Write? Write. Sleep? Sleep. Read? Read. Don't fight it.

http://sivers.org/dont-fight-it

by lucumo • 17 years ago

40 50 17 years ago

sivers.org

khafra2• 17 years ago

A Zen student once asked his teacher, "Master, what is enlightenment?"

The master replied, "When hungry, eat. When tired, sleep."

bitwize• 17 years ago

Counterpoint:

"Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water."

There are plenty of things you just have to do if you want them to get done, enlightened being or not.

unalone7• 17 years ago

Countercounterpoint:

"There are two ways to wash the dishes. You can wash the dishes so the dishes or clean. You can also wash the dishes to watch the dishes."

The moral I got from your koan when I first read it is what the difference is not in reality, but in the mind. That doesn't mean working when you don't feel like working. It means feel like working, or don't work.

joshu5• 17 years ago

No.

You have to work, every day, whether you are too tired or not. You must push yourself, every day, and have discipline.

Extraordinary results require extraordinary efforts.

khafra2• 17 years ago

Considering that Joshu was a famous Zen master, perhaps I should defer to your judgement.

I will say that in my own life, I am often tempted by immediate action or inaction that suddenly becomes unattractive when I remember my longer-term goals.

joshu5• 17 years ago

I don't know much from Zen. I'm the opposite, if anything. I appear to be attempting to achieve a state of complete Worry.

That said, I DID build something while also working at a gruelling day job. So I know a bit about how to do this.

ellyagg4• 17 years ago

Yeah, for some people, the advice in this article will lead to disaster. For example, I would rather be reading than doing, all the time. Reading is pure candy for me, instant gratification. To become (reasonably) successful, I had to stop reading.

mattm2• 17 years ago

I recall a study where researchers wanted to see how "natural" work was. They took a class of young children and told them they can do whatever they want. So the first day they all ran around outside and had fun. I think by the third day they were all begging to have class again and have some work to do.

TY• 17 years ago

I'm in the same boat - if I don't make myself work, I'll end up reading all the time with zero to show for it.

Only one thing makes me deliver: deadline

Without deadlines, nothing gets done in my world, as I always get these ideas of how to do something better using the new shiny thing X and there is no end to it.

Deadline enforces discipline and requires me to do a good job of planning to allocate the precious time. Makes me say no to pleasant distractions that I would otherwise agree to...

Once I have something delivered (or during my consulting work), then I allow myself to go on a "sabbatical": read the books and lurk on HN and LTU. However, the sabbatical must have a scheduled end-date too, otherwise nothing will ever get done.

Deadlines must be concrete. Here are mine: my current sabbatical ends in 2 weeks (coincides with the end of my consulting engagement and loss of golden handcuffs http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=763743). Real work starts on October 4 with a clear deliverable by October 23...

hyperbovine• 17 years ago

Sounds like you have a future in literary criticism then. Seriously. The whole point of the post is "don't fight it," and I for one agree.

joez• 17 years ago

Reminds me of http://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_on_genius.html about 15 mins in.

You have to show up to work everyday and if your muse doesn't then you did your part.

aditya• 17 years ago

do you care to share your tricks for doing that, when all you really want to do is read/sleep? how do you discipline yourself so that you don't constantly need inspiration?

joshu5• 17 years ago

My technique was:

Just get one thing done. Even if it's an easy, small thing. Get started and do it now. Especially if you don't want to. Having done it, try to do another; it'll be a great deal easier.

timr3• 17 years ago

No.

Some people need to do that. Others are workaholics, and need to take a break to inspire creativity. Others work because they're doing what they love, and do not need discipline because they're passionate about something. Others are usually passionate, but need momentary discipline to work through a tedious spot. Everyone is different. One size does not fit all.

This is a good place to apply the Paul Bucheit quote: "Limited life experience + Overgeneralization = ADVICE"

joshu5• 17 years ago

The question was "How do I work when I don't feel like it." Workaholics don't ask this. People who are doing what they love and don't need discipline because they're already doing it don't ask this.

