> Rather, it's that these interviews really, truly are an accurate description of what was going on in their head during the game. It's our fault for expecting a compelling narrative. Our expectation of divining some deep insight into their creative process is fundamentally flawed.
--
This point is pretty spot on. I can imagine that when you're doing something that is percieved in hindsight as "great"; if you spent all your time doing it thinking about how "great" it was, you'd probably make all the wrong choices because you'd be all worried about making it look "great" in hindsight.
What I'm about to say might be absurd, but I've found this to be true of me playing computer games. I'll use Civilization II as an example -- I used to play Civilization II quite a bit, and occasionally I did absurdly well. If it ever got to that point and I paused to look at how good I was doing, I would then get out of the flow and be worried about messing up the game, worried if I was doing everything optimal, etc. I would inevitably end up not doing as well as I would have if I just kept on playing as normal.
"I am not sure if Dr. Seuss realized that this particular book would hold deep significance to anyone, or that generations of young people would be given this book as a graduation present."
I'm sure no one could have predicted just how successful it would become, but he did put an enormous amount of thought into the messages he was sending. This NPR interview with the author of a new book about Dr. Seuss is very interesting:
He made a lot of war propaganda early on in his career, and it seems that this is one of the things that had a profound impact on him and the later books were partly an attempt to make up for that.
I don't think "what were you thinking when you created this" is EVER that interesting a question. Too short a time interval, and too vague and undirected. "What were you thinking when you typed this semicolon?"
However, two types of questions are interesting (at least for me -- of engineers and entrepreneurs; not really that interested in athletes or musicians, but I think it's general).
1) How did you solve this specific problem or decide to make these specific tradeoffs (micro)
2) How did you get to this point (macro) (this has to be asked in a more specific way, unless the person is a really skilled or experienced interviewee
> "What were you thinking when you typed this semicolon?"
When someone asks me this (or questions like it, since I don't type that many semicolons these days) I always reply "Stop looking at the trees. See the forest".
I'm not sure this makes me any more popular, but if you see semicolons (or parens, or whitespace) you are not reading the code. Sometimes, this has to be pointed out.
Agree and it feeds into the idea that you need to have some grand plan in your mind at all times. When you read stories about people in the news they are always presented as very clearly being "a" or "b". "He always knew he wanted to be President" or "He wanted to be a ball player but ended up being President". Anyway the question can in some cases even be annoying and make you feel defensive. I dated a girl once who insisted on knowing what it was I liked about a particular dish. Why is it important why I like pizza? I just like pizza. Think a minute (if you are a straight guy) about why you like tits. Go ahead. Not sure about you but I can't answer that question. I just like the way they look. Is that an adequate answer? It triggers some thing in me that makes me feel good. I think it's easier many times to describe what you don't like, than what you like. I like air conditioning because high humidity makes me feel yucky. So air conditioning helps me avoid a negative feeling.
I think the key is like you detailed. In the specificity of the question.
The thing that annoys me most about it is the "kudos" thing that animates on mouse-over. I've accidentally "given" kudos a couple of times before I figured out what it was so I could avoid it.
I am currently battling depression and this video brought me to tears. I had never heard of Oh, the Places You'll Go before this blog post but, to me, it is already a mini-masterpiece. Thank you for linking to this video.
Oh the Places You'll Go is a superb children's book that takes apart difficult problems such as conformity, risk-taking, complacency and failure. It follows a young protagonist through a psychedelic landscape discussing the painful, confusing and wonderful places we will all eventually go -- if we just try. What could be better?
"During my tenure in the music industry, my favorite part was getting to meet people that created truly Great music."
...
"What is fascinating to me is that Great creation stories all sound surprisingly similar. Something along the lines of “yeah we went in the studio and put down some tracks, and they sounded pretty good, and we had to redo a couple of things, and then when put out the album.”"
Do we have any info on the process that the people who didn't create "great" music used? Perhaps many of those used the same process. And what is the definition of "great" music anyway? Is it music that wins awards, or, the most popular music, or music that is critically acclaimed or music that is downloaded the most?
