Has PG matured an incredibly amount in the last few years? Honestly, I hated his writing before (which may be part of the point, incite controversy and get me to remember who he was and what he said), but lately I've thought his essays were very well done...
Am I alone in this trend? Did he just win me over because of time?
On this particular topic he's quite right that letting your mind drift, but also controlling the environment of that can lead to good things. I'm going to actively make an effort to try this from now on.
I suspect it's because his early essays were more "political" (if you stretch that to include the politics of programming), whereas his new ones are less likely to hit any of your mental "NO" buttons.
"When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years."
-- Mark Twain
PG is a bona fide philosopher. Just as we had the epicureans and the stoics, and their houses, we now how the house of ycombinator. AFAIK PG doesn't necessarily want it to get cultish, but its not cultish if its based in reason. And based in reason it is. Articles like these are what makes yc more than just a group of people doling out money for good material ideas. Its a forum for thinking about philosophical ideas too. This makes it an idealistic culture, and thats pretty cool.
A very closely related idea is that most people have a "ground state": an activity that they naturally gravitate toward when nothing else intervenes.
For many people, their ground state is shopping, or talking with friends, or watching tv. Nothing wrong with any of these.
For some people, their ground state is aimless coding, or writing, or drifting around some community (e.g., the community of actors, or musicians, etc). Again, nothing wrong with any of these, and they may be a useful way of learning, or having ideas.
But for a very small number of people their ground state is much more focused. I've known people whose ground state is writing papers about physics or mathematics. And it's simply unbelievable what such people can get done in a year. (Note, mind you, that very few professional physicists or mathematicians fall into this category.)
I haven't founded or worked at a startup. My observation-from-the-outside is that founders often have to take on many different tasks. And I wonder how difficult that must make it for any of them to become a ground state task.
I'm more researcher than startup-type, but to me they are both about getting the 'preparation meets luck' kind of ideas where you feel like you've got a leg up on the rest of the pack. When that happens, it's all you want to think about - it's fun and exciting and hard work all at the same time. Without the combination of the idea and the preparation you don't get the self-catalyzing reaction to boost you to some new 'ground state'. You're back to watching WWII reruns on the history channel (for example).
I like your idea... it makes me wonder if it's possible to change your own "ground state". It certainly seems like it would be an awesome lifehack if you could change it over time to suit your objectives.
I would say yes. But not in the sort of way most people would hope to. Meaning, you can't just pick any new ground state and change to it very easily. Instead, you must educate yourself in new areas and you'll find yourself being driven to new ground states that were impossible options before your new education. Now you are 'falling' back into something that is, more or less, the same concept... but far more powerful now that you've given yourself more tools.
For example, my ground state used to be browsing the web and aimlessly brainstorming business ideas when I was in high school. Seven years later I've thoroughly taught myself how to build concrete business models and virtually test/evaluate them with thought experiments and many other similar concepts. Now my ground state falls to that: effectively the same sort of ground state but amplified with skills and knowledge.
My ground state appears to have consisted for some time of sitting down and reading discussion boards. Somehow, over the last month, I seem to have replaced it with instead working on my music project. It wasn't really a conscious decision, but I found I started to engage the same pattern of either completing or losing initiative in whatever I was doing, pacing aimlessly for a brief period, then almost automatically starting up my recording software instead of a web browser.
Maybe it was just as simple as finding inspiration. I've become slightly obsessed with a couple of albums recently, and have been composing more in the past few weeks than I did in the last six months.
I code all day - well, so long as I'm not on HN :)
As long as you don't believe that coding is work, you can do so much of it. Just find a project or a problem that you really enjoy working on and hack on it.
The problem with roguelikes is that while coding them is good practice, actually playing them is pretty much a pure waste of time. Which makes me wonder whether I can still justify coding them...
This can be said of any game. Whether or not something is a waste of time is determined by the user, not the creator of the game. If you like coding them, then code them and gain the experience of coding them.
i have found that if i want to be a designer, it takes a few weeks to get thinking about design, about noticing good design and bad design everywhere and the imitating it in my work. however, if i want to think about raising money, or engineering the same is also true.
so it may be possible for people to wear many hats, but maybe it's best if you only where one hat a month.
For some people, their ground state is aimless coding, or writing, or drifting around some community (e.g., the community of actors, or musicians, etc).
