mattmaroon.com/?p=583 http://mattmaroon.com/?p=583
aneesh 18y ago
Another equally important thing is choosing your battles: you have to not only work hard, but work hard at the right things. I could practice basketball for 10,000 hours, but there's no way I could do it professionally. You have to figure out what your natural abilities are, and work hard in those areas.
- PieSquared 18y ago
  And be sure to avoid confusion 'natural abilities' with talents. I agree with aneesh that you shouldn't focus on something that you are inferior at genetically - obviously a seven foot tall guy will be better at basketball and a normal sized person if both play professionally - but make sure you don't give up by saying, "I can't seem to do very well at this one thing. Eh, I suppose it's just not a natural ability."
  - mdakin 18y ago
    Spud Webb is only 5'6" tall. He played in the NBA for 13 years and won the 1986 slam dunk contest with a "180-degree reverse two-handed strawberry jam." He was better than all the seven-feet-tall guys in that contest in 1986. Assessing potential is hard. For example, one might assume that "height" is a phenotypical requirement for being an elite basketballer. But Webb proved that assumption is incorrect. You'll likely make similar mistakes assessing your own potential. So why bother? Do what you love and let the chips fall where they may.
    - fallentimes 18y ago
      Anomalies aren't evidence. The strawberry jam was awesome though: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-IoInRUjDM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-IoInRUjDM
      - mdakin 18y ago
        Anomalies aren't necessarily evidence but in this case, and in many important general cases anomalies can be critically important evidence. He and his career constitute evidence that "height" is not a requirement to be an elite basketball player. It's definitional and not arguable. In science today's "anomaly" is sometimes the evidence that leads to tomorrow's breakthrough.
        fallentimes 18y ago
        It's not a requirement but there's a massive correlation between the two. It's just like when people say they shouldn't worry about monetizing because of Google.
        mdakin 18y ago
        We are discussing prediction of success. Noticing one or two characteristics thought to be shared by the successful is really quite useless; most people with those characteristics do not succeed. Most tall people suck at basketball. Some elite basketball players are short. The fact that most elite basketball players are tall does not really help us write our basketball-success-prediction algorithm. People dedicate their careers to solving this problem. It is very hard. Since this is hard and likely to yield garbage results anyway, and most likely only leads to worry, time-wasting and excuse-making don't bother with these thoughts. Instead, erase every doubt from your mind, get in the long boat, row west and find Valhalla. (Given Google somehow came up I had no choice but to bring Valhalla into the discussion.)
        fallentimes 18y ago
        The average height of an NBA basketball players is over 6' 6''. This helps us with our predictors of success. Sure there are other variables, but knowing this is very helpful especially if you had never watched an NBA game before. Source: http://www.nba.com/news/survey_height_2006.html http://www.nba.com/news/survey_height_2006.html
- Retric 18y ago
  If you had spent 10,000 hours practicing basketball you would probably be better than anyone you know at the game. Granted if your short or old there are limits but a tiny fraction of the populous really focus on getting better for 10,000 hours.
- time_management 18y ago
  I think the difference between athletic and intellectual endeavors is that the genetic factors necessary for reaching the highest levels are fairly well-understood, and also known to be very rare. By contrast, we don't know how rare potential great writers or programmers are; they might be fairly common. If there is a natural basis for greatness in these fields, we don't have any way of testing for it.
- migpwr 18y ago
  If you practiced basketball for 10,000 hours then you would be fucking awesome, regardless of having a contract. The right things don't exist... or have we already forgotten the whole "do what you love" concept?
  - aneesh 18y ago
    Loving what you do is necessary, but not sufficient. What you do should be at the intersection of what you love and what you're good at.
    - mdakin 18y ago
      How do you know you're good at something a priori without spending the 10,000 hours to find out empirically?
      - aneesh 18y ago