If you want to make the the world march to your beat, you need to start with your body/self.

unalone7• 17 years ago

I have a problem with this phrase have to. I don't have to do anything. There is no proven formula that works for anything.

Winston Churchill was a lazy, lazy man who succeeded because he was capable of brilliance for the short bursts of time he worked. Brian Wilson spent the infamous three years high in his bedroom, then returned with a series of masterpiece albums. Ricky Gervais was a disc jockey until he was 39, then made possibly the best television show of all time despite being lazy and disruptive both while writing and directing it. Marcel Duchamp spent how long making his fountain? It became the most famous piece of art of the century.

While I don't disagree that extraordinary efforts are required to produce things, I don't agree that "extraordinary" means hard work. Sometimes it means a willingness not to work unless the work means something.

joshu5• 17 years ago

I didn't say that you just work hard at any random thing. it's important to do the right things.

(I think of myself as very lazy as well; I tend to grind on ideas for months or years until they are simple enough.)

neilc2• 17 years ago

Winston Churchill was a lazy, lazy man who succeeded because he was capable of brilliance for the short bursts of time he worked

Do you have a reference for that? My impression was that Churchill had a fairly intense work schedule. For example, http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-cohen061802.as... :

"Churchill, far from being an aristocratic lounger, was a glutton for work ... His working hours were, it is true, hard on his subordinates, extending as they frequently did into the small hours of the morning."

VMG• 17 years ago

Karl Pilkington played with ladybirds for thirty-odd years of his life and then came up with Rockbusters.

yesimahuman• 17 years ago

I wish I had time to read and learn new things, but I feel antsy when I read books anymore, like I could be making things and pushing my product. Seriously, I feel like I only deserve to read when I'm on the toilet and can't really do anything else. I think I need to relax a bit.

UncleOxidant• 17 years ago

For the sake of argument, I'm going to ask why? I mean why do we work hard and push ourselves? We're all going to end up as worm food eventually anyway. So why push yourself? Why not just enjoy life?

Now, of course, I push myself for various reasons: I want income, I want to make the world a better place, I want to learn, etc... but in the end are those reasons for working hard any better than the person who says they want to have a happy life and thus don't work hard or push themselves?

edw519• 17 years ago

This isn't good advice. It's self-gratification.

You have work to do. Do it.

Sitting at the terminal, but not sure what to type? Turn off the terminal, grab your source listings, scratch pad, and red and black pens and go to the other room. Or the library, Or starbucks. Work the problem that way and soon enough, you'll be dying to get back to the terminal.

Sitting on the sofa and analyzing that function with pencil and paper until you've worked yourself into a logic freeze? Get up and turn on your computer and code the simplest case. Before you're done, you'll find some enlightenment.

Have trouble doing either? Review old code, examine apps written by others, refactor something (you always have something to refactor, right?).

But do what you feel like? No.

timr3• 17 years ago

"You have work to do. Do it."

Oh, come on. Says who? You only "have work to do" to the extent that you need to survive. Beyond that, it's optional. It's equally bad advice to suggest people should force themselves to work when they don't want to, simply because they "have work to do."

The only insightful comment you can make here is that one-size advice doesn't fit everyone. Some people are workaholics, and should try harder to take breaks. Others are complete daydreamers, and maybe need more discipline. There's no one right recipe. The world is not binary.

kwamenum86• 17 years ago

I like the sentiment but this does not really work for us "normal" (non-self-employed) folk. If I sleep/work/eat/learn whenever I feel like it then something will surely suffer.

unalone7• 17 years ago

That's why the idea is to get your life to a place where other people don't control you.

username2• 17 years ago

Or work at Gap. http://www.businessweek.com/careers/managementiq/archives/20...

daveungerer2• 17 years ago

This reminded me of a great quote of John Carmack, which says the opposite:

Putting creativity on a pedestal can also be an excuse for laziness. There is a lot of cultural belief that creativity comes from inspiration, and can't be rushed. Not true. Inspiration is just your subconscious putting things together, and that can be made into an active process with a little introspection.