Mine is reading. That's why I went to grad school in English, despite the plethora of articles on why doing so is a financially bad idea.
(Well, I went to grad school because I like to read and because I have a backup plan if it fails.)
Let me give you some anecdotal background story...
I realized this was happening to me a few months ago - that I was wasting more and more time just surfing Facebook or Twitter and so forth. So I started adding websites to my /etc/hosts file. (That is, my computer now blocks me from accessing these websites, unless I edit a file, and then restart).
It started with Reddit - one day I read an article on Reddit that said something along the lines of "How many of you are intelligent, but waste a ton of time on the Internet?". It struck me that I was one of those people - that my potential was dwindling away because I was wasting tons of time on Reddit rather than getting interesting things done.
I blocked Reddit a bit later, figuring I might unblock it given time, but I never have. After the first day or two, the instinct to open up a Reddit tab just died. I still feel an attachment to the community, and I feel kind of bad that I left, but I don't feel that I was addicted like people get addicted to drugs or so forth.
Later on, I blocked some other sites that I frequent, including Facebook. I even blocked HN for a while, but I realized that I wasn't wasting nearly as much time on here as the other sites, for some reason. Perhaps it's because the rate of change of articles is small. Plus, HN has noprocrast settings, which are great. Anyway, I digress. Sure, there are disadvantages, but the advantages, and the savings in time, are huge. I know a lot of people say they don't want to leave FB because they'll lose contact with people. 2 responses: One, my last FB status says to contact me on gmail - so if anyone really wants to get in touch with me, they know how. Two, it's only blocked on my computer, so if I really want to take the effort, I can hike over to a library computer or something and respond to people.
Now, the point to this comment is to convince you that you have to block these websites too.
There are two things that I would want to tell myself in order convince myself that I needed to go through with it.
1. The reason I didn't want to do it - and didn't do it, for a long time - is because I always thought that I should just have enough will power to stop doing it. If you believe this, remind yourself that even though you believe this to be true, you keep coming back to Facebook every few hours or days. Why is that? It's because even if you have enough willpower 90% or 98% of the time, that small fraction when you don't is enough to open a tab to FB, but once you open a tab, you could end up wasting an hour.
2. You become more aware of how you spend your time, and you become more productive, after you stop wasting it. I used to dump hours into just surfing the web. Now I'm quite sensitive to how much time I spend, which is advantageous. Plus, most of the sites that I visit (like HN) require constant focus, so you can't really get into that vaguely unfocused mindset that allows you to waste tons of time on things like Facebook.
In short - you said that it had to stop now. I challenge you to follow up on it :) Blocking FB, etc, was an awesome choice on my part. I think it will be for you as well.
I wrote an ad-hoc adblocker out of /etc/hosts files and shell scripts for Mac OS X. (The shell scripts just block and unblock--unblocking is necessary sometimes for a chess site I use which detects adblockers.) Usually restarting is overkill for a new hosts file to take effect--on Mac OS X `dscacheutil -flushcache` will reinstate a hosts file. Ubuntu must have a similar command.
Summary: LeechBlock is a simple productivity tool designed to block those time-wasting sites that can suck the life out of your working day. All you need to do is specify which sites to block and when to block them.
Initially, I wanted to just temporarily block sites. But I found out after completely blocking them (just for a few days!) that the quality of my time had actually gone up dramatically. I guess your mileage may vary, though.
I think I finally connect with reason why some people here defend the community so fiercely; It is so that time spent on HN is spent learning something useful. I have probably wasted lots of time here, yes, but I have also learned so darn much!
I just need to leave a few hours of the day open to actually implement what I've learned... which I do, thankfully.
If you stop finding HN useful, or you start coming here just to burn time or be entertained or to avoid work, and you really don't put any of the things you learn here to use... then, yes, its probably time to say byebye.
I was only partially joking... I actually DO spend more time than I should on HN! You are right though - I do learn a lot from HN, but at the same time, I often browse just for the sake of it, or to procrastinate. So it goes both ways really.
If you stop finding HN useful, or you start coming here just to burn time or be entertained or to avoid work
Exactly.
and you really don't put any of the things you learn here to use
I hope that I do put the things I learn to good use! There is a lot of really useful information floating around here, I'd hate to spend all this time reading it without applying it. Most of the startup related information has yet to be applied, but I hope to soon. The programming related information does get good use though.
