Genius is not a thing, but a process. Genius need the proper environment to cultivate talents like our well endowed genetically engineered corns need fertilizers and pesticides.
It doesn't matters if you have an IQ of 200 when you're born several thousand years too early. You never make use of your genius, except to make lot of babies and become the chief of your tribe, if you're lucky.
Granted, there's lot of people who are innately smarter than you, but chance are they're also stuck in various positions of life where they can't become a genius like a job at wal-mart, or having children too early, or is stuck in a hut in a third world country somewhere.
If you're reading this, chance are you have the money and the time to rearrange your environment and your behaviors to achieve mastery. The hard part is figuring out how to do that and how to sustain that.
> It doesn't matters if you have an IQ of 200 when you're born several thousand years too early. You never make use of your genius, except to make lot of babies and become the chief of your tribe, if you're lucky.
If you're in a stone age tribe, that is probably the most important thing you can do. Just because some stone age chieftain can't figure out how to smelt iron doesn't mean that they failed or are wasting their talents.
I've long felt that my intelligence is only average, and I've always tried to compensate by working hard. It had been 20 years since my last calculus class when I returned to college, and I was quite worried I'd not be able to keep up. I worked my way through most of a small calculus book before starting the class, to refresh what I'd forgotten. During the class, I spent something like 5-6 hours per day during the week working on Calculus, and around 10 hours per day on the weekends. I worked and reworked every problem until I fully understood what was going on, comparing my answers to the answer key for the odd problems, and computer algebra systems for the even ones when possible. I worked so hard it would have been embarrassing to admit it to my classmates. Only a retard would have to work so much, I thought, but I was determined to be the best I could. I ended up at the top of the class.
The point is, if you're really determined, working hard can go a long way. The key is to try not to worry about the other people that make it look easy. Later I heard this quote:
"If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it would not seem so wonderful at all." - Michaelangelo
It had been 20 years since my last calculus class when I returned to college
The greatest problem with our educational system is to neglect the fact that students begin to forget immediately after graduation. All these years in k-12 education gradually turns to dust until only reading, writing, and some basic agelbra are left, and some career related knowledge.
Trignometry? Biology? Chemistry? These are subjects that all adults once know in their high school years, now all forgotten.
Instead of documentaries assuming we know chemistry, or trignometery, or biology, they introduced "DNA" as if we never been in a biology class. They only skims the top of the scientific knowledge cake because they never assume everybody knows.
Imagine the complexity and increased believablity of fiction and non-fiction if they have to wrestle with an audience that know those things by heart, even if they only took a chemistry class that single semester?
Alas, we forgotten and our educational dollars disappeared in a puff of smoke.
You seem to think education should be like putting music on an iPod. As with all skills, what doesn't find use decays. I believe education should create well rounded people by exposing them to the the breadth of human achievements in the arts as well as sciences. I don't remember all the books we read in English class either, but I appreciate literature more in general having been there.
The real tragedy is that many educational programs emphasize the kind of rote learning you seem to want everyone to aspire to instead of critical thinking faculties which, properly instilled, will assert themselves for a lifetime.
I believe education should create well rounded people by exposing them to the the breadth of human achievements in the arts as well as sciences. I don't remember all the books we read in English class either, but I appreciate literature more in general having been there.
I don't particularly care about English literature or any <subject x> for the sake of building a well rounded education. The more important thing is retaining what you learned and building on that.
The real tragedy is that many educational programs emphasize the kind of rote learning you seem to want everyone to aspire to instead of critical thinking faculties which, properly instilled, will assert themselves for a lifetime.
To think memorization is bad is incredibly short sighted and stupid. Would you like to look up a book every time you do programming? No. You remember certain methods and certain part of the standard library so that you don't have to spend 10 minutes googling method x to accomplish result y.
Principles is nice and all, but what make you an efficient problem solver is because you have access to an inner world of factoids and knowledge.
Sure, memorization for the sake of memorization is useless. That's why you learn critical thinking skills that you love so much so that memorization will be useful.
I don't understand your tone. I never said memorization is "bad" or that I "love" critical thinking skills.
I disagree that what makes people efficient problem solvers is having an "inner world of factoids". Knowledge isn't irrelevant, but knowing where to look is key. Sometimes the knowledge is internal, but the CS whiz who jumps into coding his own libraries for everything without having the wisdom to browse the standard documentation first is surely not a model of efficiency.
