According to the author, "Effort Shock" is the phenomenon of realizing something is a lot harder than you thought it was. Then you get depressed about it and give up. This explains failed blogs, failed diets, failed restaurants, etc.
The Karate Kid and other Rocky-esque movies ruined the world because the training montages make it seem like you can go from beginner to expert in a single Survivor song.
I was hoping the author would dig deeper into the subject, but he just repeated the same thing again and again and ended with a plug for his book.
Not to mention the ridiculous images interspersed every 2 paragraphs. How did those not bug anybody enough to post about it here? Am I 2? Do I need to be reading a picture book? Could he at least have chosen relevant images?
I think people keep forgetting that Rocky was already a fighter, and that he lost the main fight at the end of the film (although he did meet his goal).
Our whole society has moved towards a philosophy that children are not allowed to fail. As a result we give people easy "successes" at every opportunity, and don't let people experience the fact that they can fail. The result is people whose self-image is like a balloon - really puffed up but likely to deflate suddenly on facing a real challenge.
Obviously the opposite extreme of beating kids down is not good either. But we need a balance. And we need to drive the message home that some things take work.
The worst part, in my mind, is that we are taking away one of the cues that the world used to give you in deciding you should try something else. Failure allows a person to find their true talent.
Which theory and cause? That the world is ruined and the cause is the Karate Kid? You might have taken it a bit too literally.
Our whole society has [...]
Our whole society probably hasn't. Is your argument seriously "kids these days"? Because I don't think the author is really attempting to engage in a meaningful debate on whether the Rocky montage is or is not the driving factor in our poor ability to estimate effort required. It's just a bit of hyperbole.
Maybe btilly's argument is parents these days. It isn't like kids wanted to fail in the past. The difference is that until recently, most kids on the football team didn't win any ribbons or prizes in the past, but now even the chubbiest, least co-ordinated loser is a winner who comes home with a 3rd most improved defensive player ribbon. Similarly, there was a time when an average student got a C. Now, a lackluster effort is often worth a B+.
It makes perfect sense that people will have a distorted view of how difficult success is if they are never allowed to fail, never exposed to "dangerous" playground equipment of their grandparents' day, and who are always allowed to beg an excuse to get extensions or extra test-taking time.
What's usually the biggest mental hurdle for hackers to transition into entrepreneurs?
pg: Coming to terms with the effort required.
Still, it's important to remember that some people work two full-time jobs and barely make ends meet, while others work roughly the same hours and make millions. Working smart is just as important as working hard. I suppose that's a goal of YC's -- to help us work smart while we work hard.
Yep. It takes two things to succeed in your goals: intelligence and persistence.
Intelligence is necessary so you know what to do. Persistence because the universe is messed up and not always consistent, and doing the right things might sometimes not work for no explainable reason (but also because it's impossible to account for all variables and make perfect choices all the time, so we've got to be able to absorb that).
That's what persistence handles. It minimizes the effect of luck. What I mean't by the unpredictability of the universe is in fact the luck. To overcome luck, you simply persist. And no amount of intelligence can overcome the unpredictable (because it follows no rules). So that's why you need persistence, as well as intelligence.
No it takes both. A lot of persistence in the wrong direction will just leave you somewhere other than where you wanted to be. Intelligence points you in the right direction, and persistence gets you there.
Think about it this way: you can be smart and know how to solve a very defined problem. But even if the world is deterministic, we're not close to being able to control it through pure logic and reasoning alone. That is we don't have the computer power or mind power to identify all variables and make sure we always do the right thing. THIS is why we need to persist. Because luck and unpredictability force us to try the right methods over and over again. Even if they are right, they may not work all the time because of luck.
I was in China teaching English when the movie "Kung-Fu Panda" came out. I was surprised at the comments. Most people said something like "I liked the movie but it was unrealistic how easily Panda became a Kung-Fu master." I can't see people in North America coming to the same conclusion.
I think people in the "East" tend to know better than people in the "West" at just how much effort is required to become a master at something.
Heh, I think they meant it in the sense of breaking suspension of disbelief required to find the story engaging. Which sort of illustrates the ingrained effort level calculations we make. Perhaps.
From my perspective, the training montage in Karate Kid demonstrated that it took a LOT of effort, not the little bit this article criticizes it for. Two months of hard work, from sunrise to sunset, to develop muscle memory? It's not the 10,000 hours required to become a world-class expert, but 600+ hours of intensive training is enough to see some pretty decent results. The other movie he criticizes by name, Rocky, was similar. Rocky had 2 months to train for his first fight, and he wasn't starting from scratch.
