8 ms·

Lovely article, though honestly getting those prerequisites also takes a lot of time, effort and either motivation or discipline in ample amounts. As someone w

Lovely article, though honestly getting those prerequisites also takes a lot of time, effort and either motivation or discipline in ample amounts. As someone who was the “smart kid” growing up, going to the university without good work ethic was pretty eye opening, no longer being able to coast on intuitively getting subjects, but rather either having to put in a bunch of effort while feeling both humbled and dumb at times, or just having to sink academically. Even after getting through that more or less successfully and having an okay career so far, I still definitely struggle with both physical health and mental health, both of which make the process of learning new things harder and slower than just drinking a caffeinated beverage of choice and grokking a subject over a long weekend. Sometimes it feels like trying to push a rock up a muddy slope. And if I’m struggling, as someone who’s not burdened by having children to take care of or even not having the most demanding job or hours to make ends meet, I have no idea how others manage to have a curious mind and succeed the way they do. Admittedly, some people just feel like they’re built different. Even if I didn’t have those things slowing me down as much (working on it), I’d still be nowhere near as cool as people who dive headfirst into low level programming, electrical engineering, write their own simulations, rendering or even whole game engines and such. Maybe I’m just exposed to what some brilliant people can do thanks to the Internet, but some just manage to do amazing things.