For the past few months, whenever I got stuck on a problem, I almost instantly stopped thinking about it and switched to a reddit tab, instinctively. I do not know why I did that, but it certainly slowed me down. Perhaps I'll become super productive and finish my thesis in the next week (unlikely :D).
Or becoming enticed in extremely interesting articles on HN when there is billing to be done, or problems to work through...
Edit: This seemed really snarky when I reread it - I do want to state emphatically that I would REALLY miss HN. But I must confess that I have to give myself a mental shove to get back to work sometimes...
And back to the point of the article, I have to keep my eyes on the path _through_ the obstacles - I think the same thing. Like my grandmother's bumper sticker "Look for the good and praise it."
Or when your reading somewhat interesting articles on subjects that are well outside your current areas. As in I find myself occasionally reading things on Haskell or Scala or some other language despite not even knowing the basics of the language.
Sounds almost like Nietzsche on solitude. If you can't control your environment then you become a product of it. It's difficult to force yourself to NOT think about something. The brain is a very reactive piece of equipment.
If I said "Don't think about the hexagon on top of Saturn" how many of you would actually be able to avoid considering it?
PG talks about the problem of having a top idea that he didn't want, something practical like making money or impractical like disputes, stealing his ambient-thought time.
I have the opposite problem: practical things that need some ambient thought to really get right (day-to-day work, money stuff) fall by the wayside, while things that I care about or find more interesting (like programming projects or relationships) take all the ambient time. Anyone else find this happening? Have coping strategies?
I guess I have a long way to go towards controlling my ambient thought. Maybe this is part of why I always had trouble "forcing myself" to study effectively?
Wow, that's an inspirational read. Thanks. Maybe I won't try to fix my "problem" :)
Hamming's Questions ("What are the most important problems in your field? Are you working on one of them? Why not?") are great, but somewhat daunting. Maybe the blow can be softened by loading those problems into ambient thought mode instead of pounding against them systematically. That was one of Feynmann's methods: keep a few hard problems in the back of your head all the time and wait to stumble on something that helps.
I have always envisioned Hamming's third question as less of a leading question and more of an honest one. Having read that lecture, I think if I said "well, because they don't pay and I have a mortgage" Hamming would have just as easily agreed and moved on. The interesting part to me about this series of questions is more that it requires being honest with yourself. That, and the fact that most of the people he asked were apparently insulted, took it negatively, and hated him for it. Not only could they not be honest with themselves, they metaphorically shot the messenger.
Still, a great series of questions to make you re-evaluate your course in life.
I think this is why meditation can be so beneficial. With practice, you can take control of the thoughts going through your mind, eventually becoming quite good at it. Later on, say at work (or in the shower), you can then make the top thing on your to-do list the top idea in your mind.
Usually my top idea is a lot more fun to think about than all the other nonsense (conflicts, minutiae, etc) so that helps too.
I love reading these essays so much. There's something about the tone, perhaps because it's slightly playful and a bit pensive, that causes the curiosity at the core of the writing to become the unstated focal point. And for some reason, I find it more enjoyable to find meaning in things when they aren't explicitly written. Kind of like a special bond you have with someone, even a perfect stranger, when you're the only group of people to really "catch the drift".
I love the process of trying to figure things out that happens in these essays. Really, it's just great. Keep it up pg.
That's funny; I'm almost sure I've read the same basic idea somewhere else within the past year or two, but I can't for the life of me remember where. I thought it was Joel on Software, but a little Googling didn't turn it up. Anyone else?
If you are deeply immersed and committed to a topic, day after day after day, your subconscious has nothing to do but work on your problem. And so you wake up one morning, or on some afternoon, and there's the answer. For those who don't get committed to their current problem, the subconscious goofs off on other things and doesn't produce the big result. So the way to manage yourself is that when you have a real important problem you don't let anything else get the center of your attention - you keep your thoughts on the problem. Keep your subconscious starved so it has to work on your problem, so you can sleep peacefully and get the answer in the morning, free.
At any given time there tends to be one problem that's the most urgent for a startup. This is what you think about as you fall asleep at night and when you take a shower in the morning. And when you start raising money, that becomes the problem you think about. You only take one shower in the morning, and if you're thinking about investors during it, then you're not thinking about the product.