It's hard to become a world-class expert at anything. You need some combination of latent talent and many thousands of hours of training, hopefully with someone who really understands how to train you effectively. But I don't think either Rocky or the Karate Kid greatly misrepresent the amount of effort it would take for an exceptionally talented individual, with a great trainer, to make the leaps they did.
> Two months of hard work, from sunrise to sunset, ...
Kind of illustrates the writer's point, in my opinion :)
I do not really agree with the entire thesis[1], the idea is not novel and the article itself is rather awkward, but there is some truth to the assertion.
[1] Should it be that difficult to have a house and a car etc.?
Rocky and Karate Kid aren't good examples because both stories are about underdog characters who's will and determination overcome their lack of skill.
I'm just pointing out that the article incorrectly interpreted Rocky and Karate Kid. The article says that Karate Kid is misleading because it shows people achieving expert skill in two months time. The author is incorrect because Karate Kid (and Rocky) didn't succeed based on their skills, so it's not relevant.
What happened, Arreguín-Toft wondered, when the underdogs likewise acknowledged their weakness and chose an unconventional strategy? He went back and re-analyzed his data. In those cases, David’s winning percentage went from 28.5 to 63.6. When underdogs choose not to play by Goliath’s rules, they win, Arreguín-Toft concluded, even when everything we think we know about power says they shouldn’t.
I only had time to read pages 1-4, please correct if I missed something crucial:
Being presumed weaker does not mean that you actually are. Expectations are orthogonal to actual power/skill/knowledge/etc.
There is a point to be made about choosing the correct strategy or tactic: for example, a less-skilled karateka could opt to just shoot the opponent and win the fight. It does not make them better at karate than the dead guy, though. We often have options such as that: programming is hard? Make your living doing something else. So on, but that is only a strategy for avoiding the things that we find difficult.
The underdog can "usually" win if they try an unusual (but effective) strategy. Karate kid didn't use a dirty trick (actually, the other guy did), he fought in a very standard style. The last second of the fight (when he surprised his opponent with his ability to kick with just one leg) may count a bit, but he wouldn't get that far.
Should it be /necessary/ to own a house and a car? :)
What is the value in having a car? Transportation. That transportation is so expensive that in much of the US it's cheaper and more convenient to own a half ton piece of steel and burn 7300 gallons of petroleum products a year than to rely on something community-based (public transport, anyone?) - does that say something about us as a nation? That we have naturally (or, as some would point out, unnaturally) drifted towards the methods of least efficiency in our society, for transport at least?
What is the value in having a house? Is it the land? I suppose land is important. What happens when your land loses value drastically, though? Turn it into farmland? Process it for trace elements?
Is it the house? The way they're built these days, they won't last another twenty years.
Our lives are transient. Shouldn't our abodes and methods of transportation be more permanent, built to outlast us and benefit future generations?
True: success takes hard work, dedication, and more hard work. That people are worried, in a modern society, about obtaining access to the very things which are necessary to /do/ that hard work (a safe home; healthy food; transportation to loved ones and places of work; knowledge) makes me sad. Lack of motivation and general ennui among the populace
is not the cause of problems, but a symptom of them.
One cause, as outlined (with poor examples, nonetheless) is bubble-wrapping everything for future generations. Somehow I doubt this is the primary - or even a tertiary - cause. What are the true causes behind it?
It should be necessary to be able to have a place to call home and some way of getting to places, but overall "house and car" and of course ownership thereof are mere details based on current socioeconomic conditions. Formulated another way, a comfortable standard of living should be attainable to all with moderate effort.
But the whole point is that two months is NOTHING. I ran 50 miles in an ultramarathon last year and it took me 6 months of pretty intense training (one marathon or longer every weekend in june & july). Even my six months were absolutely nothing compared to the guys who've been running for past 20 years. There is NO way I could have done anything during those six months that could have made me anywhere as good as the pros. So yeah, Karate Kid is indeed not possible.
I'm not a runner, but I would assume that unless you're already pretty physically fit or have running experience you can't start from scratch and run an ultra-marathon in six months. Full marathon practice sessions weekly for two months! I would reckon being able to recover between those that quickly is a skill developed over years, even if not necessarily from running.
FWIW, I think the point was that even if the kid took 2 months of "moive time", the audience perceived that time to be only a few minutes. Two months of solid work is a lot, and I don't think a few minutes of film can do justice to that.
