9 ms·

So what about when you have someone like me who works hard and still fails? I vary my methods. change my environment to make it easier, pay for training, do wha

by sown 14y ago

So what about when you have someone like me who works hard and still fails? I vary my methods. change my environment to make it easier, pay for training, do what ever. I examine what I did wrong, I still get it wrong, no matter what. Let me share with you an anecdote: In undergrad, I took an intro computer networking class. Everyone else could understand what was going on. There was no assigned reading material and lectures didn't follow from any text. I always was the lowest student in the class, no matter how hard I tried. Everyone else could understand it quickly. I worked hard on that class but it didn't matter. Not everyone who works hard will show positive results, I guess. I more or less flunked my way through school. Sometimes I'd work hard, sometimes not. It didn't seem to matter. Or, if I'm facing someone who has worked hard and is also very intelligent? I don't have a chance. The rhetoric of these articles and the rest of these posts here have a coded meaning behind them: there are no disadvantaged people or students -- only stupid or lazy ones. It's a corollary of Survivor Bias. If you work hard, everything will be peachy-keen OK and nothing will go wrong. If you work hard and fail, you deserve only scorn. For me, it was, never mind if you work so hard that ignored everything else, worked so hard to not get beaten by your parents, worked so hard to get mastery of material -- I must be still too lazy or stupid since I failed. I don't know what it is that I don't have that everyone else does. I'm likely to not ever know. This is a topic that I'm very familiar with so that's why I wrote a lot about it and sound perhaps a little crazy.