vundercind 2y ago
> As someone who was the “smart kid” growing up, going to the university without good work ethic was pretty eye opening, no longer being able to coast on intuitively getting subjects, but rather either having to put in a bunch of effort while feeling both humbled and dumb at times, or just having to sink academically. Modern gifted education is very aware of this and is working on fixing that. How effectively, I dunno, probably not very, but at least it’s a hot topic in the field this century. Damn near every person I’ve know who was “gifted” has a similar story, myself included. There’s a lot of lost potential because we badly mis-handle those kids for years and years on end.
- dsign 2y ago
  I thought that I was gifted, but in retrospect, maybe I wasn't. I couldn't play any games well; not the physical ones, not computer games, not card or board games. The other kids would get them fast, while I was always dumbfounded and it took me a long time to grasp the rules. Once, it became popular to play Warcraft in my circle of friends and, try hard as I may, I was the rag they mopped the floor with :-) . But math, physics and computer sciences were another story, because growing up I didn't have anything more interesting to do than reading and solving exercises from old soviet textbooks. So, I think I wasn't gifted, or just gifted by serendipity.
  - Jensson 2y ago
    Symbolic manipulation and intuitive understanding doesn't seem to be very correlated to me. I've met people who are very good at manipulating symbols, but they aren't very good at understanding less formal things like strategy games well, they tend to invent way too rigid rules for themselves and lose since they are bad at adapting. So maybe you are very smart with symbols, but less so with intuitive understanding? There is nothing wrong with that, makes it easier to decide what to work on, focus on your strengths and let others cover for your weaknesses.
    - lamontcg 2y ago
      My memory is kinda shit. So when I was in the gifted program, they got real concerned about how I didn't know my times tables and was super slow at a few of them. This was the 1970s, and before I knew binary, so 7s and 8s caused me issues. So I'd figure out 8x8 by going from 6x6=36 (real easy to memorize) and then adding +6+6 to mentally fill out the 8x6 block and then adding +8+8 to fill it out to a 8x8 block (I'm visual/geometrical). I was the first kid in school to pass the AHSME to get invited to take the AIME though. Being before the internet, and being stuck on an island in Alaska, didn't get me enough exposure to higher math through my own self-direction to get anywhere on the AIME. If you don't live anywhere near a University library and/or don't know you can use it, that'll set you behind (at least back then, these days there's YouTube and sci-hub and friends). I still think I would have hit a wall anyway with Math, even with perfect exposure, because I'm visual and higher Math seems to require being very good with symbols and memory as well. I suspect lots of people still underestimate me because my memory is ass, and we associate memory with intelligence so much (e.g. Jeopardy).
Log_out_ 2y ago
Somewhere sits a autistic gamedev, mulling over a beer: "everyone i know can easily dive headfirst into low level programming, electrical engineering, write their own simulations, rendering or even whole game engines, but talking to people or women ,some people are just built differently .Wish i was born on the side with the greener grass..
- veunes 2y ago
  But it’s important to remember that everyone has their own set of challenges
veunes 2y ago
In university the environment changes dramatically
- vaylian 2y ago
  Yes. This is mainly because of 2 reasons: 1. Things actually get more complicated 2. Most of your "teachers" know a lot less about teaching than your school teachers, because they never had formal training in teaching. However, there are some lecturers who are natural talents. The second point is why you have to do more work to actually learn a topic. Your lecturer won't meet you halfway, but you have to get a lot closer to them to grasp their explanations.
  - whiterknight 2y ago
    Formal teaching training never made a bad teacher good.
    - sn9 2y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_instruction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_instruction
      - necovek 2y ago
        From that article: > however, when qualified by IQ and reading levels, Strategy Instruction (SI) had better effects for the high IQ group. Which only goes to show that being a great teacher is an impossible mission, and it's wonderful how many succees at it despite the difficulty.
      - lr4444lr 2y ago
        DI is rarely used to train teachers, unfortunately, and even if it were, the education-government complex designs school procedures and discipline rules that would make it very hard to implement.
  - BlackFly 2y ago
wenc 2y ago
Also gifted child here, but grew up with parents who drilled into me that "effort matters, you might not be the best, but with effort you can be better than who you were yesterday and that is a worthy endeavor" It's just a slight switch of mindset, but that small switch carried me through times when subjects got too hard and when I wanted to give up because I felt I wasn't talented enough. I knew so many gifted kids who got perfect scores in college freshman year (engineering) but started giving up when things didn't come as easily to them. They all ended up leading mediocre lives after. I wasn't as smart as them but I knew I could always do better if I tried harder (even though the ROI wasn't great at first). So I just kept grinding (16 hour days studying). My GPA rose very gradually until eventually I finished with a not-great but respectable 3.6 (the 3.4-3.7 range is typically attained by folks who maybe didn't have natural talent but worked hard). That GPA got me into grad school where I got to study what I loved (way fewer exams, more research). Carol Dweck wrote a book on "growth mindset" that talks about this. You don't have to read the book, but the idea of growth mindset, though simple, has been really transformative in my life.
- novok 2y ago
  Sometimes the greatest gift you can give a gifted kid is failing early at something they want, so they learn the grit to achieve it.
  - wenc 2y ago
    Absolutely. No matter how gifted a person is, there is going to be some point in their lives or some domain where pure talent will be insufficient. Even super geniuses like Terence Tao struggled (he nearly did not pass his generals). https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2019/06/27/living-proof-stories-of-resilience-along-the-mathematical-journey/ https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2019/06/27/living-proof-stori... https://web.math.princeton.edu/generals/tao_terence https://web.math.princeton.edu/generals/tao_terence The American Mathematical Society has a PDF of essays of brilliant mathematicians (including Terence Tao) who despite their abilities, faced obstacles and difficulties that their sheer talents were inadequate to overcome, and they had to persevere. https://blogs.ams.org/inclusionexclusion/2019/06/26/living-proof-a-must-read/ https://blogs.ams.org/inclusionexclusion/2019/06/26/living-p...