"Avoid loud and aggressive persons; they are vexatious to the spirit." is a good method of keeping overly dramatic interpersonal interactions from affecting your top idea.
Wow, this is such a simple, yet powerful, idea. It's one of those "why didn't I think of that" ones. Another good time to discover your real top idea is at 3 am when you wake up thinking about it.
I realized the ability of my unconscious mind to solve hard problems some time around high school. I made good use of it in college, especially in courses involving coming up with algorithms or proofs. I could rarely come up with a good solution consciously, but if I spent 30 minutes thinking about the problem right before bed, the next morning optimal answers would come easily.
I also formed a habit of driving at least an hour away to do regular shopping (groceries and such) on weekends. The long drive on the mostly empty highways let me daydream without distraction, kind of like a long shower. I made a lot of architectural decisions for my web apps while on those drives.
One of Hugh McLeod's rules of creatives is that it's impossible to do art unless you have a day job. The mechanism is probably the same. All of my ideas I have while sitting on the rowing machine, to the point where once I've run out of sufficiently good ideas I know it's time to start getting back in shape.
My father was fond of doing cryptic cross word puzzles. He told me that sometimes there'd be a particular clue that he just couldn't wrap his head around, but if he slept on it, the answer would often pop into his mind the next morning.
Not that I disagree with the benefits of a long walk but driving in a car really helps in my opinion because of the white noise (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_noise#Applications), general silence with closed windows and change of scenery.
I don't know if white noise has really been proven to help concentrate but some people believe that. Alone in the car I've come with interresting thought and came up with good problem processing.
Showers are supposed to produced the same kind of environment (white noise and isolation from much of the external stimulus).
I find that by simply walking around the office, getting a coffee, or a snack, allows my mind to unconsciously work on an issue I'm stuck on. This happened to me two days ago, on the most recent occasion.
I find sitting in front of a monitor (attention is like bandwidth, this is like downloading multiple large files at once) blocks my ability to think clearly. If I ponder without really doing anything (low bandwidth consumption necessary, as subconscious needs all the bandwidth I can give it).
In conclusion:
- not appearing to do anything = optimal creative mode
- sitting in front of a monitor = execution mode only
Another reason why big companies are less productive. You can't simply appear to be daydreaming for half the day. Appearances are devastating to productivity.
ps. Daydreaming around the office is still far inferior to taking a long shower. It's funny that two activities that allow you to be highly creative (daydreaming in work and taking really long showers) raise awkward questions; or at the least, funny looks, from work colleagues/those you live with.
"I knew it (in the shower) was a good time to have ideas. Now I'd go further: now I'd say it's hard to do a really good job on anything you don't think about in the shower."
This is so very true. It is incredibly hard to get myself motivated about things I do not think about in the shower. On the other hand, it is impossible to stop myself from working towards things I do think about.
Sometimes this is scary -- its almost as if I don't have any control over what I will be passionately pursuing.
A nice actionable insight, "You can't directly control where your thoughts drift. If you're controlling them, they're not drifting. But can control them indirectly, by controlling what situations you let yourself get into."
The effectiveness of thinking in the shower is why I hate shower curtains. If you have a proper transparent glass shower screen instead, you can write and draw on it as it steams up.
When I get my own place, this will be my first renovation: the ultimate thinking shower.
I've used dry erase markers on my shower wall before... I have one of those pre-fab molded fiberglass showers and the back wall rarely gets wet. The marker wipes right off with the eraser.
I stopped using them in there because the smell of dry erase markers in the enclosed shower gave me a headache.
They make bathtub crayons, which are basically what you're describing. It washes off with water and a little scrubbing. Look for them online or in a toy store.
I've had conversations where I tell people that I'll do the work that they want me to, but it will only be a fore-brain effort because I've got a much more interesting problem percolating.
And I try -- hard -- to avoid working for/with/on anything that doesn't engage the back brain.
(I hear similar complaints from friends who are professors. Professors nowadays seem to have become professional fundraisers who do a little research on the side. It may be time to fix that.)
In an ideal world, you could sell the service of helping professors to prepare their research proposals. You could also keep an eye out for grants which the professors might be interested in, and generally handle the money side of things for professors who would rather be worrying about something else.
