Notes On Doing Massive Amounts of Good Enjoyable Work

http://sebastianmarshall.com/notes-on-doing-massive-amounts-of-good-enjoyable-work

by lionhearted • 13 years ago

28 11 13 years ago

Is this post inspired or insipid? Neither, really but the message is worth noting; one can get a lot done by working full on, on one task, for hours, success feeds on itself and feels good, and the easiest way to get into this zone is a big opportunity combined with a hard deadline.

skore4• 13 years ago

I really try to be nice and give an article by Sebastian Marshall a fair chance when it crops up on HN.

But every single time, I'm disappointed. There is little to no editing, no digestion process that I can detect that would turn what I find to be haphazard notes into an actual product of a writer. I see that he really, really cares about saying something - apparently, though, not so much about being understood. The content of these articles is at best something that somebody else somewhere has already said better and more succinct. At worst, it's meaningless drivel that could just as well be the work of the postmodernism generator[1].

After a while, the words blend together and I remain astonished how others find meaning in his writing. Maybe they need to supply it themselves?

Can anybody point me to something even moderately tangible that Sebastian Marshall has actually done?

And yes, I know he has published a book. A book that seems to be about how he's a guy who is crazy and does things. But I have yet to see what those things actually are, besides talking about doing things. The level at which you apparently can never actually learn what he does is maddening to me.

[1]http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/

lionhearted2• 13 years ago

Well, thanks for giving me a chance David. Sorry you've been repeatedly disappointed.

If you'd look on my site for about five minutes, you'd see 2 of the last 10 entries I made reference a nonprofit project I'm doing with along with some really great people. I've had some reasonable success contracting, and I'm doing mostly charitable work for the next 2-3 months.

Anyway, I always appreciate feedback. More editing and polish, that's useful. If you'd like feedback in return, I might recommend spending more time on your own writing and doing things that are meaningful to you, instead of worrying about others on the net. Looks like you only wrote one blog post in 2012 -- about a customer in Nigeria -- and that was back in July. Wouldn't you be better served by being an exemplar of good writing than putting together criticism in comments on the internet?

skore4• 13 years ago

Thank you, but I'd really like others to chime in here. I did look through your site and yes, some of the posts do reference some projects. Again an instance of hinting at doing work instead of talking about it.

I did write "only one" blog post, yes, because I only tend to write when I care about something. That article about the developer in Nigeria is a good example - I suppose there are very few articles like it and I only wrote about it because I found that I learned something that was new to me - and that I wanted to share with others. However, I'm not much of a writer and you will find that I comment very little on HN - maybe a topic or two a day. I decide against posting comments more often than I decide for posting them (closing a comment window after having written something is a frequent occurrence) and actually took about a year off some while ago. Recently, I think a lot about getting rid of my blog altogether since I'm often not sure whether I'm just wasting peoples time.

And thanks for the tip, but I already do spend pretty much all of my time doing things that are meaningful to me - my family, friends and of course my job as a self employed programmer of FOSS.

polshaw• 13 years ago

Not OK. Maybe, somehow, you intended this to be genuinely friendly advice, but it comes off as stinking.

You put your blogging out there for criticism when you submit it, criticism that is appropriate and useful to others in the comment thread of that blog post. This is not a comment thread about skore's blogging; which does not appear to be core to his activities. Even if the 'what the hell does this guy even do' part was not fair (i'm making no judgement on that) it does not reflect well for you to respond by going to much greater lengths to seek out and critique a blog from a commenter, whilst simultaneously suggesting they don't critique your work.

jrajav• 13 years ago

> Anyway, I always appreciate feedback.

If you actually mean that, some candid advice:

- Lists are good for enumerating points but not as the entire medium for your work. They don't scale well. After more than a few points, especially if they don't naturally correlate, it becomes harder to follow than simple prose. If you find it difficult to bring the points together, try recording yourself going down the list and briefly explaining each one in turn to a rubber duck.

- Try to use only as many words as you need to, but no more or less. Several of your points could have been rolled into one more coherent point, and some of them could have used a little more digging too. Again, reading aloud would help with this.

- "Takeaways / Action" as a header is a little forward. Let the reader decide for themselves what the takeaway should be, or if you want to address them directly, do so. It's already implied that someone taking their time to read your article is looking for a takeaway to make it worth their while.

- Spell check before you post.

jwdunne• 13 years ago

It's interesting to note that a lot of writers do this - they write about productivity, doing enjoyable work, etc, where their work's just writing about said topics.

It's like how NLP practitioners teach you methods on getting rich, using anecdotes from their business of teaching you methods on how to get rich.

It may be different in Sebastian's case but it just seems like a general trend.

captain_mars• 13 years ago

> ... haphazard notes into an actual product of a writer.

To be fair, this particular blog post is titled "Notes on ..."

skore4• 13 years ago

Fair point indeed. Although I really had to re-read a number of the points a couple of times before I got what he was saying. Which might a good sign that putting them out verbatim isn't the best blog material. Not really material for the HN frontpage in my opinion (which it just dropped off of).

Notes On Doing Massive Amounts of Good Enjoyable Work

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