...or in some cases, that it's not possible at all, regardless of effort.
I wanted to be able to play guitar well, but I've come to terms with the fact that I suck. People told me that continued practice would make me better. And maybe it would, to a certain degree. But no matter how much I practice, I'll never be able to play like Jimi Hendrix, because he had a very long finger spread. My hand just can't cover the same range.
Similarly, Salieri worked his butt off, just to be shown up by the upstart Mozart.
It's not fair, but some people really are better than others at certain things.
" But no matter how much I practice, I'll never be able to play like Jimi Hendrix, because he had a very long finger spread. My hand just can't cover the same range."
FWIW, I bet Hendricks didn't get to be Hendricks by working to emulate some other player's style. And for all we know, he may have been pissed that his big old hands got in the way of playing some other style he really liked.
Knowing you are not going to play like Hendricks, it's maybe time to play like CWuestefeld.
(Also, Django Reinhardt had a damaged left hand, with limited mobility. He kicked ass, though.)
"But the whole point is that two months is NOTHING."
Two months isn't NOTHING. It's just a lot less than it takes to become a world-class expert.
Karate Kid wasn't going up against a pro who'd been doing it for 20 years. He was going up against another high school kid in the "all valley championship". He had some karate background and a master trainer. It may not be totally realistic, but it's not off by such a huge amount as to be "indeed not possible".
Everything you have said is true, but remember that by compressing that timeframe into the span of one upbeat song it doesn't seem like they spent two months of hard, dedicated training forsaking almost all else.
It seems (even though the story is trying to portray something else) that they worked just a little, that it is easily achieved.
"but remember that by compressing that timeframe into the span of one upbeat song it doesn't seem like they spent two months of hard, dedicated training forsaking almost all else."
No, they dramatically sold the effort he put in very well with how pissed off Daniel is about all the time he spent painting, waxing, and polishing, without learning any "real karate." And every time he thought he finished something, Miyagi-san would ask something like "both sides?" and Daniel would drag himself back to work.
In other words, they did about as good a job at portraying two months of working hard at something as you could reasonably expect in a two hour movie.
There's a similar scene in the basketball manga Slam Dunk, where the coach takes a kid who has never played basketball in his life but can jump out of the gym, and has him make 10,000 jump shots while the rest of the team is away at a tournament. In his first game after that training, he promptly shoots the ball the first time it is passed to him, and misses everything.
After watching Karate Kid recently, and having read the Slam Dunk series in Japan many years ago, I was thinking that Sakaragi-kun is the Bizarro Karate Kid.
But I don't think either Rocky or the Karate Kid greatly misrepresent the amount of effort it would take for an exceptionally talented individual, with a great trainer, to make the leaps they did.
The studies on experts found that even those who seemed at first glance to be exceptionally talented still had needed to put in at least 10,000 hours to become an expert. There do not appear to be any shortcuts.
I didn't really like the article. It's just summing up what we've known for a good time: success requires effort. I don't buy movies being the cause of it. I did find the choice of Rocky somewhat amusing though, especially when the author mentioned his book taking 8 years (albeit doing other things).
Sylvester Stallone: [Explaining to 'The New York Times' on how he wrote the script for Rocky in three days]: "I'm astounded by people who take 18 years to write something. That's how long it took that guy [Gustave Flaubert] to write 'Madame Bovary.' And was that ever on the best-seller list? No. It was a lousy book and it made a lousy movie."
Effort alone doesn't make one successful, either, and in my opinion telling people it's going to take them years to succeed is just as bad as telling them they can succeed in 21 days.
If you can stomach the voice of Anthony Robbins, there's a very interesting YouTube video with some background about Stallone and Rocky: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2AXGz4rAQg
The point of concern for me in modern mythology is not the unrealistic amount of effort required to succeed, but the portrayal of risk. If the main character is likeable, good-hearted, and he gives it his all, he never fails. Things just work out for him.
Winston Churchill said, "It is no use saying 'we are doing our best'. You have got to succeed at doing what is necessary." And at the time he said it, it was an unremarkable sentiment echoed in literature. The modern rule seems to be more along the lines of, "If you're nice and put in a decent effort, things will work out."