However, I don't think this would work, because the professors have no way to pay you. As far as I know, no funding agency will fund you for the cost of contracting someone to prepare your grants for you. And they probably won't want to do it out of their own pocket, because; heck, this kind of service will be really expensive (and professors hate funding their research out of their salaries anyway).
But if you've got another business model, I'm all ears.
I know a company (and its founder) who did exactly that, with success. Apparently research institutions have some buffer funds, and if they have a decent chance of getting more funding, will use them to commission such services. What they did was writing the proposal, proofreading and editing input supplied by partners, then taking a share in the project and dealing with management and documentation. Pretty much exactly what you describe here.
Glander best describes the notion of lifting all inhibitions to “tinker intellectually in an undirected stochastic process aiming at capturing some idea that will enrich your corpus”. “Researching” or “thinking” smack of a top-down activity." More on Glander by Taleb: "It is an irony that the academy does not have a word for the process by which discovery works best –but slang does. I was trying to describe in a letter what I am currently doing: French would not let me. But argot lends itself very well... I am involved in an activity called “Glander”, more precisely “glandouiller”. It means “to idle”, though not “to be in a state of idleness” (it is an active verb). Gandouiller denotes enjoyment. The formal French word is “ne rien faire” (to do nothing), which misses on the active part –so do words that have a languishing connotation. Glander is what children without soccer moms do when they are out of school. It resembles flâner which has this perambulation part; though Glander does not have any strings attached. The Italians have farniente but it is really doing nothing. Even the Arabs do not have a verb for Glander: the construction takaslana from the Semitic root ksl denotes laziness (other words imply some inertia)."
Newton was a “glandeur”; In Dijksterhuis 2004:
George Spencer Brown has famously said about Sir Isaac Newton that “to arrive at the simplest truth, as Newton knew and practiced, requires years of contemplation. Not activity. Not reasoning. Not calculating. Not busy behavior of any kind. Not reading. Not talking. Not making an effort. Not thinking. Simply bearing in mind what it is that one needs to know.”
What a marvelous paragraph. It almost makes me want to give Taleb a second chance (Fooled by Randomness did nothing for me). This is a sharp observation:
Glander is what children without soccer moms do when they are out of school.
I'm reminded of someone (maybe John Taylor Gatto) who wrote about the education he got as a boy from long hours spent at a pond.
Also interesting that while he addresses the lack of similar words in Arabic and Italian, he doesn't mention the lack of such a word in English, which of course is the only reason he's writing the paragraph to begin with. "Idleness" is loaded with a Protestant strain of the moralism he's objecting to. I suppose colloquialisms like "hanging out" and "chilling" convey something of the idea, but lack its generative core. "Reverie" comes to mind as having a similar quality; telling, perhaps, that it too is French.
I'm reminded of someone (maybe John Taylor Gatto) who wrote about the education he got as a boy from long hours spent at a pond.
If you discover what you were referring to, please post. I am curious to read about that. I did a bit of searching and as far as I can find, Gatto discussed ponds and education in relation to Thoreau's Walden Pond experience.
That's from the online version of "The Underground History of American Education", which is worth reading in its entirety. The published version is even better and has been updated and corrected. Enjoy!
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For me I find if I DONT "steal" back the time to pursue the top idea I will perform poorly on what ever else I am trying to get done (contract work). So it is actually necessary to "procrastinate" and flesh the idea out - more often than not it ends up being something that has far greater worth than the "paying" contract work.
202 comments
[ 6.7 ms ] story [ 247 ms ] threadAm I alone in this trend? Did he just win me over because of time?
On this particular topic he's quite right that letting your mind drift, but also controlling the environment of that can lead to good things. I'm going to actively make an effort to try this from now on.
snark/
Background on sensate, ideational, and idealistic cultures. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitirim_Sorokin
For many people, their ground state is shopping, or talking with friends, or watching tv. Nothing wrong with any of these.
For some people, their ground state is aimless coding, or writing, or drifting around some community (e.g., the community of actors, or musicians, etc). Again, nothing wrong with any of these, and they may be a useful way of learning, or having ideas.
But for a very small number of people their ground state is much more focused. I've known people whose ground state is writing papers about physics or mathematics. And it's simply unbelievable what such people can get done in a year. (Note, mind you, that very few professional physicists or mathematicians fall into this category.)