nuancebydefault 2y ago
This seems to be a story of a kind that shows up regularly at HN. People who are smart in several ways but because they cannot do what some other (1 out of 10000) people-with-or-without-children can, they don't feel smart and are a bit frustrated by it. Those others make a 'tutorial for creating a raytracer from scratch in a weekend', invent a format for a binary that runs as-is on several processor architectures, or are maintaining parts of the linux kernel. I easily recognize such stories, perhaps because that story might apply to myself as well. This unfulfillment treat applies to this post as well as the writer of the article (the writer indicated that before his 150 day submersion he felt a bit dumb at mathematics). The thing I want to bring across is now... we should not strive for such capability. There are many things to learn and ways to grow as a person, why beat ourselves up for not being very good at this or that particular thing?
- nsxwolf 2y ago
  Well, we let kids believe they’re just not good at math, and tell them that’s ok I’m sure you’re good at other things, and they believe it, and wish we’d stop doing that.
  - nuancebydefault 2y ago
    While they are not studying maths, they can grow and improve themselves in other ways, not?
  - dwaltrip 2y ago
    There’s a world of difference between that and beating yourself up for not being in the top 0.01% of performance.
    - MichaelZuo 2y ago
      To coast through a serious program (physics, engineering physics, pure math, etc…) at a major university while barely doing any work and also simultaneously getting high marks takes a lot more than 0.01% performance. More like 0.001%, at the very least, with some extra luck needed too.
jcpst 2y ago
> And if I’m struggling, as someone who’s not burdened by having children to take care of or even not having the most demanding job or hours to make ends meet, I have no idea how others manage to have a curious mind and succeed the way they do. Paradoxically, I _feel_ like I have more time after I had kids than before. This is of course, after YOB (year of baby- first 12mo). You see, I experienced such small slices of free time during YOB, that I became way more efficient at a ton of stuff, and dropped things that were time wasters. Because I reproduced, I needed more dough. After working 3 jobs, 90 hrs a week for long enough, I decided to study programming. Went to a code boot camp and walked out with a job. But the grinding didn’t stop there. What followed that was years and years of grinding, and studying as much as possible outside of programming at work. Until finally, I got where I was going. I climbed up the ladder until I got tired of climbing, and avoided more stressful and time-demanding roles like management. I get senior dev compensation, don’t work more than 40hr/week, and I don’t commute. This is the life I built. For everything I pursue, there are others who can run circles around me. But I can still look down from that ladder and see how far I came. Wait, what am I talking about? Ok, the whole point is I became efficient and middle-class because I have mini-mes that deserve it. Also, you never know what’s on the other side of that wizard level person you see. Everything I said sounds nice, but I wasn’t taking care of myself. Last year I had a mental breakdown, and am just now getting out of it. So yeah, you’re not alone, etc etc, you know. There’s probably more people that can relate than you think.
- xyzzy_plugh 2y ago
  It's wild how much kids teach you about yourself and your time on this earth, let alone your time available each day. It's hard work but I can't think of a better motivation to improve one's self. And the best part is you don't even necessarily realize that it's happening.
jmatthews 2y ago
I was that kid, now I have 3 sons and I am homeschooling my oldest because he is similar. The hack is essentially to praise the work, not the outcome. On some level you have to be unfair to your kid to be fair with him.
treflop 2y ago
I think one factor that people forget when they see someone else that dive headfirst into something like low level programming or electrical engineering and then wonder why they haven’t is because maybe you just don’t care. I did personally get a degree in EE and have worked on low level programming (and funnily enough I do a lot of frontend these days), but there are things that still wow me like people writing game engines. I tried working on game engines briefly and I never got anywhere. I eventually realized that I just don’t care about game engines or making games for that matter. I wasn’t willing to put in the effort. Watching other people build game engines is more of a spectator sport for me. And that’s fine. But when I do find something that makes me really happy, it keeps me up thinking all day and night about it.
Aurornis 2y ago
> And if I’m struggling, as someone who’s not burdened by having children to take care of or even not having the most demanding job or hours to make ends meet, I have no idea how others manage to have a curious mind and succeed the way they do. Parent here. Raising children has a way of making you more efficient. In my pre-child years there were days where I could putter around and relax because I knew I could make up the work later in the evening or even a weekend. Or at least that’s the lie we tell ourselves in the moment. Post-kid, things come into focus. You learn how to do the work now whether you feel like it or not, because the price for doing it later becomes much higher. I also was misled by all of the internet comments about how parenting and raising kids is awful and everyone secretly hates it despite their fake happy social media posts. After having kids you realize you actually like your kids and want to spend more time playing with them. That alone is motivation to get work done now so you don’t have to sacrifice the valuable kid time later. It’s hard to explain until you get there, but I’ve talked to many other parents who went through the same growth phase. I’ve also caught up with some (not all, some) of my old friends from high school who were academic superstars but who did not have kids, and it’s remarkable to observe how some (again, don’t flame me, not all) of them are stuck in the low motivation/low effort loop and cite that as one of their reasons for not having kids. To each their own, but I for one am glad I ignored the internet/Reddit rhetoric about how kids are an impossible burden that will only make your life worse.