namank 14y ago
So you have the practice part down, now you can work on working smarter? Should be easy for you, working smarter is easier than working hard.
- free 14y ago
  Easier said than done. That's like saying 'just cheer up!' to someone who is depressed. You have to know how it feels when you have tried all you can and you still come up short.
  - namank 14y ago
    I do.
JesseAldridge 14y ago
Hmm... I was going to use wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Practice_(learning_method)#Deliberate_practice http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Practice_(learning_method)#Deli...) to show you why you're wrong, but then I found this: Two recent articles in Current Directions in Psychological Science criticize deliberate practice and argue that, while it is necessary for reaching high levels of performance, it is not sufficient, other factors such as talent being important as well. So maybe the "just practice more" attitude is an oversimplification. But still, I think if you were really stupid or whatever, you wouldn't have been able to write such a good comment. The "beaten by your parents" thing makes me think of learned helplessness: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness
- thewarrior 14y ago
  I found the source : http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/releases/deliberate-practice-necessary-but-not-sufficient.html http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/releases/...
- SiVal 14y ago
  sown, please jump to that Wikipedia article and look at Seligman's publications (at the bottom). You MUST read his book "The Optimistic Child", which you can probably get from your local library. The wording of your posts comes right off the pages of that book, and you're old enough and smart enough now to consider the phenomena described in his research and put it to good use. I think your primary need is to be more comfortable in your own skin. That book talks about how. After that, you'll still fail at some things---like the rest of us---but it won't hurt so much. Then, because quitting won't have so much meaning to you, it will be easier for you to give up on something that isn't going anywhere which, ironically, is crucial to eventual success.
ChuckMcM 14y ago
Here is a question for you, do you enjoy learning new things? I ask because I've mentored folks who have similar feelings and one thing that correlated with them was that they didn't actually enjoy learning new stuff. In particular they almost had a mental block when it came to learning something first in order to achieve a secondary goal. One story I heard was a student who was failing English composition repeatedly. The person failing's attitude was "I have to have this to get my degree, but frankly I don't give a flying f*ck about English composition." Absolutely no amount of work, practice, tutoring, or study helped. The only thing that worked, was getting past the 'I have to do this but don't want to' attitude was to find some small way that learning composition could become an interesting thing to do. Thus the question, and now a corollary, is there any subject area you know really well? And by "any" I mean "any" from an academic subject like Math to the back story of all the characters on "Twilight." If so how does that subject matter differ from the subject matter you aren't good at?
brandall10 14y ago
The nature of this comment tells me 2 things: 1) You have keen analytical and writing skills, intelligence is not a lack for what you want to achieve. 2) You suffer from victim mentality being too concerned about the abilities of others while easily dismissive of your own. No matter how much/hard you work, without being able to chuck this aside, every failure will be magnified and your successes will be mitigated to an irrational degree. The fact of the matter is the road to mastery is paved with tons of mistakes, tons of situations where you will feel like an absolute moron. You have to learn to reframe those moments and treasure them, because they are signals that you are encountering moments of true growth. Learn to compete against your own competence and not others. You don't know what they've been through to get where they are. Whenever something seems unreasonably tough, break it down into simpler problems to digest. Hack the art of learning itself. Don't look at the same problem until you're blue in the face, change it up so that there is a measurable degree of progress. Your blockage is more emotional than intellectual.
- unoti 14y ago
  This is such very sage advice. I salute you. > The fact of the matter is the road to mastery is paved > with tons of mistakes, tons of situations where you will > feel like an absolute moron. This is so true. Feeling like you're stupid is just part of the process. Try to ignore the temptation to worry about how it appears to be so easy for everyone else. You may have to work twice as hard as the next person, but do it. They say it's darkest before the dawn, and that totally applies to learning for me. When I learned Windows SDK programming back with Windows 3.0, I really felt like I was not smart enough for this. When I learned functional programming in Erlang, I really was quite confident that this was too much for me to be able to cope with. I've felt stupid so many times trying to learn things that I finally identified it as a pattern, a sign that I'm about to break through as long as I don't give up.
  - darkarmani 14y ago
    > This is so true. Feeling like you're stupid is just part of the process. Feeling like you are stupid is an attitude. I find it is one of the biggest barriers to learning. If you feel stupid, you are less likely to try "stupid" things that teach you a lot. Also, feeling stupid leads to anger, and anger prevents learning. Aaron Hillegass said this best in the beginning of Cocoa Programing for Mac OS X, and I'll never forget it. You can preview it on Amazon under "How to learn."
bokonist 14y ago
In my observation, a person with average native faculties in a given activity make themselves top 95th percentile of the general population in that activity, with dedicated and sustained practice. This applies to most specific skills - violin playing, chess, calculus, computer programming, golf, basketball, quarterbacking, painting, etc. Of course, the reason for this is the typical person in the population has not dedicated that much practice time to a given specific skill. You may be a great natural athlete, but if you have not spent at least some time learning throwing mechanics, a mediocre athlete who has practiced will be able to throw a better spiral. However, it does not follow that "everyone can be a computer programmer for Google" or "everyone can be a professional quarterback." If you want to make it to a high-level in a high paying or high status field, you must compete against other people who are also practicing really hard and who also have great natural talent. Personally, I have around natural athletic ability. I play flag football, and am likely in the top 95th percentile of QB ability. When I throw the ball around with friends at a BBQ, I can hit people in stride with tight spirals. But I could never, ever be a pro-QB, or even a QB in a competitive amateur league. My body simply does not have the appropriate build, and I simply cannot build the muscle strength to make the passes needed to be a great QB. On the flip side, I have always had an innate knack for cognitive problems, I was always that guy in math class who got A's despite barely doing homework and not studying for tests. Now another person could also get A's in that class with only mediocre natural talent by studying very hard. They might think that, "Hey, I've worked hard, I got A's, I can do anything, I can get a job at Google some day." But if they go into the most cognitively demanding career, they will find themselves competing against the most naturally