Some examples: Modern little orphan Annie is met with success after success and kindness after kindness in response to her charm and ingenuity, encountering only minor setbacks; her counterpart in Dickens' Oliver Twist meets nothing but disappointment and injustice for a very long time. The slight justices in the story are only those which are achieved by the characters with a lot of work and risk -- and even they, they often fail. Titanic's Rose drifts into and out of a beautiful adventure, but Gone With The Wind's Scarlet toils and schemes endlessly to gain what she has, even after losing everything through no fault of her own. The central romance of Casablanca does not simply work out as a modern audience would be accustomed to expect; the characters focus on doing what is necessary to achieve their aims.
The older stories have it right. In order to achieve something, one must assess the cost. You can't just do your best and hope. Rather--in the mode of Churchill--you must do what is necessary. And failure is familiar even to those who do that and proceed with best effort and intentions. A generation raised on Disney happy endings is learning the wrong lessons about the necessity of planning and perseverence.
Thankfully not all modern stories are like that. The notable example on my mind the book series 'Song of Ice and Fire'. So many bad things happen to good people :(
Stephen King usually deals some pretty harsh blows to his characters as well, and his sympathetic successful characters tend to get where they are by working hard.
GRRM's stuff (most prominently 'Song of Ice and Fire') is just plain bleak. Hard work isn't rewarded, because nothing is. I mean, it's good, and a valuable life lesson, but it's sure not motivational.
part of me agrees with you, but part of me also sees that our definition of "success" is a moving target. often succeeding from trying is possible, since effort leads to progress and effort creates opportunities....except that "success" has come to be more and more narrowly defined---for example, outrageously high income and celebrity status, rather than stable, sustainable job.
edit: attitude is also important to success, so it's not clear to me what the effect of "protagonist fails" would have on audiences. just as catharsis has a different effect than random-failure, inspiring success has a different effect than training-montage.
"Many of Alger's works have been described as rags to riches stories, illustrating how down-and-out boys might be able to achieve the American Dream of wealth and success through hard work, courage, determination, and concern for others. This widely held view involves Alger's characters achieving extreme wealth and the subsequent remediation of their "old ghosts." Alger is noted as a significant figure in the history of American cultural and social ideals."
My father (Moshe Yudkowsky, author: The Pebble and the Avalanche) has a similar thesis about how Star Trek caused the downfall of American engineering:
"Well, Captain, you crashed into that planet there and sheared one warp nacelle completely off. It'll take two months in dock to repair."
BJ Penn (now a UFC champion) trained in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu for 4 years before he won the world championships. Most people take 8-10 years to receive a black belt, and then a year or two to become competitive on the world level.
I don't think its unheard of that a very talented kid could find a fantastic teacher and excel in a city-wide tournament.
1) I think the point is that he wasn't. It was a movie about how his hard work got him to the point to win the tournament.
2) If he was, they would have said so.
3) Because people love movies about prodigy kids training for two months and beating someone who worked hard for years? Yeah, very uplifting, thats why we all remember this movie so fondly.
I like this article; the message really resonates with me. For instance, I write music. But a good three minute song could take me days to write (and most musical artists usually take way longer than that). I like to animate, but a minute of animation could take even longer than a minute of song. Similarly, writing a trivial game or a simple app just takes way longer than it should.
But I don't think that this sort of complete inability to gauge how long something should take to do has anything to do with the Karate Kid. Instead, I think the ubiquity of complex works makes the effort required non obvious, and even difficult, to see.
Right now, I'm hearing music on the radio, typing on Hacker News, running Google Chrome on Ubuntu, with a book next to me. Incredible amounts of work went into each of these things. It is very difficult, if not impossible, for me to fathom the amount of hours put into Ubuntu, for instance. It feels sort of like our inability to comprehend huge numbers, or the Universe - and I kind of feel like there might even be a tie in to that old Wired article about the 'Monkeysphere' somewhere. The omnipresence of complex creative works makes for two related effects: we only use those works for relatively short periods of time, and we come to take them for granted.
Surely before we were totally immersed in a world full of the products of work, we took more time to appreciate the details around us. But now we are essentially incapable of doing that. I wouldn't say that that is a bad thing; it's just a change. But it does lead to problems like the article mentioned where we can't properly understand how much work some things take.
The other issue I mentioned is that we only use these things for short periods of time. No matter how familiar we become with a game or web app, we can not fathom the amount of detail put in to that app by the creator. I'll use the example of a game: every time we play through, we will only see one path through the game. But the game creator had to account for every path (just like the creators of Ubuntu had to account for someone doing any possible action within the OS). So there are several orders of magnitude more depth in the game (or OS) then I could ever truly appreciate just by playing it.