        You do what statisticians do ... take a small sample and estimate. Spend 20 hours each doing 10 different things, and then pick 2-3 of them to spend 200 hours doing. Then pick the one. While it may take 10,000 hours to be truly awesome, you can probably get a sense of being "good" at something in a much smaller amount of time.
  - xiaoma 18y ago
    You wouldn't be "fucking awesome at basketball, even after 10000 hours of practice if you were crippled, pushing 90, blind or disadvantaged in a number of other ways. It's not an easy truth to accept, but the playing field is not level and while the human will is capable of amazing feats, there are limits.
dustineichler 18y ago
Short and sweet read says... if you want to be awesome. Put it time. I believe it.
- adldesigner 18y ago
  I agree.
adldesigner 18y ago
You do realize that spending one hour daily to get good at something would still require almost 30 years, right? I love the post though. Thanks.
- tptacek 18y ago
  I think the point is that you spend much more than one hour a day at it.
  - adldesigner 18y ago
    Agreed. I felt like doing some math. :) Anyway, one hour a day is what many of us have to pursue other personal goals different from work, family, etc.
    - jrockway 18y ago
      > one hour a day is what many of us have to pursue other personal goals different from work, family, etc. Perhaps this lifestyle precludes being "fucking awesome"?
      - adldesigner 18y ago
        I'm certainly betting my wife finds me "fucking awesome" for bringing food back home, and no worries. :) What would be your definition of being "fucking awesome"?
        jimbokun 18y ago
        'I'm certainly betting my wife finds me "fucking awesome"' In this case, the literal meaning of the phrase could be quite applicable, and well worth devoting 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to the cause.
henning 18y ago
If you get 3 solid hours of work (work you could, if you were being paid hourly, bill for) on something you're doing in a day, you'd accumulate your 10,000 hours in about 9 years, assuming you get 3 hours in every single day of the year. That's unrealistic, so bump it up to 10 years. This has been brought up before: http://norvig.com/21-days.html http://norvig.com/21-days.html
unalone 18y ago
Flagged: it's a fun little post, but it's repeating the key claim that Gladwell made in his new book, which appears here in 3 other top-page stories right now, and it's not adding anything new other than the title.
- raganwald 18y ago
  those are reasons not to upmod it, but I thought the flag was for spam. do I misunderstand? am I to flag everything I consider a waste of time??
  - unalone 18y ago
    I don't know. I very rarely flag things. But today, for whatever reason, Hacker News seems flooded with extremely similar articles. Today is Gladwell Day. And this post didn't seem to be adding anything relevant to the conversation. I saw it as spam. But it's still here, so I guess my flag wasn't a good one.
  - tdavis 18y ago
    I flag anything that makes me think, "I could have spent those X minutes/seconds of my life reading something worthwhile." This screams of a plug for Gladwell's book, which may well be worth reading, but doesn't really offer anything interesting beyond "Bill Gates spent lots of hours programming and made a successful software company so practice a lot." Well, yeah, duh.
    - justindz 18y ago
      Your summary didn't match with what I read in the NYTimes article. The point seemed to be that people have advantages in certain endeavors that are not attributable to their skill or talent. Bill Gates is a offered as a case of someone who had the advantage of privileged access to and time on computing systems (which is not a knock on his genius). Another case cited has to do with age cutoffs for Canadian youth hockey leagues. Basically, anyone born right before the cutoff tends to be the older, bigger, stronger kid in that bracket and this advantage increases over time. They practice, yes, but they also have a significant advantage stemming from a factor totally outside of their influence. The other point being that you can analyze these factors and reduce that influence, supposing you wanted to do that. I think your assessment of what the book offers is actually more of an assessment of what Giles zeroed in on. I'm not defending the book--I have no interested since the concept can be summed up in a twitter post--but thought I'd point out that I think there's a different thesis at work.
rokhayakebe 18y ago
4 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, you will be fucking awesome.
- kirubakaran 18y ago
  No. At 4 hours a day, you'll need 2500 days. [6.8 years] If you did it full time (40 hours a week), you'll supposedly be fucking awesome in 4.8 years. If this were true, I should be an awesome programmer. But I know I am not yet one. Far from it. So I call bullshit. (Some popular 'fucking awesome' programmers for reference: Steve Yegge, RMS, John Resig)