I haven't founded or worked at a startup. My observation-from-the-outside is that founders often have to take on many different tasks. And I wonder how difficult that must make it for any of them to become a ground state task.
For example, my ground state used to be browsing the web and aimlessly brainstorming business ideas when I was in high school. Seven years later I've thoroughly taught myself how to build concrete business models and virtually test/evaluate them with thought experiments and many other similar concepts. Now my ground state falls to that: effectively the same sort of ground state but amplified with skills and knowledge.
Maybe it was just as simple as finding inspiration. I've become slightly obsessed with a couple of albums recently, and have been composing more in the past few weeks than I did in the last six months.
It's helped a lot, but I would like to push it further.
As long as you don't believe that coding is work, you can do so much of it. Just find a project or a problem that you really enjoy working on and hack on it.
I do it because I enjoy it.
Nobody's going to pay me to (edit: because I'm not a tenured professor) make finite state machines, toy languages in LLVM, and roguelikes.
so it may be possible for people to wear many hats, but maybe it's best if you only where one hat a month.
Mine is reading. That's why I went to grad school in English, despite the plethora of articles on why doing so is a financially bad idea.
(Well, I went to grad school because I like to read and because I have a backup plan if it fails.)
Unfortunately,I am becoming most people and that has to stop now.
Let me give you some anecdotal background story...
I realized this was happening to me a few months ago - that I was wasting more and more time just surfing Facebook or Twitter and so forth. So I started adding websites to my /etc/hosts file. (That is, my computer now blocks me from accessing these websites, unless I edit a file, and then restart).
It started with Reddit - one day I read an article on Reddit that said something along the lines of "How many of you are intelligent, but waste a ton of time on the Internet?". It struck me that I was one of those people - that my potential was dwindling away because I was wasting tons of time on Reddit rather than getting interesting things done.
I blocked Reddit a bit later, figuring I might unblock it given time, but I never have. After the first day or two, the instinct to open up a Reddit tab just died. I still feel an attachment to the community, and I feel kind of bad that I left, but I don't feel that I was addicted like people get addicted to drugs or so forth.
Later on, I blocked some other sites that I frequent, including Facebook. I even blocked HN for a while, but I realized that I wasn't wasting nearly as much time on here as the other sites, for some reason. Perhaps it's because the rate of change of articles is small. Plus, HN has noprocrast settings, which are great. Anyway, I digress. Sure, there are disadvantages, but the advantages, and the savings in time, are huge. I know a lot of people say they don't want to leave FB because they'll lose contact with people. 2 responses: One, my last FB status says to contact me on gmail - so if anyone really wants to get in touch with me, they know how. Two, it's only blocked on my computer, so if I really want to take the effort, I can hike over to a library computer or something and respond to people.
Now, the point to this comment is to convince you that you have to block these websites too.
There are two things that I would want to tell myself in order convince myself that I needed to go through with it.
1. The reason I didn't want to do it - and didn't do it, for a long time - is because I always thought that I should just have enough will power to stop doing it. If you believe this, remind yourself that even though you believe this to be true, you keep coming back to Facebook every few hours or days. Why is that? It's because even if you have enough willpower 90% or 98% of the time, that small fraction when you don't is enough to open a tab to FB, but once you open a tab, you could end up wasting an hour.
2. You become more aware of how you spend your time, and you become more productive, after you stop wasting it. I used to dump hours into just surfing the web. Now I'm quite sensitive to how much time I spend, which is advantageous. Plus, most of the sites that I visit (like HN) require constant focus, so you can't really get into that vaguely unfocused mindset that allows you to waste tons of time on things like Facebook.
In short - you said that it had to stop now. I challenge you to follow up on it :) Blocking FB, etc, was an awesome choice on my part. I think it will be for you as well.
Our of curiosity, what operating system do you use? On Windows, hosts entries take effect immediately. No need to restart.
http://visitsteve.com/work/selfcontrol/
Summary: LeechBlock is a simple productivity tool designed to block those time-wasting sites that can suck the life out of your working day. All you need to do is specify which sites to block and when to block them.
I think I finally connect with reason why some people here defend the community so fiercely; It is so that time spent on HN is spent learning something useful. I have probably wasted lots of time here, yes, but I have also learned so darn much!
I just need to leave a few hours of the day open to actually implement what I've learned... which I do, thankfully.