This is by far my favorite children's book; I read it to my son at least once a week. After our first reading, I immediately realized how relevant its message is to entrepreneurs, so I'm glad to see it show up on Hacker News. One more blog post I should have written only to see someone else beat me to it. =)
Its basic message is to embrace failure. You're going to fail, things will be difficult, and you probably won't be great at everything. All of that should absolutely not deter you from trying what you want and living the life you want to live.
We discovered it after grabbing the various Seuss books at the library for my daughter. It is inspiring, but would have to say the Lorax is still our favorite. (Not to be confused with the noisy garbage that arrived in cinemas this year.)
A friend performed it as a reading during our wedding ceremony - it was particularly fitting as we had just quit our jobs and were about to embark on an open ended round-the-world honeymoon.
>"when an athlete is interviewed and says things like “well, we just went out there to play today, and we got some good momentum and powered through the other team,” it's not that the athlete is a moron lacking the cognitive capacity to accurately explain to us what happened out on the field that day. Rather, it's that these interviews really, truly are an accurate description of what was going on in their head during the game."
There's a bit of a switch from a last shot question to a "what do you think of your team" question. Intelligent thoughtful and specific answers to questions about specific plays are quite common (e.g. Tiger Woods discussing his shots after a match).
What is common is that athletes may be less articulate than your typical office professional when describing those events. This interview with Wayne Rooney regarding his goal of the year hits some of the issues: http://espnfc.com/us/en/news/1071240/beautiful-game-beautifu...
BTW, the best Dr Seuss book is "One Fish, Two Fish."
"Similarly, in software, you can't be thinking about which programming language you are using, and whether you are using MongoDB or MySQL, or whether photogrid layouts are the hot new thing or not. You will never hit the proverbial fastball if that is the sort of junk filling your head. Rather, creating and shipping products needs to be muscle memory. You just need to have clear eyes, a full heart, and be ready to show up and play."
Muscle memory comes from doing something many times. Watch the new barristas at Starbucks and compare how they use their hands to vs experienced barristas. Or a plumber. Or a physician. Or a programmer.
It takes time. Unless I am understanding what the OP is saying he seems to be implying that you can "just do it" and be in the zone that allows you to avoid thinking about "which programming language you are using".
When someone asks me a question about something that I have years of experience in I have all the answers immediately without thinking and I know the questions to ask and the nuances and can even correct the wrong information being given to me. That took years reading, learning and experiencing things. It doesn't come overnight. Along the way the learning process did involve "junk filling" my head.
I always wondered if people like the guys in Led Zeppelin realized, as they were writing some of their most epic and timeless songs, that they were creating something as truly significant as they were. Perhaps when you're creating something as an individual, it's hard to know that you're doing something great as it happens. But I'm curious if it's the same when you're 4 people in a room and that "magic" happens that can only be experienced when you've found that fit with other creatives that results in something truly original and innovative. I feel like, on some level, in cases like that, they had to know.
I think Page and Plant did know. We learn and live by how others react to us. It's how we get a sense of who we are, how "good looking" and "smart" we are. It's a constant process of self and peer evaluation and grading, although often implicit.
Page didn't always rock. No doubt he had to figure it out like everyone else, but when he did he was clearly a Great song writer and riff maker. And that's Great with a capital G.
What's so interesting about this is that the key message in "Oh, the Places You'll Go" is one which resonates for adults. Too many of our childrens books condescend.
thinking dogma, all over again!
(i.e. when thinking is seen as the opposite of doing .. and therefore bad!)
thinking is not bad ... you can think and still make great things, greatness doesn't have to be spontaneous or reactive ... it can be well thought, laid out and planned
just think about it .... and oh, the places you'll go :)
"Similarly, in software, you can't be thinking about which programming language you are using ... MongoDB or MySQL... You will never hit the proverbial fastball if that is the sort of junk filling your head. Rather, creating and shipping products needs to be muscle memory."
That's a vague statement, but I interpret "muscle memory" to mean "have a good default toolset" in this context.
It makes a lot of sense to have a default toolset -- tools that work well in a lot of situations that you understand very well, which together cover most of the problem space you work in. That frees you from getting lost in the weeds trying to decide which tool to use each time. However, it still very much matters what tools are in that default toolset.