I disagree that what makes people efficient problem solvers is having an "inner world of factoids".
Of course it does matter, because latency of lookup matters. He could spent it one hour googling things up or he can spend one minute remembering something and using it. That requires memorization.
The wisdom part to use the standard library instead of implementing something something from scratch is just extra efficiency.
Rarely, however, does one need to spend extra time memorizing things. Memorization happens naturally as you solve problems, and see and use the same things over and over.
Many see formal education as mostly learning facts and procedures. Of course we will forget these when we don't use them often. However, I think the goal of education should be deep learning of concepts. Although we'll forget the procedures and details, when we truly learned a concept, we will always have a good idea what the concept is about, what it means, how to apply it, and, most importantly, where to go to learn more about it.
Of course, deep learning is difficult to teach and assess on a large scale, so it is easier to test for knowledge of facts and procedural skills and teach children to perform well on these kind of tests.
I don't see this as a problem at all. I don't know if remembering the entire body of knowledge by heart is even possible for the average human being. I like to compare learning in University and schools similar to how memory works in computers. When you are taking a course it is similar to transferring data over a slow 28 kbps modem onto the computer, the process is slow and frustrating however as the course goes on and you understand the material better it starts to percolate up to faster caches. When you write a final exam the material is in the L1 cache, you can instantaneously rattle off answers to complex problems like it's no one's business, there's a question on Red-Black Tree deletion- no problem, question about quick select - too easy! 5 years go by and you've not touched the subject in any meaningful way so of-course if someone asks you to write a Red-Black Tree or implement Quick Select you probably will not be able to do it from the top of your head. There's a cache miss as the material is no longer in the L1 cache, you have to go down to perhaps the harddrive, which involves dusting off that copy of CLRS and reviewing what all the cases of a Red-Black tree insertion and deletion are and within a couple of hours you'll be able to start implementing it. Sure it's not the same as writing the answer in 15 minutes on the exam but it's significantly faster than learning the material for the first time which would the equivalent of getting data over a network. This process works well enough, there's little that you've learned a long time ago that you can't pick up again in a relatively short amount of time.
This property of brain to forget less use facts to make room for what you use more often has been acquired over a very long period of evolution. I don't know what schools can do to make sure that the students NEVER FORGET what they learn in a class. And imo to expect that is completely unreasonable.
I don't see this as a problem at all. I don't know if remembering the entire body of knowledge by heart is even possible for the average human being
It's possible, if you practice.
I don't know what schools can do to make sure that the students NEVER FORGET what they learn in a class. And imo to expect that is completely unreasonable.
You can't do this, but adults could take some time out of their days to practice what they learned. That way, they will keep retaining what they learned over decades, and the amount of practices should keep going down.
This process works well enough, there's little that you've learned a long time ago that you can't pick up again in a relatively short amount of time.
Those residual knowledge help make practicing and maintenance of our existing knowledge much easier. We could take advantage of it.
Anyway, if you want to retain everything you learned, you should take a look into spaced repetition which is a learning technique that help make knowledge maintenance an efficient process.
All that is left is our educational system to recognize that knowledge maintenance is important.
> 5 years go by and you've not touched the subject in any meaningful way so of-course if someone asks you to write a Red-Black Tree or implement Quick Select you probably will not be able to do it from the top of your head.
Well, don't let five years go by without touching the subject. Occasionally practice the things you once learned, integrate them into your larger body of knowledge, and you'll never forget how red-black trees and quickselect work --- even if you never implemented them from scratch.
Reminds me of a quote from Teller of Penn & Teller (the magicians). I can't find the reference at the moment, but the point is that much of the time, tricks are only mysterious because most people are unable to imagine that maybe you just spent 6 hours a day for a month getting ready for it.
No wonder most successful people just look lucky to the masses. Because they achieve feats which can't be achieved with ordinary efforts. If you go by the normal effort, it isn't surprising successful people look lucky, just like magic.
"Make the secret a lot more trouble than the trick seems worth. You will be fooled by a trick if it involves more time, money and practice than you (or any other sane onlooker) would be willing to invest. My partner, Penn, and I once produced 500 live cockroaches from a top hat on the desk of talk-show host David Letterman. To prepare this took weeks. We hired an entomologist who provided slow-moving, camera-friendly cockroaches (the kind from under your stove don’t hang around for close-ups) and taught us to pick the bugs up without screaming like preadolescent girls. Then we built a secret compartment out of foam-core (one of the few materials cockroaches can’t cling to) and worked out a devious routine for sneaking the compartment into the hat. More trouble than the trick was worth? To you, probably. But not to magicians." [1]
David Blane has a very interesting TED Talk on this, in which he shares how much preparation goes into doing some of his endurance tricks.