If you stop finding HN useful, or you start coming here just to burn time or be entertained or to avoid work, and you really don't put any of the things you learn here to use... then, yes, its probably time to say byebye.
I was only partially joking... I actually DO spend more time than I should on HN! You are right though - I do learn a lot from HN, but at the same time, I often browse just for the sake of it, or to procrastinate. So it goes both ways really.
If you stop finding HN useful, or you start coming here just to burn time or be entertained or to avoid work
Exactly.
and you really don't put any of the things you learn here to use
I hope that I do put the things I learn to good use! There is a lot of really useful information floating around here, I'd hate to spend all this time reading it without applying it. Most of the startup related information has yet to be applied, but I hope to soon. The programming related information does get good use though.
For the past few months, whenever I got stuck on a problem, I almost instantly stopped thinking about it and switched to a reddit tab, instinctively. I do not know why I did that, but it certainly slowed me down. Perhaps I'll become super productive and finish my thesis in the next week (unlikely :D).
I went a half-step further and setup my hosts file to point certain domains to a page that says JFDI (unabbreviated).
It gives me a nice reminder to go work on things that matter.
Edit: This seemed really snarky when I reread it - I do want to state emphatically that I would REALLY miss HN. But I must confess that I have to give myself a mental shove to get back to work sometimes...
And back to the point of the article, I have to keep my eyes on the path _through_ the obstacles - I think the same thing. Like my grandmother's bumper sticker "Look for the good and praise it."
Thank you.
If I said "Don't think about the hexagon on top of Saturn" how many of you would actually be able to avoid considering it?
I have the opposite problem: practical things that need some ambient thought to really get right (day-to-day work, money stuff) fall by the wayside, while things that I care about or find more interesting (like programming projects or relationships) take all the ambient time. Anyone else find this happening? Have coping strategies?
I guess I have a long way to go towards controlling my ambient thought. Maybe this is part of why I always had trouble "forcing myself" to study effectively?
Yup. Nope.
http://paulgraham.com/procrastination.html
Hamming's Questions ("What are the most important problems in your field? Are you working on one of them? Why not?") are great, but somewhat daunting. Maybe the blow can be softened by loading those problems into ambient thought mode instead of pounding against them systematically. That was one of Feynmann's methods: keep a few hard problems in the back of your head all the time and wait to stumble on something that helps.
Still, a great series of questions to make you re-evaluate your course in life.
Usually my top idea is a lot more fun to think about than all the other nonsense (conflicts, minutiae, etc) so that helps too.
I love the process of trying to figure things out that happens in these essays. Really, it's just great. Keep it up pg.
If you are deeply immersed and committed to a topic, day after day after day, your subconscious has nothing to do but work on your problem. And so you wake up one morning, or on some afternoon, and there's the answer. For those who don't get committed to their current problem, the subconscious goofs off on other things and doesn't produce the big result. So the way to manage yourself is that when you have a real important problem you don't let anything else get the center of your attention - you keep your thoughts on the problem. Keep your subconscious starved so it has to work on your problem, so you can sleep peacefully and get the answer in the morning, free.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1244308
At any given time there tends to be one problem that's the most urgent for a startup. This is what you think about as you fall asleep at night and when you take a shower in the morning. And when you start raising money, that becomes the problem you think about. You only take one shower in the morning, and if you're thinking about investors during it, then you're not thinking about the product.
http://www.fleurdelis.com/desiderata.htm
"Avoid loud and aggressive persons; they are vexatious to the spirit." is a good method of keeping overly dramatic interpersonal interactions from affecting your top idea.
I also formed a habit of driving at least an hour away to do regular shopping (groceries and such) on weekends. The long drive on the mostly empty highways let me daydream without distraction, kind of like a long shower. I made a lot of architectural decisions for my web apps while on those drives.
I don't know if white noise has really been proven to help concentrate but some people believe that. Alone in the car I've come with interresting thought and came up with good problem processing.
Showers are supposed to produced the same kind of environment (white noise and isolation from much of the external stimulus).
I find sitting in front of a monitor (attention is like bandwidth, this is like downloading multiple large files at once) blocks my ability to think clearly. If I ponder without really doing anything (low bandwidth consumption necessary, as subconscious needs all the bandwidth I can give it).
