Ask HN: I am giving up early on things I want to achieve.What is the way forward?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9520205

by newsignup • 11 years ago

17 13 11 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I have realized that I end up giving up on things more often than I should.

If I want to learn drawing or sketching: I may try for a day or two and then think "It doesn't look like the one I saw on the internet".

If I want to do kaggle competition: I won't even try to do single submission thinking - "I won't make it to the top 10, why bother, instead do something else."

I want to be the best in something I do, but I lose patience often, thinking "it is taking more than what it should be taking". May be I am completely unaware of how time it actually takes to master something and setting up wrong expectations.

Have you felt this, and how to achieve your goals or master something without giving up?

Red_Tarsius• 11 years ago

Don't beat yourself too much. 100% of the "overnight successes" you hear from the media bubble were ALWAYS X years in the making, where X >= 10.

If I want to do kaggle competition: I won't even try to do single submission thinking - "I won't make it to the top 10, why bother, instead do something else."

If you want to achieve mastery, you already lost. When the Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa received a honorary Lifetime Achievement Award at Oscars at the age of 80 he said, "I don't think I understand the cinema yet".

Seeking mastery has nothing to do with learning and everything to do with our own insecurities: "If I'm the best maybe women will love me", "If I'm the best maybe people will like me", "If I'm the best maybe I will find my own identity".

Give up mastery. Embrace learning.

"It doesn't look like the one I saw on the internet".

This is the wrong mindset. Instead ask yourself: Does it look better than the work I did yesterday?.

Maybe I am completely unaware of how time it actually takes to master something and setting up wrong expectations.

It takes time and consistency. Small, quantifiable steps every day. This applies to everything: dancing http://danceinayear.com/, web development http://jenniferdewalt.com/, ...

Good luck!

anon3_• 11 years ago

See "A Note on Practice and Persistence":

"As you study this book, and continue with programming, remember that anything worth doing is difficult at first. Maybe you are the kind of person who is afraid of failure so you give up at the first sign of difficulty. Maybe you never learned self-discipline so you can't do anything that's "boring." Maybe you were told that you are "gifted" so you never attempt anything that might make you seem stupid or not a prodigy. Maybe you are competitive and unfairly compare yourself to someone like me who's been programming for more than 20 years."

http://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/intro.html

ingend88• 11 years ago

"it is taking more than what it should be taking" - This is exactly the thing I used to think about. But as time progresses I realized even if I would have stuck with it for just a few more days, I would have been much better.

sgentle• 11 years ago

I recommend watching Ira Glass's video on the gap between your taste and your abilities. He addresses your problem specifically because it's very common: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BI23U7U2aUY

You need to refocus your goals away from achievement and towards output. Learn to become motivated by effort rather than mastery because it will be a long time before you are top 10 at anything. Nobody stays motivated for that long without enjoying the work.

andersthue• 11 years ago

To be honest I have had it like you describe for the most of my life, and still have it in some areas.

What I have learned as a 43 year old is that it is just how I am and when I accepted that, it became easier and it is no longer a "problem" for me.

Perhaps you are like that?

I took the strenghtsfinder 2.0 test and that helped me understand myself which helped me to accept myself.

I can highly recommend the book "start with why" to figure out who your innermost values are, and the letting go book from zenhabits to accept who you are and letting all your ideas about who you should be go.

meepmorp• 11 years ago

Stop giving up.

Seriously, if you feel like you're giving up too early, don't do that anymore. Keep going, even if you feel like it's hopeless. Maybe not forever, but try going twice as long as you otherwise might.

You expect to feel magic. Either some kind of power that comes over you and makes you do the right thing without putting in the sweaty shit work, or that you'll just start feeling like you can do it after a tiny bit of effort. Magic isn't real; sweat is real.

Trust me, hard shit takes lot of work. And you might just suck at many of the things you try, because that just happens a whole lot. You'll never get any better by abandoning it.

* there's a whole lifetime of this informing my comments.