I think that this sort of analysis can be extrapolated to all sorts of other creative mediums as well. We read a book in an hour, where the author probably labored an hour just choosing the right words for a sentence. There would be no way to appreciate that kind of work unless we spent ridiculous amounts of time reading, but we don't - like I said, we only use things for (relatively) short periods of time.
You probably read this comment in a minute or two, or maybe didn't even read it at all and just went down to the end to find the tl;dr. But it took me maybe 30 minutes to write. So there isn't one. Go read it.
This is a fine example of mediocrity, making things sound a hundred times more difficult than they really are for the sake of making a point.
The blog post is so badly riddled with fallacies that it becomes hard to figure out what the author tries to convey. An example: the author mentions that you can diet for months, with incredible effort, and still not lose weight. He's basically appealing to the reader's emotions, making you remember that last failed diet in which you ended up gaining weight. But guess what? You DIDN'T work hard enough! That's all there's to it. You just have the impression that you did. I can say this from experince, after failing many times and finally realizing what it takes.
Articles like this support the invisible walls we create for ourselves, for work, for our diets, for our addictions.
The concepts of the article are pretty foreign to me, so much so that it sounds to me like and individual who is blaming society for their ills.
My life experience has been completely the opposite of this summation. When I was a kid I was mediocre at everything, it was not until my adult life that I became exceptional, now things come easy to me. People look at me as kind of a daVinci (not claiming I have had anywhere near the impact as him) but the point is, a jack of all trades and a good enough master of them as well. I am never the best, but I am above average on almost anything I take interest in.
Anyway, wrapping this up into a point, with the ability to master anything, I stopped looking at failure as failure and looked at it as a proven iteration that does not work. I know it is cliche to say, but perception is reality and if you have a negative perception that will manifest itself in ones actions.
One of the big issues is that the human mind, unless trained, is bound to a simple understanding of time. Within that simple understanding is an internal pressure to race the clock. When one looks at time is a more spatial manner then they start to see failure as less about being set back x amount of time and rather that though the distance traveled will require some adjustment one has still traveled a distance and made progress.
I cannot stress enough that attaining the right perception can be the difference between success and resignation to defeat. The greatest key to attaining that perception, above all else is creativity.
I don't entirely agree with the author. It all depends on how you interpret the films. For me, the karate kid did not make expertise in karate look easy, but simply possible. It is important for people to realize that, given the appropriate training system, they can achieve anything, and that no domain is the exclusive preserve of the very gifted.
In my case, the film motivated me to put in the necessary hours, and to pass my black belt in shotokan karate in my early thirties, after eight years of almost daily training, the equivalent of about 5000 hours at that stage.
I don't think I was ever under the impression it was going to be easy; but I always did hold on to the belief that it was possible. So all in all, these films were a positive influence.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 164 ms ] threadAccording to the author, "Effort Shock" is the phenomenon of realizing something is a lot harder than you thought it was. Then you get depressed about it and give up. This explains failed blogs, failed diets, failed restaurants, etc.
The Karate Kid and other Rocky-esque movies ruined the world because the training montages make it seem like you can go from beginner to expert in a single Survivor song.
I was hoping the author would dig deeper into the subject, but he just repeated the same thing again and again and ended with a plug for his book.
No thanks.
Our whole society has moved towards a philosophy that children are not allowed to fail. As a result we give people easy "successes" at every opportunity, and don't let people experience the fact that they can fail. The result is people whose self-image is like a balloon - really puffed up but likely to deflate suddenly on facing a real challenge.
Obviously the opposite extreme of beating kids down is not good either. But we need a balance. And we need to drive the message home that some things take work.
Depressing as it is, I wouldn't be surprised if suicide rates climb. Durkheim would probably think so.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89mile_Durkheim
Which theory and cause? That the world is ruined and the cause is the Karate Kid? You might have taken it a bit too literally.
Our whole society has [...]
Our whole society probably hasn't. Is your argument seriously "kids these days"? Because I don't think the author is really attempting to engage in a meaningful debate on whether the Rocky montage is or is not the driving factor in our poor ability to estimate effort required. It's just a bit of hyperbole.
Maybe btilly's argument is parents these days. It isn't like kids wanted to fail in the past. The difference is that until recently, most kids on the football team didn't win any ribbons or prizes in the past, but now even the chubbiest, least co-ordinated loser is a winner who comes home with a 3rd most improved defensive player ribbon. Similarly, there was a time when an average student got a C. Now, a lackluster effort is often worth a B+.