  - Retric 18y ago
    Are you really spending that much time trying to get better or are you mostly doing the same things over and over again. One of my favorite sayings: "I don't want someone that has the same year of experience repeated 10 times I want 10 different years of experience." PS: If your in the top 5% of coders most people will consider you fucking awesome.
    - kirubakaran 18y ago
      I've been coding since I was 11 (like many people here). I am 29 now. I'd say that I've been trying to get better than myself all the time. I don't think one would do the same things again and again unless it is a sad day job. All I am saying is that may be 10,000 hours is not enough.
      - Retric 18y ago
        Ok, I am 28 and I started coding at 8 (my father was a programmer) but I don't think I really spend more than 100 hours coding before 12, and 1500 by 18, in collage I may have added 2000 hours of real effort, but once I started working I have spent little time learning and more time jumping though hoops. I just started working with the J2EE / Spring / Hibernate world and within 200 hours of effort it seems fairly easy and it's mostly grunt work at this point in time. So while I am still closing in on those 10,000 hours it's going to take a lot more stretching for me to get there. There was plenty of time I could have spent getting better, but I have written ASM, high and low level networking code, Multi-threaded Apps, desktop apps, code parsers, scientific number crunchers, websites, and mostly I just wonder why other people find it hard. I don't think of my self as Fucking Awesome but I do think I am close to that point.
beaudeal 18y ago
I found this really interesting, because we covered this exact topic in a psychology course that I took while in university, and I think that it is often mis-quoted / mis-used. The conclusion that was drawn from scientific research was that the vast majority of experts all shared a common trait - they all had at least 10,000 hours of deliberate practice (not that anyone who practiced for 10,000 hours would definitely be an expert). Deliberate practice was defined as practice which: has a goal / task that relates to improved performance, there are explicit instructions as the the best methods of improvement, there is immediate feedback on the performance, and the person repeatedly performs these actions. Obviously his isn't leisurely practice like playing catch in your backyard if you're a baseball player. The experts also didn't practice for 1 hour per day for 30 years like someone in the comments mentioned; the average was about 4 hours per day if I remember correctly. The research had also noted (much like the Matt Maroon article) that this does not mean, for example, that ANYBODY can play in the NBA. What they are really pointing out is that those who are in the NBA probably had at least 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. They also noted that some fields of expertise (such as the NBA) have built-in physical constraints (ex: height) which must be considered. Their study actual dealt with the field of music (violin playing, specifically) which has fewer constraints than something like basketball, and the results were significant.
- ScottHanson 18y ago
  Practice makes perfect.
  - danhak 18y ago
    No, practice makes permanent.
  - sherl0ck 18y ago
    practice perfect makes perfect
    - nuclear_eclipse 18y ago
      I believe it's "perfect practice makes perfect."
sabat 18y ago
Anyone read the new Malcolm Gladwell book that this is based on? Is it any good? A lot of his books seem half-finished. He points out something (Blink: your intuition is more powerful than you realize, and not well-understood) but never gets around to explaining why the phenomenon exists. Is this one worth reading?
Nerdlinger 18y ago
A related article. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=359551 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=359551
matt1 18y ago
Time and awesomeness is a correlation, not cause and effect. Sure, talent and time help, but the key ingredient is passion. Without it, you've got a long, painful road ahead of you. With it, you can climb mountains. . The article gives Bill Gates as an example. According to the article, Gates is a great programmer because he sat in front of the computer for seven years. But Gladwell has it backwards... Gates sat in front of a computer for seven years because he had a passion for programming and that's what lead him to be great.
utsmokingaces 18y ago
Gates was brilliant because of his business decisions in which m$ partner up with IBM and dominated the PC operating system market. He was also brilliant in taking the risk in dropping out of Harvard and starting a business with Paul Allen. Gates is not famous for his coding skills. His coding ability is just one part of the foundation that led to his success.