Focused, hard work is the real key to success. Keep your eyes on the goal, and just keep taking the next step towards completing it. If you aren't sure which way to do something, do it both ways and see which works better.

d3d2• 17 years ago

I don't consider Carmack to be an expert on creativity, of all things.

His game ideas can be summarized thusly: DOOM.

The best id game, the original Quake, had both John Romero and American McGee as designers, among others, AND Trent Reznor on sound effects.

Without them, id did... DOOM 3.

What Carmack is really referring to is the gruntwork of things like writing multiple rendering pipelines to support the nightmare hodgepodge of consumer 3D hardware, trying out WELL-KNOWN rendering techniques (invented for film) in games as hardware improves, and so forth, which sometimes is just tedium and sometimes requires hackery like fast stencil shadows/sqrt/bit-twiddling tricks. Trying a bunch of methods to see what works on limited hardware is a process of discovery.

You cannot brute-force creative ideas in general in that manner.

username2• 17 years ago

http://lifehacker.com/5037175/musician-ryan-adams-success-se...

daveungerer2• 17 years ago

He is an expert on creative problem solving. I doubt you are in a position to dispute that. And how long do you think consumer 3D hardware has been mainstream? Carmack's career spans a lot longer than that.

I wonder if you would accuse an artist who spends lots of time exploring dead end ideas of doing grunt work? Would you dismiss an artist as adapting WELL-KNOWN ideas if they allowed you to view someone else's work in a brand new, unexpected light?

petercooper• 17 years ago

I lived (and sorta still do live) by this advice. It's good, if you have the lifestyle and means to support it, except for the sleep advice:

But if you're tired, don't fight it. Sleep.

This worked out to be an absolute disaster for me (if you take it to its logical conclusion, if you're not tired, don't go to sleep, etc). I ended up free wheeling around the clock, sometimes getting up at 7pm, sometimes 2am, sometimes 11am.. it was nuts. And that sort of sleep pattern really messes with your head after a while.

warp• 17 years ago

This works fine for me, but my body has this habit of waking up when the sun is up -- even if I've only gone to sleep a few hours ago. That also isn't a problem in itself, as I will fall asleep around 16:00 on those days and catch up whatever I missed the previous night, and still be tired enough in the evening to go to bed at a normal hour.

It's a sort of built-in automatic circadian rhythm reset mechanism which kicks in after just one late night coding session.

snitko• 17 years ago

I have a feeling most people here saying it's a bad advice, didn't get it in the first place. I think the key is that you got to give yourself a little freedom in the short distance, but be disciplined in the long run. For example, I think I'm going to get some sleep now and work in the morning, not tonight. But I'm still going to do the job. The only difference is: I'd be more productive.

It's like (a + b) is still the same thing as (b + a). But because 'a' is the first letter of the alphabet (for most of us) it's more natural to put it first.

And another short thought that I think is relevant: discipline is not about forcing yourself to work when you don't want to, but it's about managing the time and finding the best spots for your work to be done. Of course, self-employment is best for this.

TrevorJ• 17 years ago

This completely abstracts the mind from the concept of self-control, and that's a logical fallacy. Conscious executive decision making originates in the mind as well. The reason you go do something is because you made the choice to do it. Period. Sure, we do things we don't 'want' to do in a narrow sense, but in the broader sense when we choose to do an unpleasant task we have decided, based on outside forces that this task is what we need/want to do.

This isn't to say that there is no merit in working with your mind and being productive when your mind is ready, but the notion that you must not bring willpower to bear on any task is taking things a bit too far.

Write? Write. Sleep? Sleep. Read? Read. Don't fight it.

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