It makes perfect sense that people will have a distorted view of how difficult success is if they are never allowed to fail, never exposed to "dangerous" playground equipment of their grandparents' day, and who are always allowed to beg an excuse to get extensions or extra test-taking time.
What's usually the biggest mental hurdle for hackers to transition into entrepreneurs?
pg: Coming to terms with the effort required.
Still, it's important to remember that some people work two full-time jobs and barely make ends meet, while others work roughly the same hours and make millions. Working smart is just as important as working hard. I suppose that's a goal of YC's -- to help us work smart while we work hard.
Intelligence is necessary so you know what to do. Persistence because the universe is messed up and not always consistent, and doing the right things might sometimes not work for no explainable reason (but also because it's impossible to account for all variables and make perfect choices all the time, so we've got to be able to absorb that).
Think about it this way: you can be smart and know how to solve a very defined problem. But even if the world is deterministic, we're not close to being able to control it through pure logic and reasoning alone. That is we don't have the computer power or mind power to identify all variables and make sure we always do the right thing. THIS is why we need to persist. Because luck and unpredictability force us to try the right methods over and over again. Even if they are right, they may not work all the time because of luck.
I think people in the "East" tend to know better than people in the "West" at just how much effort is required to become a master at something.
It's hard to become a world-class expert at anything. You need some combination of latent talent and many thousands of hours of training, hopefully with someone who really understands how to train you effectively. But I don't think either Rocky or the Karate Kid greatly misrepresent the amount of effort it would take for an exceptionally talented individual, with a great trainer, to make the leaps they did.
Kind of illustrates the writer's point, in my opinion :)
I do not really agree with the entire thesis[1], the idea is not novel and the article itself is rather awkward, but there is some truth to the assertion.
[1] Should it be that difficult to have a house and a car etc.?
Sure, we could argue about whether that assertion is correct but these comments demonstrate that at least half of the equation seems to hold.
I'm just pointing out that the article incorrectly interpreted Rocky and Karate Kid. The article says that Karate Kid is misleading because it shows people achieving expert skill in two months time. The author is incorrect because Karate Kid (and Rocky) didn't succeed based on their skills, so it's not relevant.
Did you see this New Yorker article on how the underdog can win? http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/11/090511fa_fact_...
An interesting quote from that article:
What happened, Arreguín-Toft wondered, when the underdogs likewise acknowledged their weakness and chose an unconventional strategy? He went back and re-analyzed his data. In those cases, David’s winning percentage went from 28.5 to 63.6. When underdogs choose not to play by Goliath’s rules, they win, Arreguín-Toft concluded, even when everything we think we know about power says they shouldn’t.
Being presumed weaker does not mean that you actually are. Expectations are orthogonal to actual power/skill/knowledge/etc.
There is a point to be made about choosing the correct strategy or tactic: for example, a less-skilled karateka could opt to just shoot the opponent and win the fight. It does not make them better at karate than the dead guy, though. We often have options such as that: programming is hard? Make your living doing something else. So on, but that is only a strategy for avoiding the things that we find difficult.
What is the value in having a car? Transportation. That transportation is so expensive that in much of the US it's cheaper and more convenient to own a half ton piece of steel and burn 7300 gallons of petroleum products a year than to rely on something community-based (public transport, anyone?) - does that say something about us as a nation? That we have naturally (or, as some would point out, unnaturally) drifted towards the methods of least efficiency in our society, for transport at least?
What is the value in having a house? Is it the land? I suppose land is important. What happens when your land loses value drastically, though? Turn it into farmland? Process it for trace elements?
Is it the house? The way they're built these days, they won't last another twenty years.
Our lives are transient. Shouldn't our abodes and methods of transportation be more permanent, built to outlast us and benefit future generations?
True: success takes hard work, dedication, and more hard work. That people are worried, in a modern society, about obtaining access to the very things which are necessary to /do/ that hard work (a safe home; healthy food; transportation to loved ones and places of work; knowledge) makes me sad. Lack of motivation and general ennui among the populace is not the cause of problems, but a symptom of them.
One cause, as outlined (with poor examples, nonetheless) is bubble-wrapping everything for future generations. Somehow I doubt this is the primary - or even a tertiary - cause. What are the true causes behind it?
FWIW, I think the point was that even if the kid took 2 months of "moive time", the audience perceived that time to be only a few minutes. Two months of solid work is a lot, and I don't think a few minutes of film can do justice to that.