david927 18y ago
Wait, wait, wait. Bill Gates didn't program ANYTHING (at least not anything of note). He bought DOS, which made his fortune, and it was his connections through his mother which helped him in the deal with IBM. You /can/ be awesome with practice. But Bill Gates isn't an example. (And, yes, I know he wrote an early Basic interpreter, but he was also considered a mediocre programmer by many who knew him.)
- kthakar 18y ago
  you can call billg an awesome businessman, after all it takes a lot to be the richest man on earth. I haven't heard much about his programming skills, so I don't think he was a great programmer.
  - david927 18y ago
    exactly. And he didn't spend 10,000 hours practicing business. I'm not trying to be snarky by pointing this out; I'm trying clarify that, while we should remember that in order to be great, we require dedication, effort and patience, the example chosen of Bill Gates shows that, sadly, this is often irrelevant.
    - wheels 18y ago
      Microsoft was founded in 1975. 10k hours is 5 years of 40 hour weeks. I think it's fair to say that he was working more than 40 hour weeks, so by the time MS rose to dominance, he'd almost certainly spent over 10k hours at it.
- cpr 18y ago
  Sorry, he's not a mediocre programmer. I knew him in college and he was darned good. We took the same grad CS courses as undergrads together, and he did well.
mironathetin 18y ago
That reminds me of Peter Norvig: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years. Let me add: Don't waste your time reading books about trivial topics.
plinkplonk 18y ago
how would someone do "deliberate practice" with programming anyway? Music, basketball etc involve "body memory" where repetitions of identical movements help. This seems to be fundamentally different from programming. I am guessing programming "practice" would involve writing more ambitious programs? where would the feedback come from?
- giles_bowkett 18y ago
  I explained this in my blog a few posts ago. You write programs to focus on some particular aspect of your programming that you want to make better. I think it should be obvious. You use functional programming idioms - write programs that have using functional programming idioms well as their only purpose. You use regular expressions - write programs that only exist to make you better at regular expressions. In other words write a bunch of regular expressions and make them as good as you can. In the Ruby community we have the Ruby Quiz. I'm pretty sure that's copied from some other community, I think Perl. Every programming language community has practices of this nature. It's absurd to suggest that deliberate practice has anything to do with body memory intrinsically. How many times will you write a regular expression in your life? There's no element of repetition there? The literature on deliberate practice cites Mozart, Bobby Fischer, and Bill Gates. Body memory has nothing to do with it. The feedback comes from sharing with others, as in the Ruby Quiz, or benchmarking your code, or posting it on a blog. Another form of feedback would be seeing if your programs run at all. ;-)
  - plinkplonk 18y ago
    "It's absurd to suggest that deliberate practice has anything to do with body memory intrinsically. " Since no one actually made that claim - the intrinsically part that is - ..... :)
dmoney 18y ago
If you believe it takes 10,000 hours to become Fucking Awesome, it will take 10,000 hours to become Fucking Awesome. Of course it must take many hours of practice at a given activity, but 10,000 is just a number (and Fucking Awesome is vaguely defined).
hs 18y ago
if u buy that 10% improvement by 10x effort and mapping the 10000 hours: 10000 -> 99.9% 1000 -> 99% 100 -> 90% 100 hrs is about 13 weeks (a quarter) of 3 uni 1hr credits + 1.5hr practice = 13 * 3 * (1 + 1.5) if u take deliberate practice as vector, that's only the magnitude part the direction part is what to study and that ends up being more important given a constraint of 100 hrs, a nonprogrammer will end up becoming more productive studying lisp compared to java but of course, to say such programmer is 90% better than average is too much :D ... and controversial
sireat 18y ago
There is one important thing: some of those hours should come before certain age. For many disciplines/fields it is under 18 and for almost all it is certainly 25. In other words, if you start practicing basketball at age 37, you are not going to make it to NBA even if you put in 20000 hours of deliberate practice. While this principle seems obvious for largely physical pursuits, it holds true for purely mental fields, as well, be it chess, programming or piano playing.