- sersi 2y ago
  Also, having a kid is great to get you to learn new things. I want my son to learn to play an instrument, so I've finally been taking piano classes because I know that very few children of completely non-musical parents actually succeed in learning to play instruments. Learning piano has been a lot of fun, I have a blast playing simple things with him (he's still young) and learning some of my favorite music. Likewise, after reading "Math from Three to Seven: The Story of a Mathematical Circle for Preschoolers", I've been having a lot of fun getting back into Mathematics because it's fun doing things like this together.
wvh 2y ago
The coasting until real work was required part sounds very familiar, and also the getting by in objective terms but being unhappy and struggling mentally part too. After embarrassingly many years I've learned that there's a little voice inside that says "you can't", "that won't work", "that was shit". Succeeding at anything, for anybody, is stacking a whole lot of little failures and frustration, but crucially, being able to ignore that little voice. I, and I assume many of us, have burned half of my energy and mental health fighting that little voice. To me, it seems that most of those manage-anything people are not just generally gifted intelligence-wise or physically, but have learned to silence that inner voice and just do things until they succeed, while still avoiding to do "stupid" things. As a distance runner, I've learned a bit of dopamine trickery, but managing that inner voice, and even being aware of it, is turning out to be a life-long project. It becomes a mission of figuring out what you're burning your energy on, and why. You can't strive for happiness or success, but it should be possible to get enough stuff done to find contentment and acceptance.
- detourdog 2y ago
  I have just recently learned that the little voice can be amplified by people around you. Being removed from those re-enforcing that little voice is an amazingly freeing mentally.
brailsafe 2y ago
Although I'm not on the super sweaty side of trying to grok some of those items in your list, I have been going back to square one from the perspective of having started with and followed the whole dependency tree of frontend but never understanding the really low level. Over time, I've learned to appreciate getting "reps" in whatever subject, and just sitting with it for ages and grinding your brain into dust trying. Something I've also been noticing now in my 30s, is that your and my ability to do that is something to be proud of—even if it won't come as fast as for someone innately faster or with more prereqs—because many people are truly not curious and don't push themselves. The amount of otherwise smart people even that won't or can't sit down to learn something for curiosity sake, and I'm not talking something very long-term like game engines, is... like next to zero people. And it not just true for learning hard or impractical subjects, but the overwhelming majority of the surprisingly high number of decent friends I have, do not have the patience for pushing themselves and will bail on hard physical activities as quick as possible, even if they're pretty fit. It's quite eye opening. They tell me they want to go do __, but not if they can't squeeze it in to an afternoon, even if they definitely have the time, and it really detracts from trying to share the experience or curiosity.
- bonoboTP 2y ago
  Just accept that this is the case and meet people where they are. And collect some friends that share your curiosities and passions. People can be good and reliable friends even if they are content living a simple life in simple ways as it's always been, without pushing for abstract novelty and learning. People try to blame school for killing the natural curiosity of kids, but I've come to be very skeptical about this. It's an idealized romantic notion. Most mammals lose their playfulness in adulthood and most humans are like this too, even if not to the same extent (some say humans retain more neoteny, similar to domesticated animals like dogs that also remain more playful than wolves as adults). These two types of people often misunderstand each other. For you a job might become boring if it stays the same year upon year. But for most people the thought of having to keep up with ever changing knowledge requirements after school and even once they are settled in their jobs is utterly terrifying.
  - 2y ago
bonoboTP 2y ago
> Lovely article, though honestly getting those prerequisites also takes a lot of time, effort and either motivation or discipline in ample amounts. Exactly. It's like saying that winning a marathon is easy, you just need to run fast enough. The entire problem is that many people won't be able to learn the prerequisites of advanced math. There are always exceptional cases, like someone really smart who just totally slacked off during school because they spent all their time building apps or websites or tinkering with games or electronics. Or someone who was never given the opportunity to learn certain subjects because they had to work as a teen because their parents died etc. But the vast majority of people are presented with the prereq material they just can't absorb it.
softwareEngine 2y ago
I had the complete opposite experience, never gifted. Bullied by my teachers in middle school for my lack of intelligence. It was always an effort battle. The only way to get the pre-reqs was to literally drill 100s of problems. I remember I did for one math test in college and I studied consistently for hours for weeks only to get an 89. I earned that and my college roommate coasted in and got a 96. Work ethic wasn’t a choice it was the only way. My perspective on gifted students not utilizing their full potential is smallest violin. I wish I had what you had. But I don’t and all I had was motivation and discipline. I struggled all the time in school but work has been easy by comparison. I’m emotional about this and don’t mean to attack anyone, but all my friends in the same state are all depressed and on SSRIs. It is sad for me to see them. For me the conflict was never being good enough, for them it’s the same but they seemingly chose not to do anything about it. That might be the difference simplistically but life isn’t that simple. There is no conclusion for this antidote or argument. Maybe just find a problem where you get pushed to your absolute limit, might be at academia or startup or something. You find some truths at the end of that.
brainzap 2y ago
who took your curious mind? One way to get it back is to play with children.
tantricked 2y ago
I feel the prerequisite for simulations, game engines, and rendering is also maths