I wanted to be able to play guitar well, but I've come to terms with the fact that I suck. People told me that continued practice would make me better. And maybe it would, to a certain degree. But no matter how much I practice, I'll never be able to play like Jimi Hendrix, because he had a very long finger spread. My hand just can't cover the same range.
Similarly, Salieri worked his butt off, just to be shown up by the upstart Mozart.
It's not fair, but some people really are better than others at certain things.
FWIW, I bet Hendricks didn't get to be Hendricks by working to emulate some other player's style. And for all we know, he may have been pissed that his big old hands got in the way of playing some other style he really liked.
Knowing you are not going to play like Hendricks, it's maybe time to play like CWuestefeld.
(Also, Django Reinhardt had a damaged left hand, with limited mobility. He kicked ass, though.)
Two months isn't NOTHING. It's just a lot less than it takes to become a world-class expert.
Karate Kid wasn't going up against a pro who'd been doing it for 20 years. He was going up against another high school kid in the "all valley championship". He had some karate background and a master trainer. It may not be totally realistic, but it's not off by such a huge amount as to be "indeed not possible".
It seems (even though the story is trying to portray something else) that they worked just a little, that it is easily achieved.
No, they dramatically sold the effort he put in very well with how pissed off Daniel is about all the time he spent painting, waxing, and polishing, without learning any "real karate." And every time he thought he finished something, Miyagi-san would ask something like "both sides?" and Daniel would drag himself back to work.
In other words, they did about as good a job at portraying two months of working hard at something as you could reasonably expect in a two hour movie.
After watching Karate Kid recently, and having read the Slam Dunk series in Japan many years ago, I was thinking that Sakaragi-kun is the Bizarro Karate Kid.
The studies on experts found that even those who seemed at first glance to be exceptionally talented still had needed to put in at least 10,000 hours to become an expert. There do not appear to be any shortcuts.
Sylvester Stallone: [Explaining to 'The New York Times' on how he wrote the script for Rocky in three days]: "I'm astounded by people who take 18 years to write something. That's how long it took that guy [Gustave Flaubert] to write 'Madame Bovary.' And was that ever on the best-seller list? No. It was a lousy book and it made a lousy movie."
Effort alone doesn't make one successful, either, and in my opinion telling people it's going to take them years to succeed is just as bad as telling them they can succeed in 21 days.
Sounds more like Stallone is advocating Minimum Viable Product.
How they ruined the franchise:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XY8amUImEu0&feature=pyv&#...
It seems like they are just using the name to get people to watch the movie, which is a completely different story.
There is also a small scene where they make fun of the original.
Winston Churchill said, "It is no use saying 'we are doing our best'. You have got to succeed at doing what is necessary." And at the time he said it, it was an unremarkable sentiment echoed in literature. The modern rule seems to be more along the lines of, "If you're nice and put in a decent effort, things will work out."
Some examples: Modern little orphan Annie is met with success after success and kindness after kindness in response to her charm and ingenuity, encountering only minor setbacks; her counterpart in Dickens' Oliver Twist meets nothing but disappointment and injustice for a very long time. The slight justices in the story are only those which are achieved by the characters with a lot of work and risk -- and even they, they often fail. Titanic's Rose drifts into and out of a beautiful adventure, but Gone With The Wind's Scarlet toils and schemes endlessly to gain what she has, even after losing everything through no fault of her own. The central romance of Casablanca does not simply work out as a modern audience would be accustomed to expect; the characters focus on doing what is necessary to achieve their aims.
The older stories have it right. In order to achieve something, one must assess the cost. You can't just do your best and hope. Rather--in the mode of Churchill--you must do what is necessary. And failure is familiar even to those who do that and proceed with best effort and intentions. A generation raised on Disney happy endings is learning the wrong lessons about the necessity of planning and perseverence.
I should probably read Oliver Twist.
But that I am surprised by seeing the hero fail in these stories is proof enough to me of the rule.
GRRM's stuff (most prominently 'Song of Ice and Fire') is just plain bleak. Hard work isn't rewarded, because nothing is. I mean, it's good, and a valuable life lesson, but it's sure not motivational.
edit: attitude is also important to success, so it's not clear to me what the effect of "protagonist fails" would have on audiences. just as catharsis has a different effect than random-failure, inspiring success has a different effect than training-montage.
Those seem to be a vanishing species, these days.
"Many of Alger's works have been described as rags to riches stories, illustrating how down-and-out boys might be able to achieve the American Dream of wealth and success through hard work, courage, determination, and concern for others. This widely held view involves Alger's characters achieving extreme wealth and the subsequent remediation of their "old ghosts." Alger is noted as a significant figure in the history of American cultural and social ideals."