At the end of the talk he actually breaks down. Its one of my best TED Talks, I watch it almost every week to remind that even the most magical thing is hardly magical when you look at the effort that goes behind it.
And they probably perceived you as really smart instead of dedicated. :)
I noticed something similar happens when I want to pickup some basic skill I wish I had, like juggling, shuffling decks of cards, or emacs or walking the slackline: first it seems impossible, then I insist for a few days, many hours per day, sleep on it, and then its trivial.
But most people won't go to youtube to learn how to shuffle a deck of cards, and probably consider that very nerdy.
About 5 days I think to be able to mostly walk without falling.
(The crazy tricks I won't even try, because that kind of agility doesn't go well with my body weight/motor coordination - I'm one of those kids who could never do ollies :P)
> (The crazy tricks I won't even try, because that kind of agility doesn't go well with my body weight/motor coordination - I'm one of those kids who could never do ollies :P)
While I have no doubt that this is a carefully considered evaluation, I think one has to be careful making this kind of remark; just imagine the student who says "The crazy mathematics I won't even try, because that kind of thinking doesn't go well with my mindset --I'm one of those kids who could never do algebra."
Practicing violin since before birth is a thing that is just impossible to do for anyone here not to mention not many would really like to play violin. As such, it's hypothetical, abstract situation that can be discussed safely.
On the other hand, putting tremendous amount of work into preparation for Google interview is something everyone here could, but is not doing, and a good deal of people would really like to do (or, at least, they would like to work at Google). As such, it triggers defensive mechanisms, many of which we could see in the linked thread.
Your story reminds of a girl I dated in college. Her and her sister were #2 and #3 in their HS. They were straight A students in college. People assumed they were just 'smart' and they obviously were not stupid, but what they didn't tell people was just how much they studied. 24 hour study sessions were common. Multiple egg timers around the house they shared going off at all hours during exam time.
I was someone who had it easy in HS and almost failed out of college because I simple didn't know how to study. Watching these two taught me the level of effort required to really do well.
I have a similar story but it ends differently. I dated a girl in college who was #1 in her high school. Similar to your ex, she studied like crazy, and extended studying sessions without end were routine.
She proceeded with college in the same way; and while it worked for the first ~2 years, she was completely burnt out and exhausted by graduation time, leaving her deeply depressed. While she had always intended on going to grad school, she instead gave up on that and is now working in a low paying, low intellectual demand manual job.
I'm often impressed by how some people can command sheer levels of effort without being passionate about what they're doing. Not saying it's particularly the case. When you have that obstination coupled with fiery passion, you get an unstoppable force--like those who can trod on for a decade.
Speaking from personal experience, that talent itself can also be developed and improved. It's not easy, and can definitely take awhile.
'The Art of Learning' by Josh Waitzkin could be a good start for someone who wants to improve in this area.
Of course, one could also learn how to make their study technique more effective so they don't need to spend 10 hours. See 'Your Memory: How It Works and How To Improve It' by Higbee for that.
Few people in the US are shown how to study. People end up doing a wide range of things. But most of the methods that work seem to be something along the lines of: Clunking things so you use about 2/3 of your natural attention span 'studying' then review and repeat as needed. Get a good rhythm going and you can loose track of time. So, it's a good idea to take regular short breaks, just get back to it when your done.
You need to cover enough material that reviewing is not quite trivial, but no so much that your mind starts to wonder.
Concentration is not a talent. It's a very specific practice, fundamental to anything you want to accomplish. Concentration itself is a skill that grows with daily practice.
When I was a kid, I had difficulty staying on the same task. My daydreams were (and still are) incredibly vivid. I had a lot of physical energy, and I wanted to run around as a kid. And when I can't, being stuck inside studying, I'd have near lucid daydreams of running around outside. Combined with being able to pick up many things up, I become more and more intolerant of my own mistakes and challenging situations. As I entered my early adulthood, my experiences of life started narrowing down as I avoided challenges. And when I try taking on those challenges, I'd run straight into them.