vundercind 2y ago

> As someone who was the “smart kid” growing up, going to the university without good work ethic was pretty eye opening, no longer being able to coast on intuitively getting subjects, but rather either having to put in a bunch of effort while feeling both humbled and dumb at times, or just having to sink academically. Modern gifted education is very aware of this and is working on fixing that. How effectively, I dunno, probably not very, but at least it’s a hot topic in the field this century. Damn near every person I’ve know who was “gifted” has a similar story, myself included. There’s a lot of lost potential because we badly mis-handle those kids for years and years on end.

dsign 2y ago
I thought that I was gifted, but in retrospect, maybe I wasn't. I couldn't play any games well; not the physical ones, not computer games, not card or board games. The other kids would get them fast, while I was always dumbfounded and it took me a long time to grasp the rules. Once, it became popular to play Warcraft in my circle of friends and, try hard as I may, I was the rag they mopped the floor with :-) . But math, physics and computer sciences were another story, because growing up I didn't have anything more interesting to do than reading and solving exercises from old soviet textbooks. So, I think I wasn't gifted, or just gifted by serendipity.
- Jensson 2y ago
  Symbolic manipulation and intuitive understanding doesn't seem to be very correlated to me. I've met people who are very good at manipulating symbols, but they aren't very good at understanding less formal things like strategy games well, they tend to invent way too rigid rules for themselves and lose since they are bad at adapting. So maybe you are very smart with symbols, but less so with intuitive understanding? There is nothing wrong with that, makes it easier to decide what to work on, focus on your strengths and let others cover for your weaknesses.
  - lamontcg 2y ago
    My memory is kinda shit. So when I was in the gifted program, they got real concerned about how I didn't know my times tables and was super slow at a few of them. This was the 1970s, and before I knew binary, so 7s and 8s caused me issues. So I'd figure out 8x8 by going from 6x6=36 (real easy to memorize) and then adding +6+6 to mentally fill out the 8x6 block and then adding +8+8 to fill it out to a 8x8 block (I'm visual/geometrical). I was the first kid in school to pass the AHSME to get invited to take the AIME though. Being before the internet, and being stuck on an island in Alaska, didn't get me enough exposure to higher math through my own self-direction to get anywhere on the AIME. If you don't live anywhere near a University library and/or don't know you can use it, that'll set you behind (at least back then, these days there's YouTube and sci-hub and friends). I still think I would have hit a wall anyway with Math, even with perfect exposure, because I'm visual and higher Math seems to require being very good with symbols and memory as well. I suspect lots of people still underestimate me because my memory is ass, and we associate memory with intelligence so much (e.g. Jeopardy).

Log_out_ 2y ago

Somewhere sits a autistic gamedev, mulling over a beer: "everyone i know can easily dive headfirst into low level programming, electrical engineering, write their own simulations, rendering or even whole game engines, but talking to people or women ,some people are just built differently .Wish i was born on the side with the greener grass..

veunes 2y ago
But it’s important to remember that everyone has their own set of challenges

veunes 2y ago

In university the environment changes dramatically

vaylian 2y ago
Yes. This is mainly because of 2 reasons: 1. Things actually get more complicated 2. Most of your "teachers" know a lot less about teaching than your school teachers, because they never had formal training in teaching. However, there are some lecturers who are natural talents. The second point is why you have to do more work to actually learn a topic. Your lecturer won't meet you halfway, but you have to get a lot closer to them to grasp their explanations.
- whiterknight 2y ago
  Formal teaching training never made a bad teacher good.
  - sn9 2y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_instruction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_instruction
    - necovek 2y ago
      From that article: > however, when qualified by IQ and reading levels, Strategy Instruction (SI) had better effects for the high IQ group. Which only goes to show that being a great teacher is an impossible mission, and it's wonderful how many succees at it despite the difficulty.
    - lr4444lr 2y ago
      DI is rarely used to train teachers, unfortunately, and even if it were, the education-government complex designs school procedures and discipline rules that would make it very hard to implement.
- BlackFly 2y ago