It takes a lot of effort and study to understand and choose the right set of default tools. If the options are MySQL and Postgres (or ruby/python, etc.), you need to pick only one as your default choice, otherwise you get distracted trying to make that decision for every project. It's not so much whether the technology overlaps or not, it's whether you perceive the applicability to overlap. For instance, if you perceive MongoDB to be useful as a primary datastore, it can't easily coexist in the default toolset with a SQL system; but it can if you perceive MongoDB to be more of a caching layer or for special-purpose processing.
Of course, you should recognize the signals when you're dealing with a different kind of problem that may require a non-default tool.
I interpret "muscle memory" to mean "have a good default toolset" in this context.
I don't. In sports, we use "muscle memory" to refer to on-the-fly adaptations that athletes have to perform without conscious thought. For example, a basketball player sees his defender lean too far in one direction, and he automatically knows when to stop, jump and shoot in order to avoid being blocked. The shooter did not have to consciously think "Oh, he leaned that way, so I need to correct this way." That's too slow. The right thing to do is ingrained from hours of drilling and live practice. My sport of choice is Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and I see the same thing with myself all the time. When I feel my opponents weight shift, I don't consciously think about how to flip him over. If I do, he'll already have moved. I just know what to do, based on years of drilling and live training.
So, I extend the metaphor to software to rather the opposite of what you said. Always applying a default toolset is the opposite of on-the-fly adaptations. "Muscle memory" for solving software problems is being able to reason about what you know you can handle without having to pick a technology up front. It's having an intuition of what what the technology allows you to do. You're not thinking in terms of technology, you're thinking in terms of solving the problem and being able to easily classify things as "I know how to handle" and "I don't know yet how to handle."
The benefit of software over sports is that we have the luxury of time; we have the time to check our intuitive guesses through rational evaluation.
There is a quote, I'm not sure the answer but in a nutshell is says that amateurs practice until they get it right. Professionals practice until they can't get it wrong. I think that is very true in all disciplines.
Why does this sort of stuff get up-voted on HN? It's pure blog-spew. Sunday feel-good bad-analogy flattering nonsense. You don't think this is nonsense? The term "muscle memory" in the context of CS is incoherent. As for important choices like programming language and database...these are the sorts of choices that make or break projects. These choices are not "junk filling your head". In fact, when I think "junk", this story comes to mind.
A fastball is over in a few second, but product development is vastly more complex, and good products can take years to develop.
The next time you up-vote a story on HN, think critically about the work. Are the analogies good? Where do they break down? Is he making serious arguments or just expressing counter-intuitive opinions to get attention?
How much muscle memory did Zuckerberg have? Couldn't have been that much as he was so young.
I think this post is missing a larger point. You don't need to get to the point that "creating and shipping products is muscle memory". You just need to ship products. We've all seen the examples of Rovio (60+ products before a hit) or Id (4 products before hit?). And there's probably also plenty of examples of first product hits as well. Seems like important part is shipping. Not being a master of your craft.
Of course maybe that's not what people want to hear and I certainly would like to know tips that would make it more likely that the things I ship, write, create will be well received and popular but I can certainly name many products, libraries, app that are not the product of "someone with a finely honed craft."
And so that's the true story. It's not that people who do great things don't have an interesting story because to them it's just a normal day and they're so awesome they don't recognize it. It's that greatness comes from doing. The more you do the more chances for greatness.
"It's not that people who do great things don't have an interesting story because to them it's just a normal day and they're so awesome they don't recognize it."
"Great" things also depends on your timing and what the competition is doing. (Remember Job's Newton?) Bad timing could be having the right product at the wrong time. Good timing a little earlier than the competition in some cases. As well as luck. And also honesty and how you deal with people you work with, suppliers. And this only scratches the surface.
I mean even with respect to sports the winner in any given year is dependent on the quality of the other teams or individuals playing, right? The second fastest man would be the fastest if the fastest didn't run that race.
"It's that greatness comes from doing. The more you do the more chances for greatness."
And in a sense the key to the VC business. If you put your money behind enough possibilities (with some reasonable vetting) some of those ideas will succeed. I mean if they could predict better the ideas that would hit (even assuming the timing was right and there was nobody else trying the same idea) they would have a much better success rate than what the currently have, right? The success rate is not great actually.