82 points by sant0sk1 18y ago

mhb 18y ago

Need to season this with a little http://mattmaroon.com/?p=583 http://mattmaroon.com/?p=583

Another equally important thing is choosing your battles: you have to not only work hard, but work hard at the right things. I could practice basketball for 10,000 hours, but there's no way I could do it professionally. You have to figure out what your natural abilities are, and work hard in those areas.

PieSquared 18y ago
And be sure to avoid confusion 'natural abilities' with talents. I agree with aneesh that you shouldn't focus on something that you are inferior at genetically - obviously a seven foot tall guy will be better at basketball and a normal sized person if both play professionally - but make sure you don't give up by saying, "I can't seem to do very well at this one thing. Eh, I suppose it's just not a natural ability."
- mdakin 18y ago
  Spud Webb is only 5'6" tall. He played in the NBA for 13 years and won the 1986 slam dunk contest with a "180-degree reverse two-handed strawberry jam." He was better than all the seven-feet-tall guys in that contest in 1986. Assessing potential is hard. For example, one might assume that "height" is a phenotypical requirement for being an elite basketballer. But Webb proved that assumption is incorrect. You'll likely make similar mistakes assessing your own potential. So why bother? Do what you love and let the chips fall where they may.
  - fallentimes 18y ago
    Anomalies aren't evidence. The strawberry jam was awesome though: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-IoInRUjDM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-IoInRUjDM
    - mdakin 18y ago
      Anomalies aren't necessarily evidence but in this case, and in many important general cases anomalies can be critically important evidence. He and his career constitute evidence that "height" is not a requirement to be an elite basketball player. It's definitional and not arguable. In science today's "anomaly" is sometimes the evidence that leads to tomorrow's breakthrough.
      - fallentimes 18y ago
        It's not a requirement but there's a massive correlation between the two. It's just like when people say they shouldn't worry about monetizing because of Google.
        mdakin 18y ago
        We are discussing prediction of success. Noticing one or two characteristics thought to be shared by the successful is really quite useless; most people with those characteristics do not succeed. Most tall people suck at basketball. Some elite basketball players are short. The fact that most elite basketball players are tall does not really help us write our basketball-success-prediction algorithm. People dedicate their careers to solving this problem. It is very hard. Since this is hard and likely to yield garbage results anyway, and most likely only leads to worry, time-wasting and excuse-making don't bother with these thoughts. Instead, erase every doubt from your mind, get in the long boat, row west and find Valhalla. (Given Google somehow came up I had no choice but to bring Valhalla into the discussion.)
        fallentimes 18y ago
        The average height of an NBA basketball players is over 6' 6''. This helps us with our predictors of success. Sure there are other variables, but knowing this is very helpful especially if you had never watched an NBA game before. Source: http://www.nba.com/news/survey_height_2006.html http://www.nba.com/news/survey_height_2006.html
Retric 18y ago
If you had spent 10,000 hours practicing basketball you would probably be better than anyone you know at the game. Granted if your short or old there are limits but a tiny fraction of the populous really focus on getting better for 10,000 hours.
time_management 18y ago
I think the difference between athletic and intellectual endeavors is that the genetic factors necessary for reaching the highest levels are fairly well-understood, and also known to be very rare. By contrast, we don't know how rare potential great writers or programmers are; they might be fairly common. If there is a natural basis for greatness in these fields, we don't have any way of testing for it.
migpwr 18y ago
If you practiced basketball for 10,000 hours then you would be fucking awesome, regardless of having a contract. The right things don't exist... or have we already forgotten the whole "do what you love" concept?
- aneesh 18y ago
  Loving what you do is necessary, but not sufficient. What you do should be at the intersection of what you love and what you're good at.
  - mdakin 18y ago
    How do you know you're good at something a priori without spending the 10,000 hours to find out empirically?
    - aneesh 18y ago
      You do what statisticians do ... take a small sample and estimate. Spend 20 hours each doing 10 different things, and then pick 2-3 of them to spend 200 hours doing. Then pick the one. While it may take 10,000 hours to be truly awesome, you can probably get a sense of being "good" at something in a much smaller amount of time.
- xiaoma 18y ago
  You wouldn't be "fucking awesome at basketball, even after 10000 hours of practice if you were crippled, pushing 90, blind or disadvantaged in a number of other ways. It's not an easy truth to accept, but the playing field is not level and while the human will is capable of amazing feats, there are limits.