It was later in life that I learned the methods for concentration practice. There are no shortcuts to concentration. There are no clever hacks. Searching for a shortcut is precisely why most people have difficulty concentrating. Your mind does not want to accept what you are doing here and now. So you think you have to "force" yourself to concentrate, and end up burning a lot of energy keeping you on track. This is NOT how you concentrate.
Concentration grows a little bit each time you practice, and the more you practice, the more you learn about how your mind works.
Growing the raw skill of concentration as you learn your primary art is itself the reason other skills take years of practice to master. It is also why, without practice, talent does not blossom into mastery.
It has interesting framework, divided into two. The first part is what you can do. The second is how you can create an environment that keeps you on track.
I still procrastinate like crazy sometimes though, so I'd add to this small list a book called the power of habit. This is the missing link on how to make your behaviour automatic.
>>I mean, I can't study for 10 minutes straight, much less 10 hours. It's certainly a talent I wish I had.
I bet if you try enough you can add another 5 minutes to those 10 minutes. And then later another 5 minutes, and then later another 5... And so on and some day you will go to 10 hours.
People often ask how somebody can sleep only for 6 hours. Or get up to work at 3 AM in the morning. That's possible only after trying hard enough for weeks a little bit at a time.
I play a text based online game where activity is extremely important and I often only have 3 or 4 hours of sleep every day, and even that is broken in to chunks so I can be online every 3 hours - and this is for the past 5 and a half years.
Outside of the obvious physical and mental stress it can put you under, you are perfectly right when you say that it takes time to perfect, at first I was tired from having 8 hours of sleep, now I can have 3 hours of sleep per night, wake up and operate at 100%.
I'm not sure when, but somewhere along the line I lost the need for sleep, I don't get tired any more or yawn and even on nights where I can sleep as long as I want, I find myself only wanting 4 or 5 hours anyway.
I'm without a doubt the highest ranked player on the game, fought for through perseverance and a refusal to let my ego take a hit, but was it worth it? I'm not sure.
Please note though you can train yourself to sleep only 4 hours a day, it doesn't mean you must. What I mean to say is, rest is essential to any long term productive endeavor. I think athletes and gym freaks can attest to this. How much you rest and how quickly recover from stress can decide how productive while you are awake. And probably affects your larger health situation on the longer run too.
>>but was it worth it? I'm not sure.
I won't comment on your habits and whats important to you. But speaking objectively. I would say its bad use of time.
If you are in need of entertainment, which demands a lot of engaging activity I would advice you start to learn playing a music instrument. Again not risking your health in the course of it, but music is a liberating experience. Especially if you learn how to play yourself. It can be very joyful.
And its generally a good skill to have and a lot better than fighting for internet points.
Regarding the claim that you can train yourself to sleep less, you might find this study interesting: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17Sleep-t.htm... They had three different groups that could sleep either 4, 6 or 8 hours. Here's the punchline:
"after just a few days, the four- and six-hour group reported that, yes, they were slightly sleepy. But they insisted they had adjusted to their new state. Even 14 days into the study, they said sleepiness was not affecting them. In fact, their performance had tanked. In other words, the sleep-deprived among us are lousy judges of our own sleep needs. We are not nearly as sharp as we think we are."
So, although you can get used to being sleepy, it's unlikely you're performance isn't being impacted. You could argue that the 2 week study wasn't long enough, but it still seems to show that you can't really judge your own cognitive performance, so any anecdotal evidence to the contrary wouldn't hold much water.
The point to me is, don't care about the rate at which others go at all. It is completely meaningless. People see my art and they think it came easy to me. I've been drawing and painting for 20 years. It wasn't easy.
Lately, I weave in and out of painting, coding, and studying mathematics. The switch between the fields often has me feeling lost when initially starting back up into one or the other, since I sort of go through these manic cycles of learning rather than something continuous and balanced throughout. When I switch from painting to math or coding, I usually feel very dumb for a while, relearning all of the new terminology I have missed. It is often a significant blow to my ego, and over the years it has required me to develop sort of a thick skin to approaching sets of people who are technically minded, while my mind is still in the la-la land art world, and vice-verse.
But I mean, out of everything I have approached to learn to do or learn about, the one thing I know that is true for all of them is that nothing is actually simple. Doing calculus and memorizing formula to apply to a very specific set of a problems requires a strong memory, which younger people tend have the advantage on (not myself though, 26 and my memory is garbage). But actually understanding the concepts, and being capable of applying them after you take the class, that's different.