"I certainly would like to know tips that would make it more likely that the things I ship, write, create will be well received and popular"
One of the problems with reading to much about what others say (on HN or elsewhere) is that you get a watered down version of the world since there are always different points of view. (Horse by committee is a camel?) No single vision directing things. To many points of view. Something that I am able to achieve given my skills, knowledge the way I was raised and a million other variables might not be the right approach for you. Just like you may be able to walk up to a random woman in a bar and pick her up with a line and an approach that wouldn't work for me. Just like Jobs could make people do things by his words and his presence, his looks, his voice that (insert smart but dull person here) can't.
I don't think you're contradicting the essay. I absolutely agree that the more you produce, the more likely you are to produce something great. But it's also true that the more you produce, the individual likelihood that each particular work will be great increases - assuming, of course, that you are mastering your craft and approaching the "muscle memory" level of ability.
You picked the perfect example to be wrong about :)
Facebook ships every day, and in the early days they shipped continually because they were editing the code on the live servers (no revision control even). I doubt that anyone would have called the very first version of facebook "great", but they've shipped thousands of times since then, and now they have product with a billion users. And of course Facebook wasn't his first product either -- remember the Facemash story?
In general, I find that a close inspection of these success stories only uncovers a hidden backstory where, in fact, the protagonists are developing "muscle memory." And this doesn't necessarily mean that they were building a startup, were the best in their field, or even went through the commercial marketplace! It means only that they accumulated the right mix of skills and experience to see - and then reach - success.
Clearly Zuckerberg was, at the bare minimum, used to whipping up CRUD-style web sites - and had even started taking on contract work - before he decided to start on Facebook. He didn't wake up one day, say "social networks, what a great idea," and learn PHP and MySQL all at once. He arrived at a position where it was natural to work on one as an extrapolation from his existing experience, an incremental leap out of the comfort zone.
Just "doing" is not equivalent; lots of people "do" every day, but don't grow or challenge themselves.
My sister sent me a copy of this book when I finally completed my associate's degree (as a graduation present -- along with a stuffed toy in cap and gown announcing "I iz a brane."). It's a wonderful little book.
In addition to having this book in our kids' collection, my wife gave this book to the young gal she donated a kidney to a year ago this week. As with many well done pieces of art, I am sure, it is amazing how one thing can take many different shapes for so many people.
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[ 6.1 ms ] story [ 104 ms ] thread--
This point is pretty spot on. I can imagine that when you're doing something that is percieved in hindsight as "great"; if you spent all your time doing it thinking about how "great" it was, you'd probably make all the wrong choices because you'd be all worried about making it look "great" in hindsight.
I'm sure no one could have predicted just how successful it would become, but he did put an enormous amount of thought into the messages he was sending. This NPR interview with the author of a new book about Dr. Seuss is very interesting:
http://www.npr.org/2011/10/05/141085044/gustav-tadd-and-todd...
He made a lot of war propaganda early on in his career, and it seems that this is one of the things that had a profound impact on him and the later books were partly an attempt to make up for that.
However, two types of questions are interesting (at least for me -- of engineers and entrepreneurs; not really that interested in athletes or musicians, but I think it's general).
1) How did you solve this specific problem or decide to make these specific tradeoffs (micro)
2) How did you get to this point (macro) (this has to be asked in a more specific way, unless the person is a really skilled or experienced interviewee
When someone asks me this (or questions like it, since I don't type that many semicolons these days) I always reply "Stop looking at the trees. See the forest".
I'm not sure this makes me any more popular, but if you see semicolons (or parens, or whitespace) you are not reading the code. Sometimes, this has to be pointed out.
Agree and it feeds into the idea that you need to have some grand plan in your mind at all times. When you read stories about people in the news they are always presented as very clearly being "a" or "b". "He always knew he wanted to be President" or "He wanted to be a ball player but ended up being President". Anyway the question can in some cases even be annoying and make you feel defensive. I dated a girl once who insisted on knowing what it was I liked about a particular dish. Why is it important why I like pizza? I just like pizza. Think a minute (if you are a straight guy) about why you like tits. Go ahead. Not sure about you but I can't answer that question. I just like the way they look. Is that an adequate answer? It triggers some thing in me that makes me feel good. I think it's easier many times to describe what you don't like, than what you like. I like air conditioning because high humidity makes me feel yucky. So air conditioning helps me avoid a negative feeling.