wenc 2y ago

Also gifted child here, but grew up with parents who drilled into me that "effort matters, you might not be the best, but with effort you can be better than who you were yesterday and that is a worthy endeavor" It's just a slight switch of mindset, but that small switch carried me through times when subjects got too hard and when I wanted to give up because I felt I wasn't talented enough. I knew so many gifted kids who got perfect scores in college freshman year (engineering) but started giving up when things didn't come as easily to them. They all ended up leading mediocre lives after. I wasn't as smart as them but I knew I could always do better if I tried harder (even though the ROI wasn't great at first). So I just kept grinding (16 hour days studying). My GPA rose very gradually until eventually I finished with a not-great but respectable 3.6 (the 3.4-3.7 range is typically attained by folks who maybe didn't have natural talent but worked hard). That GPA got me into grad school where I got to study what I loved (way fewer exams, more research). Carol Dweck wrote a book on "growth mindset" that talks about this. You don't have to read the book, but the idea of growth mindset, though simple, has been really transformative in my life.

novok 2y ago
Sometimes the greatest gift you can give a gifted kid is failing early at something they want, so they learn the grit to achieve it.
- wenc 2y ago
  Absolutely. No matter how gifted a person is, there is going to be some point in their lives or some domain where pure talent will be insufficient. Even super geniuses like Terence Tao struggled (he nearly did not pass his generals). https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2019/06/27/living-proof-stories-of-resilience-along-the-mathematical-journey/ https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2019/06/27/living-proof-stori... https://web.math.princeton.edu/generals/tao_terence https://web.math.princeton.edu/generals/tao_terence The American Mathematical Society has a PDF of essays of brilliant mathematicians (including Terence Tao) who despite their abilities, faced obstacles and difficulties that their sheer talents were inadequate to overcome, and they had to persevere. https://blogs.ams.org/inclusionexclusion/2019/06/26/living-proof-a-must-read/ https://blogs.ams.org/inclusionexclusion/2019/06/26/living-p...

nuancebydefault 2y ago

This seems to be a story of a kind that shows up regularly at HN. People who are smart in several ways but because they cannot do what some other (1 out of 10000) people-with-or-without-children can, they don't feel smart and are a bit frustrated by it. Those others make a 'tutorial for creating a raytracer from scratch in a weekend', invent a format for a binary that runs as-is on several processor architectures, or are maintaining parts of the linux kernel. I easily recognize such stories, perhaps because that story might apply to myself as well. This unfulfillment treat applies to this post as well as the writer of the article (the writer indicated that before his 150 day submersion he felt a bit dumb at mathematics). The thing I want to bring across is now... we should not strive for such capability. There are many things to learn and ways to grow as a person, why beat ourselves up for not being very good at this or that particular thing?

nsxwolf 2y ago
Well, we let kids believe they’re just not good at math, and tell them that’s ok I’m sure you’re good at other things, and they believe it, and wish we’d stop doing that.
- nuancebydefault 2y ago
  While they are not studying maths, they can grow and improve themselves in other ways, not?
- dwaltrip 2y ago
  There’s a world of difference between that and beating yourself up for not being in the top 0.01% of performance.
  - MichaelZuo 2y ago
    To coast through a serious program (physics, engineering physics, pure math, etc…) at a major university while barely doing any work and also simultaneously getting high marks takes a lot more than 0.01% performance. More like 0.001%, at the very least, with some extra luck needed too.