I surprised someone, in grad school I think, explaining how to calculate how large a container we would need to clean the espresso machine (it drips water through), based on some simple dimensions of the input container, and the flow rate. That's calculus. I knew a lot of students in engineering who did really well in the class, and are doing really well in their specific sub-field. But to actually understand what one is learning, that is different. Everyone can do it no matter what age, it just requires dedication and actually being able to think about what confuses you. And it is often a person's ego or fear of their ego appearing 'less than' that hinders progress in learning and doing. Or probably, it is always the case that that is why people stop learning and doing.
It is not difficult to ask simple questions. I mean last night I spent about 6 hours thinking about what a point on a number line actually is. Had anyone seen my notes, they would probably look like they came from a 1st grade maths class. But I'm connecting it to many other topics I understand - and that is something those people don't see, the tangential thought process that develops along with my learning and questioning. So when someone asks a simple question that may seem trivial, instead of scoffing at the fact that that person does not know the answer, I prefer to ask myself "Why did they ask that question?", or, "Why is it important that this thing is so clearly defined or understood - what about this thing is necessary or important to understanding of the whole?". And those are my favorite kinds of questions to ask in learning, because it keeps every topic interesting.
If anyone is curious as to the research on this topic, check out Carol Dweck's book "Mindset." It has a ton of examples from academia, sports and business on fixed vs. growth mentalities and how that plays into a person's success in life.
I studied violin at Juilliard with the great Dorothy DeLay. She taught the greats such as Perlman and Midori, and she insisted that 'talent' was nothing more than a 'mood.' I will always treat her viewpoint on this as gold having taught so many youngsters over the decades. So, work hard, and think big of yourselves as your reward (although that can be so hard to do!)
So what about when you have someone like me who works hard and still fails? I vary my methods. change my environment to make it easier, pay for training, do what ever. I examine what I did wrong, I still get it wrong, no matter what.
Let me share with you an anecdote: In undergrad, I took an intro computer networking class. Everyone else could understand what was going on. There was no assigned reading material and lectures didn't follow from any text. I always was the lowest student in the class, no matter how hard I tried. Everyone else could understand it quickly. I worked hard on that class but it didn't matter. Not everyone who works hard will show positive results, I guess. I more or less flunked my way through school. Sometimes I'd work hard, sometimes not. It didn't seem to matter.
Or, if I'm facing someone who has worked hard and is also very intelligent? I don't have a chance.
The rhetoric of these articles and the rest of these posts here have a coded meaning behind them: there are no disadvantaged people or students -- only stupid or lazy ones. It's a corollary of Survivor Bias. If you work hard, everything will be peachy-keen OK and nothing will go wrong. If you work hard and fail, you deserve only scorn.
For me, it was, never mind if you work so hard that ignored everything else, worked so hard to not get beaten by your parents, worked so hard to get mastery of material -- I must be still too lazy or stupid since I failed.
I don't know what it is that I don't have that everyone else does. I'm likely to not ever know.
This is a topic that I'm very familiar with so that's why I wrote a lot about it and sound perhaps a little crazy.
Two recent articles in Current Directions in Psychological Science
criticize deliberate practice and argue that, while it is necessary
for reaching high levels of performance, it is not sufficient, other
factors such as talent being important as well.
So maybe the "just practice more" attitude is an oversimplification. But still, I think if you were really stupid or whatever, you wouldn't have been able to write such a good comment. The "beaten by your parents" thing makes me think of learned helplessness: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness
sown, please jump to that Wikipedia article and look at Seligman's publications (at the bottom). You MUST read his book "The Optimistic Child", which you can probably get from your local library. The wording of your posts comes right off the pages of that book, and you're old enough and smart enough now to consider the phenomena described in his research and put it to good use.
I think your primary need is to be more comfortable in your own skin. That book talks about how. After that, you'll still fail at some things---like the rest of us---but it won't hurt so much. Then, because quitting won't have so much meaning to you, it will be easier for you to give up on something that isn't going anywhere which, ironically, is crucial to eventual success.
Here is a question for you, do you enjoy learning new things?
I ask because I've mentored folks who have similar feelings and one thing that correlated with them was that they didn't actually enjoy learning new stuff. In particular they almost had a mental block when it came to learning something first in order to achieve a secondary goal.