In conclusion:
- not appearing to do anything = optimal creative mode
- sitting in front of a monitor = execution mode only
Another reason why big companies are less productive. You can't simply appear to be daydreaming for half the day. Appearances are devastating to productivity.
ps. Daydreaming around the office is still far inferior to taking a long shower. It's funny that two activities that allow you to be highly creative (daydreaming in work and taking really long showers) raise awkward questions; or at the least, funny looks, from work colleagues/those you live with.
This is so very true. It is incredibly hard to get myself motivated about things I do not think about in the shower. On the other hand, it is impossible to stop myself from working towards things I do think about.
Sometimes this is scary -- its almost as if I don't have any control over what I will be passionately pursuing.
When I get my own place, this will be my first renovation: the ultimate thinking shower.
I'd buy a dozen.
I stopped using them in there because the smell of dry erase markers in the enclosed shower gave me a headache.
But it can be done.
Calvin bugs his mom about money
Calvin's mom is exasperated
Calvin asks his mom for soap. "Yes, have all the soap you want"
Calvin sitting before his parents' car, grinning, with "4 SALE, CHEEP" written across the windshield
Maybe you should buy some soap?
I've had conversations where I tell people that I'll do the work that they want me to, but it will only be a fore-brain effort because I've got a much more interesting problem percolating.
And I try -- hard -- to avoid working for/with/on anything that doesn't engage the back brain.
Now there's a startup idea!
In an ideal world, you could sell the service of helping professors to prepare their research proposals. You could also keep an eye out for grants which the professors might be interested in, and generally handle the money side of things for professors who would rather be worrying about something else.
However, I don't think this would work, because the professors have no way to pay you. As far as I know, no funding agency will fund you for the cost of contracting someone to prepare your grants for you. And they probably won't want to do it out of their own pocket, because; heck, this kind of service will be really expensive (and professors hate funding their research out of their salaries anyway).
But if you've got another business model, I'm all ears.
Glander best describes the notion of lifting all inhibitions to “tinker intellectually in an undirected stochastic process aiming at capturing some idea that will enrich your corpus”. “Researching” or “thinking” smack of a top-down activity." More on Glander by Taleb: "It is an irony that the academy does not have a word for the process by which discovery works best –but slang does. I was trying to describe in a letter what I am currently doing: French would not let me. But argot lends itself very well... I am involved in an activity called “Glander”, more precisely “glandouiller”. It means “to idle”, though not “to be in a state of idleness” (it is an active verb). Gandouiller denotes enjoyment. The formal French word is “ne rien faire” (to do nothing), which misses on the active part –so do words that have a languishing connotation. Glander is what children without soccer moms do when they are out of school. It resembles flâner which has this perambulation part; though Glander does not have any strings attached. The Italians have farniente but it is really doing nothing. Even the Arabs do not have a verb for Glander: the construction takaslana from the Semitic root ksl denotes laziness (other words imply some inertia)."
Newton was a “glandeur”; In Dijksterhuis 2004:
George Spencer Brown has famously said about Sir Isaac Newton that “to arrive at the simplest truth, as Newton knew and practiced, requires years of contemplation. Not activity. Not reasoning. Not calculating. Not busy behavior of any kind. Not reading. Not talking. Not making an effort. Not thinking. Simply bearing in mind what it is that one needs to know.”
— Excerpt from The Black Swan
So do all french speakers :)
Glander is what children without soccer moms do when they are out of school.
I'm reminded of someone (maybe John Taylor Gatto) who wrote about the education he got as a boy from long hours spent at a pond.
Also interesting that while he addresses the lack of similar words in Arabic and Italian, he doesn't mention the lack of such a word in English, which of course is the only reason he's writing the paragraph to begin with. "Idleness" is loaded with a Protestant strain of the moralism he's objecting to. I suppose colloquialisms like "hanging out" and "chilling" convey something of the idea, but lack its generative core. "Reverie" comes to mind as having a similar quality; telling, perhaps, that it too is French.
If you discover what you were referring to, please post. I am curious to read about that. I did a bit of searching and as far as I can find, Gatto discussed ponds and education in relation to Thoreau's Walden Pond experience.
That's from the online version of "The Underground History of American Education", which is worth reading in its entirety. The published version is even better and has been updated and corrected. Enjoy!
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