dustineichler 18y ago

Short and sweet read says... if you want to be awesome. Put it time. I believe it.

adldesigner 18y ago
I agree.

adldesigner 18y ago

You do realize that spending one hour daily to get good at something would still require almost 30 years, right? I love the post though. Thanks.

tptacek 18y ago
I think the point is that you spend much more than one hour a day at it.
- adldesigner 18y ago
  Agreed. I felt like doing some math. :) Anyway, one hour a day is what many of us have to pursue other personal goals different from work, family, etc.
  - jrockway 18y ago
    > one hour a day is what many of us have to pursue other personal goals different from work, family, etc. Perhaps this lifestyle precludes being "fucking awesome"?
    - adldesigner 18y ago
      I'm certainly betting my wife finds me "fucking awesome" for bringing food back home, and no worries. :) What would be your definition of being "fucking awesome"?
      - jimbokun 18y ago
        'I'm certainly betting my wife finds me "fucking awesome"' In this case, the literal meaning of the phrase could be quite applicable, and well worth devoting 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to the cause.

henning 18y ago

If you get 3 solid hours of work (work you could, if you were being paid hourly, bill for) on something you're doing in a day, you'd accumulate your 10,000 hours in about 9 years, assuming you get 3 hours in every single day of the year. That's unrealistic, so bump it up to 10 years. This has been brought up before: http://norvig.com/21-days.html http://norvig.com/21-days.html

unalone 18y ago

Flagged: it's a fun little post, but it's repeating the key claim that Gladwell made in his new book, which appears here in 3 other top-page stories right now, and it's not adding anything new other than the title.

raganwald 18y ago
those are reasons not to upmod it, but I thought the flag was for spam. do I misunderstand? am I to flag everything I consider a waste of time??
- unalone 18y ago
  I don't know. I very rarely flag things. But today, for whatever reason, Hacker News seems flooded with extremely similar articles. Today is Gladwell Day. And this post didn't seem to be adding anything relevant to the conversation. I saw it as spam. But it's still here, so I guess my flag wasn't a good one.
- tdavis 18y ago
  I flag anything that makes me think, "I could have spent those X minutes/seconds of my life reading something worthwhile." This screams of a plug for Gladwell's book, which may well be worth reading, but doesn't really offer anything interesting beyond "Bill Gates spent lots of hours programming and made a successful software company so practice a lot." Well, yeah, duh.
  - justindz 18y ago
    Your summary didn't match with what I read in the NYTimes article. The point seemed to be that people have advantages in certain endeavors that are not attributable to their skill or talent. Bill Gates is a offered as a case of someone who had the advantage of privileged access to and time on computing systems (which is not a knock on his genius). Another case cited has to do with age cutoffs for Canadian youth hockey leagues. Basically, anyone born right before the cutoff tends to be the older, bigger, stronger kid in that bracket and this advantage increases over time. They practice, yes, but they also have a significant advantage stemming from a factor totally outside of their influence. The other point being that you can analyze these factors and reduce that influence, supposing you wanted to do that. I think your assessment of what the book offers is actually more of an assessment of what Giles zeroed in on. I'm not defending the book--I have no interested since the concept can be summed up in a twitter post--but thought I'd point out that I think there's a different thesis at work.

rokhayakebe 18y ago

4 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, you will be fucking awesome.