One story I heard was a student who was failing English composition repeatedly. The person failing's attitude was "I have to have this to get my degree, but frankly I don't give a flying f*ck about English composition." Absolutely no amount of work, practice, tutoring, or study helped. The only thing that worked, was getting past the 'I have to do this but don't want to' attitude was to find some small way that learning composition could become an interesting thing to do.
Thus the question, and now a corollary, is there any subject area you know really well? And by "any" I mean "any" from an academic subject like Math to the back story of all the characters on "Twilight." If so how does that subject matter differ from the subject matter you aren't good at?
1) You have keen analytical and writing skills, intelligence is not a lack for what you want to achieve.
2) You suffer from victim mentality being too concerned about the abilities of others while easily dismissive of your own. No matter how much/hard you work, without being able to chuck this aside, every failure will be magnified and your successes will be mitigated to an irrational degree.
The fact of the matter is the road to mastery is paved with tons of mistakes, tons of situations where you will feel like an absolute moron. You have to learn to reframe those moments and treasure them, because they are signals that you are encountering moments of true growth. Learn to compete against your own competence and not others. You don't know what they've been through to get where they are.
Whenever something seems unreasonably tough, break it down into simpler problems to digest. Hack the art of learning itself. Don't look at the same problem until you're blue in the face, change it up so that there is a measurable degree of progress.
Your blockage is more emotional than intellectual.
> The fact of the matter is the road to mastery is paved
> with tons of mistakes, tons of situations where you will
> feel like an absolute moron.
This is so true. Feeling like you're stupid is just part of the process. Try to ignore the temptation to worry about how it appears to be so easy for everyone else. You may have to work twice as hard as the next person, but do it. They say it's darkest before the dawn, and that totally applies to learning for me.
When I learned Windows SDK programming back with Windows 3.0, I really felt like I was not smart enough for this. When I learned functional programming in Erlang, I really was quite confident that this was too much for me to be able to cope with. I've felt stupid so many times trying to learn things that I finally identified it as a pattern, a sign that I'm about to break through as long as I don't give up.
> This is so true. Feeling like you're stupid is just part of the process.
Feeling like you are stupid is an attitude. I find it is one of the biggest barriers to learning. If you feel stupid, you are less likely to try "stupid" things that teach you a lot. Also, feeling stupid leads to anger, and anger prevents learning.
Aaron Hillegass said this best in the beginning of Cocoa Programing for Mac OS X, and I'll never forget it. You can preview it on Amazon under "How to learn."
Really good advice there. The summary is: 1.) get 10 hours of sleep a night when working on new concepts; this is the key to being able to focus. 2.) Instead of thinking you're stupid, be at peace and accept the fact that the subject matter is hard.
If you honestly never win, then you have an excellent opportunity to develop amazing emotional strength. Here's what I would want from you, if we were friends and you asked me for advice:
1. Don't give up.
2. Never complain. Take the 30 day no complaining challenge[1]. Not complaining is about focusing your mind on positive things, because complaining and thinking about negative things is self-reinforcing and makes you more sad. The only way to go for 30 days straight without complaining is to re-form how you think, and it worked wonders for me.
3. Read Letters from a Stoic.
If it's one big goal - "I want to be an X" - well guess what, you're going to have to have a thousand smaller victories to get there. And by the time you do get there you're most certainly going to have bigger goals beyond that on the horizon. Otherwise life will get very boring.
It's the messy room syndrome, for you only have two hands you can't will the whole thing into becoming clean at once. You have to pick some part of it that you can handle and make it clean, then move onto another part. As you make your way through interesting patterns will emerge that will allow you to clean smarter, so the first act of cleaning will go much slower than the last act. You still only have 2 hands, but you have something else - wisdom.
In my observation, a person with average native faculties in a given activity make themselves top 95th percentile of the general population in that activity, with dedicated and sustained practice. This applies to most specific skills - violin playing, chess, calculus, computer programming, golf, basketball, quarterbacking, painting, etc. Of course, the reason for this is the typical person in the population has not dedicated that much practice time to a given specific skill. You may be a great natural athlete, but if you have not spent at least some time learning throwing mechanics, a mediocre athlete who has practiced will be able to throw a better spiral.
However, it does not follow that "everyone can be a computer programmer for Google" or "everyone can be a professional quarterback." If you want to make it to a high-level in a high paying or high status field, you must compete against other people who are also practicing really hard and who also have great natural talent.