talented people, who also now have a financial incentive to work extremely hard, and the less naturally talented people will simply not be able to compete. I find it unfortunate and self-serving, that so there are so many commentators and intellectuals, who are above average cognitively and (likely) mediocre athletically, who assume that the other people's failings at cognitive skills are due to lack of practice or lack of sufficient schooling. Meanwhile they assume their own lack of athletic ability is due to accidents of birth. That said, it can be very difficult to determine if your having difficultly in a subject is really due to innate talent or due to lack of practice. When I took an intro computer science course, I noticed the professor was a completely horrible teacher (and lectures are generally a horrible way to teach math, computer science or any technical subject). The textbook sucked too. The people who did well in that class already had been programming on their own during high school. The people taking the class expecting it to be an actual introductory course, who expected that if you just followed the lectures and textbooks that you would know how to do the assignment, ended up doing very poorly. Even if they worked very hard, their total hours dedicated to understanding computer science was far below that of fellow classmates.
unoti 14y ago
You don't deserve scorn for failing, it's ok. You might be suffering from some kind of anxiety, and you're being too hard on yourself for sure. One piece of advice that might help you: when you're trying to measure your progress, instead of looking at the people who are ahead of you all the time, sometimes look at the people who are behind you. The people who you've exceeded, who you have done better than. It's an important part of motivation that's often overlooked. (This and a bunch of other really excellent advice I got from Seneca in Letters from a Stoic.) Also, don't give up. You've only truly failed when you quit learning or give up.
namank 14y ago
Looked through your older posts, you seem like a smart person. I would: -start a blog. -start working on a personal project in another hacker or designer. Find some at some mailing list near you.
Tichy 14y ago
The way you write already suggests intelligence. In what ways did you try to prepare for that networking class? It sounds as if they didn't provide anything for you to cling to if you weren't already familiar with the territory?
Tycho 14y ago
Maybe the other people in the networking class were either all very smart students that anyone would struggle to keep up with, or maybe they all had prior exposure to networking principles (eg. from LAN gaming).
zubairshams 14y ago
People who seem successful from the outside, are in general, very hard working and focused in their venture. I have few friends from high school who always got good grades and understood topics very fast. Being around such gifted students made me feel insufficient. I could never compete with them no matter how hard I tried. In my mind I was trying hard. Turns out, while I was slicing my waking hours between sports, hanging out, studies and socializing, they invested all those hours to study class materials, read supplementary materials, reading ahead for the class next day. To me, sports, studies and friends were equally important while they kept single minded focus on where they want to put their hours. It also turns out, the method is replicable. You can put single minded focus on anything and be reasonably successful. I believe it. Because I have seen it happen in my life. Albeit, there are talended people and hard work will always fall short of talent + hard work. But hard work will get you far enough.
cturner 14y ago
When you say you vary your methods, what do you mean by that? When you were in your networking class and it wasn't structured in a way you found convenient, could this have been demonstrating that you're overly dependent on certain learning techniques, and need to become adept with some new ones? Your repeated references to hard work stood out: > I worked hard on that class but it didn't matter. There's a pattern you can fall into where you stare at the page and get stressed, and then come away hours later none the wiser but exhausted and feeling unduly virtuous from your hard but meaningless work. Hard work doesn't count for anything of itself. Only when you're pursuing effective strategies. > I'm likely to not ever know. If you want to, you could dig up your syllabus notes or email the uni for a copy of them. Identify the topics, and see if you understand them. Get past exams out of the library and identify the topics in them. Find a mentor and go back over the stuff again until you have an easy understanding of each of the concepts.
zubairshams 14y ago
People who seem successful from the outside, are in general, very hard working and focused in their venture. I have few friends from high school who always got good grades and understood topics very fast. Being around such gifted students made me feel insufficient. I could never compete with them no matter how hard I tried. In my mind I was trying hard. Turns out, while I was slicing my waking hours between sports, hanging out, studies and socializing, they invested all those hours to study class materials, read supplementary materials, reading ahead for the class next day. To me, sports, studies and friends were equally important while they kept single minded focus on where they want to put their hours. It also turns out, the method is replicable. You can put single minded focus on anything and be reasonably successful. I believe it. Because I have seen it happen in my life. Albeit, there are talended people and hard work will always fall short of talent + hard work. But hard work will get you far enough.
kragen 14y ago
Maybe the things you were putting a lot of effort into weren't things that helped you master those materials. It's possible to work hard with the intent of learning something, and never learn it, even though it's within your capacity to learn, if the thing you're working hard on doesn't help with learning the thing you're trying to learn. In fact, I think most of the effort people put into learning things in the standard educational system is wasted. I mean, it's also possible you're struggling against some kind of mental handicap. But if your IQ was really 75 or something, I don't think you'd be able to write such long sentences.
jongraehl 14y ago
It sounds like you should set your sights lower. You don't seem to have an aversion to trying or thinking. I'd hope the explanation for your failures is that you didn't acquire the prerequisites and are continually trying to fake or skip them. But that's unlikely. So, discover what you are capable of. There's no shame in trying and being average, instead of not trying and being below average.
leviathant 14y ago
I thought I'd share some hopeful words from the author in a Facebook followup to the article. My wife's a composer and has worked with several members of her (incredible) family. "I didn't get to go into much detail in 800 words, but I agree it's more complicated than that. I don't think my kids all enjoyed practicing, but they have come back many times to say how much it changed their lives, including the three who did not go on to become musicians. The youngest was my Suzuki failure... I felt guilty that I didn't have as much patience to work with her as I'd had with her sisters. She restarted lessons several times and limped along in classical studies for years, progressing, but not nearly at the rate as her sisters. Then at age 15 she suddenly blossomed as a guitarist/singer-sonwriter and playwright, spending hours every day immersed in practice, and progressing quickly. It was as though all of those painful hours spent on violin and viola were coming to fruition in a way none of us, including her, had anticipated."