kirubakaran 18y ago
No. At 4 hours a day, you'll need 2500 days. [6.8 years] If you did it full time (40 hours a week), you'll supposedly be fucking awesome in 4.8 years. If this were true, I should be an awesome programmer. But I know I am not yet one. Far from it. So I call bullshit. (Some popular 'fucking awesome' programmers for reference: Steve Yegge, RMS, John Resig)
- Retric 18y ago
  Are you really spending that much time trying to get better or are you mostly doing the same things over and over again. One of my favorite sayings: "I don't want someone that has the same year of experience repeated 10 times I want 10 different years of experience." PS: If your in the top 5% of coders most people will consider you fucking awesome.
  - kirubakaran 18y ago
    I've been coding since I was 11 (like many people here). I am 29 now. I'd say that I've been trying to get better than myself all the time. I don't think one would do the same things again and again unless it is a sad day job. All I am saying is that may be 10,000 hours is not enough.
    - Retric 18y ago
      Ok, I am 28 and I started coding at 8 (my father was a programmer) but I don't think I really spend more than 100 hours coding before 12, and 1500 by 18, in collage I may have added 2000 hours of real effort, but once I started working I have spent little time learning and more time jumping though hoops. I just started working with the J2EE / Spring / Hibernate world and within 200 hours of effort it seems fairly easy and it's mostly grunt work at this point in time. So while I am still closing in on those 10,000 hours it's going to take a lot more stretching for me to get there. There was plenty of time I could have spent getting better, but I have written ASM, high and low level networking code, Multi-threaded Apps, desktop apps, code parsers, scientific number crunchers, websites, and mostly I just wonder why other people find it hard. I don't think of my self as Fucking Awesome but I do think I am close to that point.

beaudeal 18y ago

I found this really interesting, because we covered this exact topic in a psychology course that I took while in university, and I think that it is often mis-quoted / mis-used. The conclusion that was drawn from scientific research was that the vast majority of experts all shared a common trait - they all had at least 10,000 hours of deliberate practice (not that anyone who practiced for 10,000 hours would definitely be an expert). Deliberate practice was defined as practice which: has a goal / task that relates to improved performance, there are explicit instructions as the the best methods of improvement, there is immediate feedback on the performance, and the person repeatedly performs these actions. Obviously his isn't leisurely practice like playing catch in your backyard if you're a baseball player. The experts also didn't practice for 1 hour per day for 30 years like someone in the comments mentioned; the average was about 4 hours per day if I remember correctly. The research had also noted (much like the Matt Maroon article) that this does not mean, for example, that ANYBODY can play in the NBA. What they are really pointing out is that those who are in the NBA probably had at least 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. They also noted that some fields of expertise (such as the NBA) have built-in physical constraints (ex: height) which must be considered. Their study actual dealt with the field of music (violin playing, specifically) which has fewer constraints than something like basketball, and the results were significant.

ScottHanson 18y ago
Practice makes perfect.
- danhak 18y ago
  No, practice makes permanent.
- sherl0ck 18y ago
  practice perfect makes perfect
  - nuclear_eclipse 18y ago
    I believe it's "perfect practice makes perfect."

sabat 18y ago

Anyone read the new Malcolm Gladwell book that this is based on? Is it any good? A lot of his books seem half-finished. He points out something (Blink: your intuition is more powerful than you realize, and not well-understood) but never gets around to explaining why the phenomenon exists. Is this one worth reading?

Nerdlinger 18y ago

A related article. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=359551 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=359551

matt1 18y ago

Time and awesomeness is a correlation, not cause and effect. Sure, talent and time help, but the key ingredient is passion. Without it, you've got a long, painful road ahead of you. With it, you can climb mountains. . The article gives Bill Gates as an example. According to the article, Gates is a great programmer because he sat in front of the computer for seven years. But Gladwell has it backwards... Gates sat in front of a computer for seven years because he had a passion for programming and that's what lead him to be great.

utsmokingaces 18y ago

Gates was brilliant because of his business decisions in which m$ partner up with IBM and dominated the PC operating system market. He was also brilliant in taking the risk in dropping out of Harvard and starting a business with Paul Allen. Gates is not famous for his coding skills. His coding ability is just one part of the foundation that led to his success.