I think the key is like you detailed. In the specificity of the question.
Obtvse - https://github.com/natew/obtvse
Simple - https://github.com/orf/simple
When I manually drag the text pane over to the left (sigh), it overlaps the buttons transparently, then eventually redraws over them.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahv_1IS7SiE
Enjoy. Or get moved. Whatever works for you.
"What is fascinating to me is that Great creation stories all sound surprisingly similar. Something along the lines of “yeah we went in the studio and put down some tracks, and they sounded pretty good, and we had to redo a couple of things, and then when put out the album.”"
Do we have any info on the process that the people who didn't create "great" music used? Perhaps many of those used the same process. And what is the definition of "great" music anyway? Is it music that wins awards, or, the most popular music, or music that is critically acclaimed or music that is downloaded the most?
Its basic message is to embrace failure. You're going to fail, things will be difficult, and you probably won't be great at everything. All of that should absolutely not deter you from trying what you want and living the life you want to live.
A friend gave me this book when I quit my salary job 3 years ago; I've read it to my 2yr old boy many, many times.
There's a bit of a switch from a last shot question to a "what do you think of your team" question. Intelligent thoughtful and specific answers to questions about specific plays are quite common (e.g. Tiger Woods discussing his shots after a match).
What is common is that athletes may be less articulate than your typical office professional when describing those events. This interview with Wayne Rooney regarding his goal of the year hits some of the issues: http://espnfc.com/us/en/news/1071240/beautiful-game-beautifu...
BTW, the best Dr Seuss book is "One Fish, Two Fish."
Muscle memory comes from doing something many times. Watch the new barristas at Starbucks and compare how they use their hands to vs experienced barristas. Or a plumber. Or a physician. Or a programmer.
It takes time. Unless I am understanding what the OP is saying he seems to be implying that you can "just do it" and be in the zone that allows you to avoid thinking about "which programming language you are using".
When someone asks me a question about something that I have years of experience in I have all the answers immediately without thinking and I know the questions to ask and the nuances and can even correct the wrong information being given to me. That took years reading, learning and experiencing things. It doesn't come overnight. Along the way the learning process did involve "junk filling" my head.
Page didn't always rock. No doubt he had to figure it out like everyone else, but when he did he was clearly a Great song writer and riff maker. And that's Great with a capital G.
thinking is not bad ... you can think and still make great things, greatness doesn't have to be spontaneous or reactive ... it can be well thought, laid out and planned
just think about it .... and oh, the places you'll go :)
That's a vague statement, but I interpret "muscle memory" to mean "have a good default toolset" in this context.
It makes a lot of sense to have a default toolset -- tools that work well in a lot of situations that you understand very well, which together cover most of the problem space you work in. That frees you from getting lost in the weeds trying to decide which tool to use each time. However, it still very much matters what tools are in that default toolset.
It takes a lot of effort and study to understand and choose the right set of default tools. If the options are MySQL and Postgres (or ruby/python, etc.), you need to pick only one as your default choice, otherwise you get distracted trying to make that decision for every project. It's not so much whether the technology overlaps or not, it's whether you perceive the applicability to overlap. For instance, if you perceive MongoDB to be useful as a primary datastore, it can't easily coexist in the default toolset with a SQL system; but it can if you perceive MongoDB to be more of a caching layer or for special-purpose processing.
Of course, you should recognize the signals when you're dealing with a different kind of problem that may require a non-default tool.
I don't. In sports, we use "muscle memory" to refer to on-the-fly adaptations that athletes have to perform without conscious thought. For example, a basketball player sees his defender lean too far in one direction, and he automatically knows when to stop, jump and shoot in order to avoid being blocked. The shooter did not have to consciously think "Oh, he leaned that way, so I need to correct this way." That's too slow. The right thing to do is ingrained from hours of drilling and live practice. My sport of choice is Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and I see the same thing with myself all the time. When I feel my opponents weight shift, I don't consciously think about how to flip him over. If I do, he'll already have moved. I just know what to do, based on years of drilling and live training.