by sown 14y ago

namank 14y ago

So you have the practice part down, now you can work on working smarter? Should be easy for you, working smarter is easier than working hard.

free 14y ago
Easier said than done. That's like saying 'just cheer up!' to someone who is depressed. You have to know how it feels when you have tried all you can and you still come up short.
- namank 14y ago
  I do.

JesseAldridge 14y ago

Hmm... I was going to use wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Practice_(learning_method)#Deliberate_practice http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Practice_(learning_method)#Deli...) to show you why you're wrong, but then I found this: Two recent articles in Current Directions in Psychological Science criticize deliberate practice and argue that, while it is necessary for reaching high levels of performance, it is not sufficient, other factors such as talent being important as well. So maybe the "just practice more" attitude is an oversimplification. But still, I think if you were really stupid or whatever, you wouldn't have been able to write such a good comment. The "beaten by your parents" thing makes me think of learned helplessness: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness

thewarrior 14y ago
I found the source : http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/releases/deliberate-practice-necessary-but-not-sufficient.html http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/releases/...
SiVal 14y ago
sown, please jump to that Wikipedia article and look at Seligman's publications (at the bottom). You MUST read his book "The Optimistic Child", which you can probably get from your local library. The wording of your posts comes right off the pages of that book, and you're old enough and smart enough now to consider the phenomena described in his research and put it to good use. I think your primary need is to be more comfortable in your own skin. That book talks about how. After that, you'll still fail at some things---like the rest of us---but it won't hurt so much. Then, because quitting won't have so much meaning to you, it will be easier for you to give up on something that isn't going anywhere which, ironically, is crucial to eventual success.

ChuckMcM 14y ago

Here is a question for you, do you enjoy learning new things? I ask because I've mentored folks who have similar feelings and one thing that correlated with them was that they didn't actually enjoy learning new stuff. In particular they almost had a mental block when it came to learning something first in order to achieve a secondary goal. One story I heard was a student who was failing English composition repeatedly. The person failing's attitude was "I have to have this to get my degree, but frankly I don't give a flying f*ck about English composition." Absolutely no amount of work, practice, tutoring, or study helped. The only thing that worked, was getting past the 'I have to do this but don't want to' attitude was to find some small way that learning composition could become an interesting thing to do. Thus the question, and now a corollary, is there any subject area you know really well? And by "any" I mean "any" from an academic subject like Math to the back story of all the characters on "Twilight." If so how does that subject matter differ from the subject matter you aren't good at?

brandall10 14y ago

The nature of this comment tells me 2 things: 1) You have keen analytical and writing skills, intelligence is not a lack for what you want to achieve. 2) You suffer from victim mentality being too concerned about the abilities of others while easily dismissive of your own. No matter how much/hard you work, without being able to chuck this aside, every failure will be magnified and your successes will be mitigated to an irrational degree. The fact of the matter is the road to mastery is paved with tons of mistakes, tons of situations where you will feel like an absolute moron. You have to learn to reframe those moments and treasure them, because they are signals that you are encountering moments of true growth. Learn to compete against your own competence and not others. You don't know what they've been through to get where they are. Whenever something seems unreasonably tough, break it down into simpler problems to digest. Hack the art of learning itself. Don't look at the same problem until you're blue in the face, change it up so that there is a measurable degree of progress. Your blockage is more emotional than intellectual.