TheAlchemist• 11 years ago

Just remember every day that 1.01^365 ~ 14 and 0.99^365 ~ 0.07. You will be surprised how far you can go, just by doing the thing and improving by a small margin everyday.

ThrustVectoring• 11 years ago

My first impression is that you're trying too many things and not focusing on what's actually important to you. Giving up on low-value activities in favor of high-value ones is a good thing.

My suggestion is to make a list of how you want to grow as a person over the next few years. Sort it by importance, and then do not do anything that's below number 3 or 4.

Taking my own advice, I really should stop reading/commenting on HN and reddit. And I know how to break this habit, so I don't have a good excuse. So, uhh, bye?

MalcolmDiggs• 11 years ago

May be I am completely unaware of how time it actually takes to master something and setting up wrong expectations.

An oft-quoted metric is 10,000 hours to truly master a skill. Translated into the working world: That's working full time at a job for roughly 5 years.

Have you felt this, and how to achieve your goals or master something without giving up?

When I started boxing as a teenager there was a life-size cutout of Mike Tyson in the corner of the gym. The words "Your competition is training harder than you" were emblazoned across his chest. That message stuck with me, and I still use it as a motivator. When you're ready to quit, just remember: there's someone else who wants this more than you do, and they're not quitting yet. Keep going!

6d0debc071• 11 years ago

Have you felt this, and how to achieve your goals or master something without giving up?

Personally I have functional goals when I'm interested in an activity. Learn C++? Okay, how do I write a program that will draw a box to the screen? Now how do I shade it? How do I do that with less overhead....

I give myself six months for tasks like that, often it takes considerably less time. Sometimes a matter of days or weeks. Very occasionally I run into a 'To make an apple pie, first create the universe.' style problem and it takes significantly longer in those cases. But at least then I've got a basis to compare how hard the problem is to, and can cache out the steps that need to be taken. Worst comes to the worst I get to the end of the six months and assign new schedules based on how large the problem stack has grown.

If you think of it like a constraint for a problem: You're starting off and your constraint is 'Best in the world' and that's a very narrow target to hit. But if you start the other side of things, 'my constraint is to draw a circle' , 'now it's to shade it' 'Now it's to give the circle a nose' ... then it's a lot harder to fail, especially if you're generous with your time in those sorts of activities.

You're starting off with constraints that are at the edge of your current skills that way, rather than constraints that are... not feasible to reach that quickly.

Even then, I would warn against a desire to be the best in the world: There are seven billion people in the world. If you define your success along some particular line as being the best, you are comparing yourself to someone who got all the genetic breaks, started when they were a kid, and finds the subject rewarding enough to work on it more or less continuously.

Chances are really bad that you're the best in the world at anything. Like 7 billion to 1 against. Even worse, the sacrifices demanded of people who are truly the best in the world in terms of some particular activity often seem to leave time for anything resembling a life. And for what? The returns on being the best in the world are rarely in line with the effort it takes to be so, or at least so it seems.

^_^

tl/dr: Small steps, consistently applied.

4ydx• 11 years ago

As you find yourself not pursuing things, you are also potentially finding focus by letting go of goals that are not important to you. In order to master something however, you will have to do boring, repetitive feeling tasks mentally and physically. You just have to figure out how to push through those moments of pain. What Red_Tarsius said is excellent advice. It isn't about the end goal so much as it is about the process.

HeyLaughingBoy• 11 years ago

Stop worrying about "mastery" and focus on just putting in the time. Every single day, spend some time, be it 5 minutes or 5 hours, on whatever it is you want go be great at. Don't compare progress at any interval less than one month.

Nothing happens overnight except failure.

lukaslalinsky• 11 years ago

You are giving up on things because they are things you don't truly enjoy. You want to become good at something for no reason, other than to be good at it. The world is not a competion, even though some people make it look like it is. Just find something that you like doing and do it for yourself, not to be the best at it.

Ask HN: I am giving up early on things I want to achieve.What is the way forward?

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