david927 18y ago

Wait, wait, wait. Bill Gates didn't program ANYTHING (at least not anything of note). He bought DOS, which made his fortune, and it was his connections through his mother which helped him in the deal with IBM. You /can/ be awesome with practice. But Bill Gates isn't an example. (And, yes, I know he wrote an early Basic interpreter, but he was also considered a mediocre programmer by many who knew him.)

kthakar 18y ago
you can call billg an awesome businessman, after all it takes a lot to be the richest man on earth. I haven't heard much about his programming skills, so I don't think he was a great programmer.
- david927 18y ago
  exactly. And he didn't spend 10,000 hours practicing business. I'm not trying to be snarky by pointing this out; I'm trying clarify that, while we should remember that in order to be great, we require dedication, effort and patience, the example chosen of Bill Gates shows that, sadly, this is often irrelevant.
  - wheels 18y ago
    Microsoft was founded in 1975. 10k hours is 5 years of 40 hour weeks. I think it's fair to say that he was working more than 40 hour weeks, so by the time MS rose to dominance, he'd almost certainly spent over 10k hours at it.
cpr 18y ago
Sorry, he's not a mediocre programmer. I knew him in college and he was darned good. We took the same grad CS courses as undergrads together, and he did well.

mironathetin 18y ago

That reminds me of Peter Norvig: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years. Let me add: Don't waste your time reading books about trivial topics.

plinkplonk 18y ago

how would someone do "deliberate practice" with programming anyway? Music, basketball etc involve "body memory" where repetitions of identical movements help. This seems to be fundamentally different from programming. I am guessing programming "practice" would involve writing more ambitious programs? where would the feedback come from?

giles_bowkett 18y ago
I explained this in my blog a few posts ago. You write programs to focus on some particular aspect of your programming that you want to make better. I think it should be obvious. You use functional programming idioms - write programs that have using functional programming idioms well as their only purpose. You use regular expressions - write programs that only exist to make you better at regular expressions. In other words write a bunch of regular expressions and make them as good as you can. In the Ruby community we have the Ruby Quiz. I'm pretty sure that's copied from some other community, I think Perl. Every programming language community has practices of this nature. It's absurd to suggest that deliberate practice has anything to do with body memory intrinsically. How many times will you write a regular expression in your life? There's no element of repetition there? The literature on deliberate practice cites Mozart, Bobby Fischer, and Bill Gates. Body memory has nothing to do with it. The feedback comes from sharing with others, as in the Ruby Quiz, or benchmarking your code, or posting it on a blog. Another form of feedback would be seeing if your programs run at all. ;-)
- plinkplonk 18y ago
  "It's absurd to suggest that deliberate practice has anything to do with body memory intrinsically. " Since no one actually made that claim - the intrinsically part that is - ..... :)

dmoney 18y ago

If you believe it takes 10,000 hours to become Fucking Awesome, it will take 10,000 hours to become Fucking Awesome. Of course it must take many hours of practice at a given activity, but 10,000 is just a number (and Fucking Awesome is vaguely defined).

hs 18y ago

if u buy that 10% improvement by 10x effort and mapping the 10000 hours: 10000 -> 99.9% 1000 -> 99% 100 -> 90% 100 hrs is about 13 weeks (a quarter) of 3 uni 1hr credits + 1.5hr practice = 13 * 3 * (1 + 1.5) if u take deliberate practice as vector, that's only the magnitude part the direction part is what to study and that ends up being more important given a constraint of 100 hrs, a nonprogrammer will end up becoming more productive studying lisp compared to java but of course, to say such programmer is 90% better than average is too much :D ... and controversial

sireat 18y ago

There is one important thing: some of those hours should come before certain age. For many disciplines/fields it is under 18 and for almost all it is certainly 25. In other words, if you start practicing basketball at age 37, you are not going to make it to NBA even if you put in 20000 hours of deliberate practice. While this principle seems obvious for largely physical pursuits, it holds true for purely mental fields, as well, be it chess, programming or piano playing.