unoti 14y ago
This is such very sage advice. I salute you. > The fact of the matter is the road to mastery is paved > with tons of mistakes, tons of situations where you will > feel like an absolute moron. This is so true. Feeling like you're stupid is just part of the process. Try to ignore the temptation to worry about how it appears to be so easy for everyone else. You may have to work twice as hard as the next person, but do it. They say it's darkest before the dawn, and that totally applies to learning for me. When I learned Windows SDK programming back with Windows 3.0, I really felt like I was not smart enough for this. When I learned functional programming in Erlang, I really was quite confident that this was too much for me to be able to cope with. I've felt stupid so many times trying to learn things that I finally identified it as a pattern, a sign that I'm about to break through as long as I don't give up.
- darkarmani 14y ago
  > This is so true. Feeling like you're stupid is just part of the process. Feeling like you are stupid is an attitude. I find it is one of the biggest barriers to learning. If you feel stupid, you are less likely to try "stupid" things that teach you a lot. Also, feeling stupid leads to anger, and anger prevents learning. Aaron Hillegass said this best in the beginning of Cocoa Programing for Mac OS X, and I'll never forget it. You can preview it on Amazon under "How to learn."

bokonist 14y ago

In my observation, a person with average native faculties in a given activity make themselves top 95th percentile of the general population in that activity, with dedicated and sustained practice. This applies to most specific skills - violin playing, chess, calculus, computer programming, golf, basketball, quarterbacking, painting, etc. Of course, the reason for this is the typical person in the population has not dedicated that much practice time to a given specific skill. You may be a great natural athlete, but if you have not spent at least some time learning throwing mechanics, a mediocre athlete who has practiced will be able to throw a better spiral. However, it does not follow that "everyone can be a computer programmer for Google" or "everyone can be a professional quarterback." If you want to make it to a high-level in a high paying or high status field, you must compete against other people who are also practicing really hard and who also have great natural talent. Personally, I have around natural athletic ability. I play flag football, and am likely in the top 95th percentile of QB ability. When I throw the ball around with friends at a BBQ, I can hit people in stride with tight spirals. But I could never, ever be a pro-QB, or even a QB in a competitive amateur league. My body simply does not have the appropriate build, and I simply cannot build the muscle strength to make the passes needed to be a great QB. On the flip side, I have always had an innate knack for cognitive problems, I was always that guy in math class who got A's despite barely doing homework and not studying for tests. Now another person could also get A's in that class with only mediocre natural talent by studying very hard. They might think that, "Hey, I've worked hard, I got A's, I can do anything, I can get a job at Google some day." But if they go into the most cognitively demanding career, they will find themselves competing against the most naturally talented people, who also now have a financial incentive to work extremely hard, and the less naturally talented people will simply not be able to compete. I find it unfortunate and self-serving, that so there are so many commentators and intellectuals, who are above average cognitively and (likely) mediocre athletically, who assume that the other people's failings at cognitive skills are due to lack of practice or lack of sufficient schooling. Meanwhile they assume their own lack of athletic ability is due to accidents of birth. That said, it can be very difficult to determine if your having difficultly in a subject is really due to innate talent or due to lack of practice. When I took an intro computer science course, I noticed the professor was a completely horrible teacher (and lectures are generally a horrible way to teach math, computer science or any technical subject). The textbook sucked too. The people who did well in that class already had been programming on their own during high school. The people taking the class expecting it to be an actual introductory course, who expected that if you just followed the lectures and textbooks that you would know how to do the assignment, ended up doing very poorly. Even if they worked very hard, their total hours dedicated to understanding computer science was far below that of fellow classmates.

unoti 14y ago

You don't deserve scorn for failing, it's ok. You might be suffering from some kind of anxiety, and you're being too hard on yourself for sure. One piece of advice that might help you: when you're trying to measure your progress, instead of looking at the people who are ahead of you all the time, sometimes look at the people who are behind you. The people who you've exceeded, who you have done better than. It's an important part of motivation that's often overlooked. (This and a bunch of other really excellent advice I got from Seneca in Letters from a Stoic.) Also, don't give up. You've only truly failed when you quit learning or give up.

namank 14y ago

Looked through your older posts, you seem like a smart person. I would: -start a blog. -start working on a personal project in another hacker or designer. Find some at some mailing list near you.