"Well, Captain, you crashed into that planet there and sheared one warp nacelle completely off. It'll take two months in dock to repair."
"Dammit, Scotty, I need it in five minutes!"
"Okay."
This is not completely unheard of.
I don't think its unheard of that a very talented kid could find a fantastic teacher and excel in a city-wide tournament.
2) If he was, they would have said so.
3) Because people love movies about prodigy kids training for two months and beating someone who worked hard for years? Yeah, very uplifting, thats why we all remember this movie so fondly.
But I don't think that this sort of complete inability to gauge how long something should take to do has anything to do with the Karate Kid. Instead, I think the ubiquity of complex works makes the effort required non obvious, and even difficult, to see.
Right now, I'm hearing music on the radio, typing on Hacker News, running Google Chrome on Ubuntu, with a book next to me. Incredible amounts of work went into each of these things. It is very difficult, if not impossible, for me to fathom the amount of hours put into Ubuntu, for instance. It feels sort of like our inability to comprehend huge numbers, or the Universe - and I kind of feel like there might even be a tie in to that old Wired article about the 'Monkeysphere' somewhere. The omnipresence of complex creative works makes for two related effects: we only use those works for relatively short periods of time, and we come to take them for granted.
Surely before we were totally immersed in a world full of the products of work, we took more time to appreciate the details around us. But now we are essentially incapable of doing that. I wouldn't say that that is a bad thing; it's just a change. But it does lead to problems like the article mentioned where we can't properly understand how much work some things take.
The other issue I mentioned is that we only use these things for short periods of time. No matter how familiar we become with a game or web app, we can not fathom the amount of detail put in to that app by the creator. I'll use the example of a game: every time we play through, we will only see one path through the game. But the game creator had to account for every path (just like the creators of Ubuntu had to account for someone doing any possible action within the OS). So there are several orders of magnitude more depth in the game (or OS) then I could ever truly appreciate just by playing it.
I think that this sort of analysis can be extrapolated to all sorts of other creative mediums as well. We read a book in an hour, where the author probably labored an hour just choosing the right words for a sentence. There would be no way to appreciate that kind of work unless we spent ridiculous amounts of time reading, but we don't - like I said, we only use things for (relatively) short periods of time.
You probably read this comment in a minute or two, or maybe didn't even read it at all and just went down to the end to find the tl;dr. But it took me maybe 30 minutes to write. So there isn't one. Go read it.
The blog post is so badly riddled with fallacies that it becomes hard to figure out what the author tries to convey. An example: the author mentions that you can diet for months, with incredible effort, and still not lose weight. He's basically appealing to the reader's emotions, making you remember that last failed diet in which you ended up gaining weight. But guess what? You DIDN'T work hard enough! That's all there's to it. You just have the impression that you did. I can say this from experince, after failing many times and finally realizing what it takes.
Articles like this support the invisible walls we create for ourselves, for work, for our diets, for our addictions.
Isn't that the sole point of the article?
...actually I don't know whether to be impressed or horrified.
My life experience has been completely the opposite of this summation. When I was a kid I was mediocre at everything, it was not until my adult life that I became exceptional, now things come easy to me. People look at me as kind of a daVinci (not claiming I have had anywhere near the impact as him) but the point is, a jack of all trades and a good enough master of them as well. I am never the best, but I am above average on almost anything I take interest in.
Anyway, wrapping this up into a point, with the ability to master anything, I stopped looking at failure as failure and looked at it as a proven iteration that does not work. I know it is cliche to say, but perception is reality and if you have a negative perception that will manifest itself in ones actions.
One of the big issues is that the human mind, unless trained, is bound to a simple understanding of time. Within that simple understanding is an internal pressure to race the clock. When one looks at time is a more spatial manner then they start to see failure as less about being set back x amount of time and rather that though the distance traveled will require some adjustment one has still traveled a distance and made progress.
I cannot stress enough that attaining the right perception can be the difference between success and resignation to defeat. The greatest key to attaining that perception, above all else is creativity.
In my case, the film motivated me to put in the necessary hours, and to pass my black belt in shotokan karate in my early thirties, after eight years of almost daily training, the equivalent of about 5000 hours at that stage.
I don't think I was ever under the impression it was going to be easy; but I always did hold on to the belief that it was possible. So all in all, these films were a positive influence.