Personally, I have around natural athletic ability. I play flag football, and am likely in the top 95th percentile of QB ability. When I throw the ball around with friends at a BBQ, I can hit people in stride with tight spirals. But I could never, ever be a pro-QB, or even a QB in a competitive amateur league. My body simply does not have the appropriate build, and I simply cannot build the muscle strength to make the passes needed to be a great QB.
On the flip side, I have always had an innate knack for cognitive problems, I was always that guy in math class who got A's despite barely doing homework and not studying for tests. Now another person could also get A's in that class with only mediocre natural talent by studying very hard. They might think that, "Hey, I've worked hard, I got A's, I can do anything, I can get a job at Google some day." But if they go into the most cognitively demanding career, they will find themselves competing against the most naturally talented people, who also now have a financial incentive to work extremely hard, and the less naturally talented people will simply not be able to compete.
I find it unfortunate and self-serving, that so there are so many commentators and intellectuals, who are above average cognitively and (likely) mediocre athletically, who assume that the other people's failings at cognitive skills are due to lack of practice or lack of sufficient schooling. Meanwhile they assume their own lack of athletic ability is due to accidents of birth.
That said, it can be very difficult to determine if your having difficultly in a subject is really due to innate talent or due to lack of practice. When I took an intro computer science course, I noticed the professor was a completely horrible teacher (and lectures are generally a horrible way to teach math, computer science or any technical subject). The textbook sucked too. The people who did well in that class already had been programming on their own during high school. The people taking the class expecting it to be an actual introductory course, who expected that if you just followed the lectures and textbooks that you would know how to do the assignment, ended up doing very poorly. Even if they worked very hard, their total hours dedicated to understanding computer science was far below that of fellow classmates.
You don't deserve scorn for failing, it's ok. You might be suffering from some kind of anxiety, and you're being too hard on yourself for sure.
One piece of advice that might help you: when you're trying to measure your progress, instead of looking at the people who are ahead of you all the time, sometimes look at the people who are behind you. The people who you've exceeded, who you have done better than. It's an important part of motivation that's often overlooked. (This and a bunch of other really excellent advice I got from Seneca in Letters from a Stoic.)
Also, don't give up. You've only truly failed when you quit learning or give up.
The way you write already suggests intelligence. In what ways did you try to prepare for that networking class? It sounds as if they didn't provide anything for you to cling to if you weren't already familiar with the territory?
Maybe the other people in the networking class were either all very smart students that anyone would struggle to keep up with, or maybe they all had prior exposure to networking principles (eg. from LAN gaming).
When you say you vary your methods, what do you mean by that? When you were in your networking class and it wasn't structured in a way you found convenient, could this have been demonstrating that you're overly dependent on certain learning techniques, and need to become adept with some new ones?
Your repeated references to hard work stood out:
> I worked hard on that class but it didn't matter.
There's a pattern you can fall into where you stare at the page and get stressed, and then come away hours later none the wiser but exhausted and feeling unduly virtuous from your hard but meaningless work.
Hard work doesn't count for anything of itself. Only when you're pursuing effective strategies.
> I'm likely to not ever know.
If you want to, you could dig up your syllabus notes or email the uni for a copy of them. Identify the topics, and see if you understand them. Get past exams out of the library and identify the topics in them. Find a mentor and go back over the stuff again until you have an easy understanding of each of the concepts.
People who seem successful from the outside, are in general, very hard working and focused in their venture. I have few friends from high school who always got good grades and understood topics very fast. Being around such gifted students made me feel insufficient. I could never compete with them no matter how hard I tried. In my mind I was trying hard. Turns out, while I was slicing my waking hours between sports, hanging out, studies and socializing, they invested all those hours to study class materials, read supplementary materials, reading ahead for the class next day. To me, sports, studies and friends were equally important while they kept single minded focus on where they want to put their hours. It also turns out, the method is replicable. You can put single minded focus on anything and be reasonably successful. I believe it. Because I have seen it happen in my life. Albeit, there are talended people and hard work will always fall short of talent + hard work. But hard work will get you far enough.