jcpst 2y ago

> And if I’m struggling, as someone who’s not burdened by having children to take care of or even not having the most demanding job or hours to make ends meet, I have no idea how others manage to have a curious mind and succeed the way they do. Paradoxically, I _feel_ like I have more time after I had kids than before. This is of course, after YOB (year of baby- first 12mo). You see, I experienced such small slices of free time during YOB, that I became way more efficient at a ton of stuff, and dropped things that were time wasters. Because I reproduced, I needed more dough. After working 3 jobs, 90 hrs a week for long enough, I decided to study programming. Went to a code boot camp and walked out with a job. But the grinding didn’t stop there. What followed that was years and years of grinding, and studying as much as possible outside of programming at work. Until finally, I got where I was going. I climbed up the ladder until I got tired of climbing, and avoided more stressful and time-demanding roles like management. I get senior dev compensation, don’t work more than 40hr/week, and I don’t commute. This is the life I built. For everything I pursue, there are others who can run circles around me. But I can still look down from that ladder and see how far I came. Wait, what am I talking about? Ok, the whole point is I became efficient and middle-class because I have mini-mes that deserve it. Also, you never know what’s on the other side of that wizard level person you see. Everything I said sounds nice, but I wasn’t taking care of myself. Last year I had a mental breakdown, and am just now getting out of it. So yeah, you’re not alone, etc etc, you know. There’s probably more people that can relate than you think.

xyzzy_plugh 2y ago
It's wild how much kids teach you about yourself and your time on this earth, let alone your time available each day. It's hard work but I can't think of a better motivation to improve one's self. And the best part is you don't even necessarily realize that it's happening.

jmatthews 2y ago

I was that kid, now I have 3 sons and I am homeschooling my oldest because he is similar. The hack is essentially to praise the work, not the outcome. On some level you have to be unfair to your kid to be fair with him.

treflop 2y ago

I think one factor that people forget when they see someone else that dive headfirst into something like low level programming or electrical engineering and then wonder why they haven’t is because maybe you just don’t care. I did personally get a degree in EE and have worked on low level programming (and funnily enough I do a lot of frontend these days), but there are things that still wow me like people writing game engines. I tried working on game engines briefly and I never got anywhere. I eventually realized that I just don’t care about game engines or making games for that matter. I wasn’t willing to put in the effort. Watching other people build game engines is more of a spectator sport for me. And that’s fine. But when I do find something that makes me really happy, it keeps me up thinking all day and night about it.

Aurornis 2y ago

> And if I’m struggling, as someone who’s not burdened by having children to take care of or even not having the most demanding job or hours to make ends meet, I have no idea how others manage to have a curious mind and succeed the way they do. Parent here. Raising children has a way of making you more efficient. In my pre-child years there were days where I could putter around and relax because I knew I could make up the work later in the evening or even a weekend. Or at least that’s the lie we tell ourselves in the moment. Post-kid, things come into focus. You learn how to do the work now whether you feel like it or not, because the price for doing it later becomes much higher. I also was misled by all of the internet comments about how parenting and raising kids is awful and everyone secretly hates it despite their fake happy social media posts. After having kids you realize you actually like your kids and want to spend more time playing with them. That alone is motivation to get work done now so you don’t have to sacrifice the valuable kid time later. It’s hard to explain until you get there, but I’ve talked to many other parents who went through the same growth phase. I’ve also caught up with some (not all, some) of my old friends from high school who were academic superstars but who did not have kids, and it’s remarkable to observe how some (again, don’t flame me, not all) of them are stuck in the low motivation/low effort loop and cite that as one of their reasons for not having kids. To each their own, but I for one am glad I ignored the internet/Reddit rhetoric about how kids are an impossible burden that will only make your life worse.

sersi 2y ago
Also, having a kid is great to get you to learn new things. I want my son to learn to play an instrument, so I've finally been taking piano classes because I know that very few children of completely non-musical parents actually succeed in learning to play instruments. Learning piano has been a lot of fun, I have a blast playing simple things with him (he's still young) and learning some of my favorite music. Likewise, after reading "Math from Three to Seven: The Story of a Mathematical Circle for Preschoolers", I've been having a lot of fun getting back into Mathematics because it's fun doing things like this together.

