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"Superstars" seem different to me not because they can or can't decompose problems into steps, but because they seem to have a 6th sense for what is possible.
by noonespecial 14y ago
"Superstars" seem different to me not because they can or can't decompose problems into steps, but because they seem to have a 6th sense for what is possible.
Everything is easier once someone has done it before. You don't even have to know how it was done, just knowing its possible is enough. Superstars can substitute some sort of magic pixie dust(1) for this foreknowledge and proceed like they already know its been done and they're just rediscovering the minutia of making it happen.
Its humbling to me when I meet them because they think thoughts and have insights that I know I would not have had even if I worked on the same problem for 100 years.
(1) I strongly suspect that its made almost, but not quite, entirely of crazy.
- einhverfr 14y agoHere's what I think. Sometimes I am in superstar mode and more often I am not. When I am in superstar mode, I am able to latently process problems ahead of time and decompose them. That way when I get to the problems they all seem simple. The rest of the time I have to run up against a problem first, let it sit and see if it decomposes for me, and if not come back and actively try to decompose it. Once I am actually ready to sit down and start coding, all the hard part is over. The question is how much of the hard part can be done latently before I get to it.