So, I extend the metaphor to software to rather the opposite of what you said. Always applying a default toolset is the opposite of on-the-fly adaptations. "Muscle memory" for solving software problems is being able to reason about what you know you can handle without having to pick a technology up front. It's having an intuition of what what the technology allows you to do. You're not thinking in terms of technology, you're thinking in terms of solving the problem and being able to easily classify things as "I know how to handle" and "I don't know yet how to handle."
The benefit of software over sports is that we have the luxury of time; we have the time to check our intuitive guesses through rational evaluation.
A fastball is over in a few second, but product development is vastly more complex, and good products can take years to develop.
The next time you up-vote a story on HN, think critically about the work. Are the analogies good? Where do they break down? Is he making serious arguments or just expressing counter-intuitive opinions to get attention?
How much muscle memory did Zuckerberg have? Couldn't have been that much as he was so young.
I think this post is missing a larger point. You don't need to get to the point that "creating and shipping products is muscle memory". You just need to ship products. We've all seen the examples of Rovio (60+ products before a hit) or Id (4 products before hit?). And there's probably also plenty of examples of first product hits as well. Seems like important part is shipping. Not being a master of your craft.
Of course maybe that's not what people want to hear and I certainly would like to know tips that would make it more likely that the things I ship, write, create will be well received and popular but I can certainly name many products, libraries, app that are not the product of "someone with a finely honed craft."
And so that's the true story. It's not that people who do great things don't have an interesting story because to them it's just a normal day and they're so awesome they don't recognize it. It's that greatness comes from doing. The more you do the more chances for greatness.
"Great" things also depends on your timing and what the competition is doing. (Remember Job's Newton?) Bad timing could be having the right product at the wrong time. Good timing a little earlier than the competition in some cases. As well as luck. And also honesty and how you deal with people you work with, suppliers. And this only scratches the surface.
I mean even with respect to sports the winner in any given year is dependent on the quality of the other teams or individuals playing, right? The second fastest man would be the fastest if the fastest didn't run that race.
"It's that greatness comes from doing. The more you do the more chances for greatness."
And in a sense the key to the VC business. If you put your money behind enough possibilities (with some reasonable vetting) some of those ideas will succeed. I mean if they could predict better the ideas that would hit (even assuming the timing was right and there was nobody else trying the same idea) they would have a much better success rate than what the currently have, right? The success rate is not great actually.
"I certainly would like to know tips that would make it more likely that the things I ship, write, create will be well received and popular"
One of the problems with reading to much about what others say (on HN or elsewhere) is that you get a watered down version of the world since there are always different points of view. (Horse by committee is a camel?) No single vision directing things. To many points of view. Something that I am able to achieve given my skills, knowledge the way I was raised and a million other variables might not be the right approach for you. Just like you may be able to walk up to a random woman in a bar and pick her up with a line and an approach that wouldn't work for me. Just like Jobs could make people do things by his words and his presence, his looks, his voice that (insert smart but dull person here) can't.
Facebook ships every day, and in the early days they shipped continually because they were editing the code on the live servers (no revision control even). I doubt that anyone would have called the very first version of facebook "great", but they've shipped thousands of times since then, and now they have product with a billion users. And of course Facebook wasn't his first product either -- remember the Facemash story?
In general, I find that a close inspection of these success stories only uncovers a hidden backstory where, in fact, the protagonists are developing "muscle memory." And this doesn't necessarily mean that they were building a startup, were the best in their field, or even went through the commercial marketplace! It means only that they accumulated the right mix of skills and experience to see - and then reach - success.
Clearly Zuckerberg was, at the bare minimum, used to whipping up CRUD-style web sites - and had even started taking on contract work - before he decided to start on Facebook. He didn't wake up one day, say "social networks, what a great idea," and learn PHP and MySQL all at once. He arrived at a position where it was natural to work on one as an extrapolation from his existing experience, an incremental leap out of the comfort zone.
Just "doing" is not equivalent; lots of people "do" every day, but don't grow or challenge themselves.
Oh yes, and I added the Doctor Suess book to my Amazon wish list.
That caught my attention. Mostly the biggest obstacle in front is ourselves.