How To Be Fucking Awesome

http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2008/11/how-to-be-fucking-awesome.html

by sant0sk1 • 18 years ago

82 74 18 years ago

gilesbowkett.blogspot.com

mhb• 18 years ago

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

aneesh5• 18 years 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• 18 years 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."

mdakin4• 18 years 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.

Retric3• 18 years 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_management2• 18 years 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• 18 years 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?

aneesh5• 18 years 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.

xiaoma• 18 years 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• 18 years ago

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

adldesigner4• 18 years ago

I agree.

adldesigner4• 18 years 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• 18 years ago

I think the point is that you spend much more than one hour a day at it.

adldesigner4• 18 years 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.

henning• 18 years 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

unalone3• 18 years 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• 18 years 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??

unalone3• 18 years 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• 18 years 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.

giles_bowkett4• 18 years ago

this is why these sites are doomed, dude. any site built on this model of news dissemination is doomed. putting out a flag button makes your site vulnerable to the tragedy of the commons. it's in everybody's group interest to only flag spam, but it's in everybody's personal interest to flag anything they don't want to see again. these sites are so intrinsically vulnerable to tragedies of the commons that we might as well call them sheep pastures.

they make the same mistake here that everybody else makes with tagging. if you look at the research on tagging, the big tagging success story was delicious - which leveraged SELF-INTEREST in its tagging system and produced a useful public resource as an emergent byproduct. this is not coincidence! read James Surowiecki. seriously. economics 101 for social software.

leveraging independent self-interest is THE key factor which differentiates the wisdom of crowds from the stupidity of groupthink. "the wisdom of crowds" is really just a reiteration of adam smith's invisible hand. to create an invisible hand effect, you must leverage independent self-interest within a shared context where independent self-interested actions are visible to other independent self-interested agents.

every tagging system that fails to leverage self-interest fails to capture that. you can't just sprinkle magic web 2.0 fairy dust on something and go "Tagging!" if you want delicious results, you have to find out what made delicious work and emulate that. what made delicious work was a fundamental principle of economics. the reason so many sites have useless tags is that their makers are ignoring this fundamental principle. it's cargo cult site design.

similarly, this flagging nonsense flat-out ignores another basic fundamental of economics. what makes it even more insane is that Paul Graham already explained in one of his first blog posts about Bayesian filtering exactly why spam filters should be tuned to an individual's preferences and not to a group's. if you had a bunch of individually-tuned spam filters, you could find a way to leverage that. since you have a group-tuned spam filter, you have nothing but a tragedy of the commons magnet.

anyway, just ranting about why Hacker News should hurry up and cease to exist already.

edit: just for the record I'm responding to Reg's comment. I don't know if that's clear from the UI. it is a non sequitur rant, but it's not a complete non sequitur rant.

rokhayakebe2• 18 years ago

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

kirubakaran4• 18 years 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)

Retric3• 18 years 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.

time_management2• 18 years ago

It's 10000 hours of deliberate practice, not mere activity, that's necessary according to this theory. Deliberate practice requires that you're constantly challenging yourself and attacking more ambitious goals. The conversion ratio on paid work for very few jobs is anywhere close to 1.0; a job where it's 0.5 would generally be considered excellent.

bloch• 18 years ago

"Finally, deliberate practice is an effortful activity that can be sustained only for a limited time each day during extended periods without leading to exhaustion (effort constraint). To maximize gains from long-term practice, individuals must avoid exhaustion and must limit practice to an amount from which they can completely recover on a daily or weekly basis." (K. Anders Ericsson)

"A number of training studies in real life have compared the efficiency of practice durations rangingfrom 1-8 hr per day.These studiesshowessentiallyno benefit from durations exceeding 4 hr per day and reduced benefits from practice exceeding 2 hr (Welford, 1968; Woodworth & Schlosberg, 1954). Many studiesof the acquisition oftyping skill (Baddeley & Longman, 1978; Dvorak et al.. 1936) and other perceptual-motor skills (Henshaw& Holman, 1930) indicate that the effective duration of deliberate practice may be closer to 1hr perday." (K. Anders Ericsson)

projects.ict.usc.edu/itw/gel/EricssonDeliberatePracticePR93.pdf

rokhayakebe2• 18 years ago

Ok, I have no idea how I came up with the 365 days instead of 52 weeks.

Hexstream• 18 years ago

I can't believe it took me so much time to notice:

365 days a year already includes 7 days a week. So you'd actually need 27.4 hours of practice a day to make it in a year.

beaudeal• 18 years 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• 18 years ago

Practice makes perfect.

danhak• 18 years ago

No, practice makes permanent.

sherl0ck• 18 years ago

practice perfect makes perfect

aneesh5• 18 years ago

In short, practice is necessary but not sufficient for awesomeness.

In particular, this implies: "If you have not practiced, then you are not awesome."

So to be awesome at X, you need:

1) some natural talent for X, varies based on the field

2) a love for X that will allow you to practice for 10,000 hours

aaronblohowiak• 18 years ago

3) the discipline to make 10,000 hours of your practice deliberate

giles_bowkett4• 18 years ago

"1) some natural talent for X, varies based on the field"

No. The trend in the research is that "natural talent" is a MYTH. It does not exist.

Agree or disagree, I don't care, but as a summary of my post, your comment is inaccurate.

giles_bowkett4• 18 years ago

"They also noted that some fields of expertise (such as the NBA) have built-in physical constraints (ex: height) which must be considered."

Mugsy Bogues.

aneesh5• 18 years ago

I fondly remember his days playing for the Hornets. But he's the exception, not the rule.

sabat• 18 years 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?

matt1• 18 years 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• 18 years 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.

david9272• 18 years 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• 18 years 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.

david9272• 18 years 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.

cpr• 18 years 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• 18 years 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.

plinkplonk2• 18 years 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_bowkett4• 18 years 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. ;-)

plinkplonk2• 18 years 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• 18 years 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• 18 years 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• 18 years 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.