wvh 2y ago

The coasting until real work was required part sounds very familiar, and also the getting by in objective terms but being unhappy and struggling mentally part too. After embarrassingly many years I've learned that there's a little voice inside that says "you can't", "that won't work", "that was shit". Succeeding at anything, for anybody, is stacking a whole lot of little failures and frustration, but crucially, being able to ignore that little voice. I, and I assume many of us, have burned half of my energy and mental health fighting that little voice. To me, it seems that most of those manage-anything people are not just generally gifted intelligence-wise or physically, but have learned to silence that inner voice and just do things until they succeed, while still avoiding to do "stupid" things. As a distance runner, I've learned a bit of dopamine trickery, but managing that inner voice, and even being aware of it, is turning out to be a life-long project. It becomes a mission of figuring out what you're burning your energy on, and why. You can't strive for happiness or success, but it should be possible to get enough stuff done to find contentment and acceptance.

detourdog 2y ago
I have just recently learned that the little voice can be amplified by people around you. Being removed from those re-enforcing that little voice is an amazingly freeing mentally.

brailsafe 2y ago

Although I'm not on the super sweaty side of trying to grok some of those items in your list, I have been going back to square one from the perspective of having started with and followed the whole dependency tree of frontend but never understanding the really low level. Over time, I've learned to appreciate getting "reps" in whatever subject, and just sitting with it for ages and grinding your brain into dust trying. Something I've also been noticing now in my 30s, is that your and my ability to do that is something to be proud of—even if it won't come as fast as for someone innately faster or with more prereqs—because many people are truly not curious and don't push themselves. The amount of otherwise smart people even that won't or can't sit down to learn something for curiosity sake, and I'm not talking something very long-term like game engines, is... like next to zero people. And it not just true for learning hard or impractical subjects, but the overwhelming majority of the surprisingly high number of decent friends I have, do not have the patience for pushing themselves and will bail on hard physical activities as quick as possible, even if they're pretty fit. It's quite eye opening. They tell me they want to go do __, but not if they can't squeeze it in to an afternoon, even if they definitely have the time, and it really detracts from trying to share the experience or curiosity.

bonoboTP 2y ago
Just accept that this is the case and meet people where they are. And collect some friends that share your curiosities and passions. People can be good and reliable friends even if they are content living a simple life in simple ways as it's always been, without pushing for abstract novelty and learning. People try to blame school for killing the natural curiosity of kids, but I've come to be very skeptical about this. It's an idealized romantic notion. Most mammals lose their playfulness in adulthood and most humans are like this too, even if not to the same extent (some say humans retain more neoteny, similar to domesticated animals like dogs that also remain more playful than wolves as adults). These two types of people often misunderstand each other. For you a job might become boring if it stays the same year upon year. But for most people the thought of having to keep up with ever changing knowledge requirements after school and even once they are settled in their jobs is utterly terrifying.
- 2y ago

bonoboTP 2y ago

> Lovely article, though honestly getting those prerequisites also takes a lot of time, effort and either motivation or discipline in ample amounts. Exactly. It's like saying that winning a marathon is easy, you just need to run fast enough. The entire problem is that many people won't be able to learn the prerequisites of advanced math. There are always exceptional cases, like someone really smart who just totally slacked off during school because they spent all their time building apps or websites or tinkering with games or electronics. Or someone who was never given the opportunity to learn certain subjects because they had to work as a teen because their parents died etc. But the vast majority of people are presented with the prereq material they just can't absorb it.

softwareEngine 2y ago

I had the complete opposite experience, never gifted. Bullied by my teachers in middle school for my lack of intelligence. It was always an effort battle. The only way to get the pre-reqs was to literally drill 100s of problems. I remember I did for one math test in college and I studied consistently for hours for weeks only to get an 89. I earned that and my college roommate coasted in and got a 96. Work ethic wasn’t a choice it was the only way. My perspective on gifted students not utilizing their full potential is smallest violin. I wish I had what you had. But I don’t and all I had was motivation and discipline. I struggled all the time in school but work has been easy by comparison. I’m emotional about this and don’t mean to attack anyone, but all my friends in the same state are all depressed and on SSRIs. It is sad for me to see them. For me the conflict was never being good enough, for them it’s the same but they seemingly chose not to do anything about it. That might be the difference simplistically but life isn’t that simple. There is no conclusion for this antidote or argument. Maybe just find a problem where you get pushed to your absolute limit, might be at academia or startup or something. You find some truths at the end of that.

brainzap 2y ago

who took your curious mind? One way to get it back is to play with children.

tantricked 2y ago

I feel the prerequisite for simulations, game engines, and rendering is also maths