Tichy 14y ago

The way you write already suggests intelligence. In what ways did you try to prepare for that networking class? It sounds as if they didn't provide anything for you to cling to if you weren't already familiar with the territory?

Tycho 14y ago

Maybe the other people in the networking class were either all very smart students that anyone would struggle to keep up with, or maybe they all had prior exposure to networking principles (eg. from LAN gaming).

zubairshams 14y ago

People who seem successful from the outside, are in general, very hard working and focused in their venture. I have few friends from high school who always got good grades and understood topics very fast. Being around such gifted students made me feel insufficient. I could never compete with them no matter how hard I tried. In my mind I was trying hard. Turns out, while I was slicing my waking hours between sports, hanging out, studies and socializing, they invested all those hours to study class materials, read supplementary materials, reading ahead for the class next day. To me, sports, studies and friends were equally important while they kept single minded focus on where they want to put their hours. It also turns out, the method is replicable. You can put single minded focus on anything and be reasonably successful. I believe it. Because I have seen it happen in my life. Albeit, there are talended people and hard work will always fall short of talent + hard work. But hard work will get you far enough.

cturner 14y ago

When you say you vary your methods, what do you mean by that? When you were in your networking class and it wasn't structured in a way you found convenient, could this have been demonstrating that you're overly dependent on certain learning techniques, and need to become adept with some new ones? Your repeated references to hard work stood out: > I worked hard on that class but it didn't matter. There's a pattern you can fall into where you stare at the page and get stressed, and then come away hours later none the wiser but exhausted and feeling unduly virtuous from your hard but meaningless work. Hard work doesn't count for anything of itself. Only when you're pursuing effective strategies. > I'm likely to not ever know. If you want to, you could dig up your syllabus notes or email the uni for a copy of them. Identify the topics, and see if you understand them. Get past exams out of the library and identify the topics in them. Find a mentor and go back over the stuff again until you have an easy understanding of each of the concepts.

zubairshams 14y ago

kragen 14y ago

Maybe the things you were putting a lot of effort into weren't things that helped you master those materials. It's possible to work hard with the intent of learning something, and never learn it, even though it's within your capacity to learn, if the thing you're working hard on doesn't help with learning the thing you're trying to learn. In fact, I think most of the effort people put into learning things in the standard educational system is wasted. I mean, it's also possible you're struggling against some kind of mental handicap. But if your IQ was really 75 or something, I don't think you'd be able to write such long sentences.

jongraehl 14y ago

It sounds like you should set your sights lower. You don't seem to have an aversion to trying or thinking. I'd hope the explanation for your failures is that you didn't acquire the prerequisites and are continually trying to fake or skip them. But that's unlikely. So, discover what you are capable of. There's no shame in trying and being average, instead of not trying and being below average.

leviathant 14y ago

I thought I'd share some hopeful words from the author in a Facebook followup to the article. My wife's a composer and has worked with several members of her (incredible) family. "I didn't get to go into much detail in 800 words, but I agree it's more complicated than that. I don't think my kids all enjoyed practicing, but they have come back many times to say how much it changed their lives, including the three who did not go on to become musicians. The youngest was my Suzuki failure... I felt guilty that I didn't have as much patience to work with her as I'd had with her sisters. She restarted lessons several times and limped along in classical studies for years, progressing, but not nearly at the rate as her sisters. Then at age 15 she suddenly blossomed as a guitarist/singer-sonwriter and playwright, spending hours every day immersed in practice, and progressing quickly. It was as though all of those painful hours spent on violin and viola were coming to fruition in a way none of us, including her, had anticipated."