People who seem successful from the outside, are in general, very hard working and focused in their venture. I have few friends from high school who always got good grades and understood topics very fast. Being around such gifted students made me feel insufficient. I could never compete with them no matter how hard I tried. In my mind I was trying hard. Turns out, while I was slicing my waking hours between sports, hanging out, studies and socializing, they invested all those hours to study class materials, read supplementary materials, reading ahead for the class next day. To me, sports, studies and friends were equally important while they kept single minded focus on where they want to put their hours. It also turns out, the method is replicable. You can put single minded focus on anything and be reasonably successful. I believe it. Because I have seen it happen in my life. Albeit, there are talended people and hard work will always fall short of talent + hard work. But hard work will get you far enough.
Maybe the things you were putting a lot of effort into weren't things that helped you master those materials. It's possible to work hard with the intent of learning something, and never learn it, even though it's within your capacity to learn, if the thing you're working hard on doesn't help with learning the thing you're trying to learn. In fact, I think most of the effort people put into learning things in the standard educational system is wasted.
I mean, it's also possible you're struggling against some kind of mental handicap. But if your IQ was really 75 or something, I don't think you'd be able to write such long sentences.
It sounds like you should set your sights lower. You don't seem to have an aversion to trying or thinking. I'd hope the explanation for your failures is that you didn't acquire the prerequisites and are continually trying to fake or skip them. But that's unlikely. So, discover what you are capable of. There's no shame in trying and being average, instead of not trying and being below average.
I thought I'd share some hopeful words from the author in a Facebook followup to the article. My wife's a composer and has worked with several members of her (incredible) family.
"I didn't get to go into much detail in 800 words, but I agree it's more complicated than that. I don't think my kids all enjoyed practicing, but they have come back many times to say how much it changed their lives, including the three who did not go on to become musicians.
The youngest was my Suzuki failure... I felt guilty that I didn't have as much patience to work with her as I'd had with her sisters. She restarted lessons several times and limped along in classical studies for years, progressing, but not nearly at the rate as her sisters.
Then at age 15 she suddenly blossomed as a guitarist/singer-sonwriter and playwright, spending hours every day immersed in practice, and progressing quickly. It was as though all of those painful hours spent on violin and viola were coming to fruition in a way none of us, including her, had anticipated."
Interesting to consider, though not discussed much in the article: quality of practice is paramount. Thoughtful and deliberate generates incremental progress. Casual, mentally checked-out practice isn't practice at all. Some discussion & sources here: http://ideas.time.com/2012/01/25/the-myth-of-practice-makes-...
One mantra tossed around of late is "_perfect_ practice makes perfect," meaning not to never make mistakes, but to be conscious and analytical when you do.
Paul Graham has mentioned similar issues several times in essays posted on his personal website. For example, he wrote in "What You'll Wish You'd Known" (January 2005),
". . . . In fact I suspect if you had the sixteen year old Shakespeare or Einstein in school with you, they'd seem impressive, but not totally unlike your other friends.
"Which is an uncomfortable thought. If they were just like us, then they had to work very hard to do what they did. And that's one reason we like to believe in genius. It gives us an excuse for being lazy. . . . "
"Sometimes jumping from one sort of work to another is a sign of energy, and sometimes it's a sign of laziness. Are you dropping out, or boldly carving a new path? You often can't tell yourself. Plenty of people who will later do great things seem to be disappointments early on, when they're trying to find their niche.
"Is there some test you can use to keep yourself honest? One is to try to do a good job at whatever you're doing, even if you don't like it. Then at least you'll know you're not using dissatisfaction as an excuse for being lazy. Perhaps more importantly, you'll get into the habit of doing things well."
And in "The Anatomy of Determination" (December 2009),
"In most domains, talent is overrated compared to determination—partly because it makes a better story, partly because it gives onlookers an excuse for being lazy, and partly because after a while determination starts to look like talent."
Mathematician Hung-hsi Wu wrote an article more than a decade ago, Basic skills versus conceptual understanding: A bogus dichotomy in mathematics education, American Educator, Fall 1999, Vol. 23, No. 3, pp. 14-19, 50-52,
to point out that any distinction between understanding a topic and having basic skills in the topic is a "bogus dichotomy." The two go together like two sides of the same coin.
Excellent stuff. Along the same lines: Someone once told me that the difference between a professional and an amateur is that a professional keeps working on it long after it stops being fun.
This is true in the discussion of Penn & Teller below, as well as game programming, and probably all worthy endeavors. Wish I could remember the reference...
This article appeals to our deepest and most widely-held educational values, which makes it all the more dangerous, being wrong in several ways.
The author rightly belittles the concept of talent but it seems to have found its way in through the back door: “Two of our four turned out to be musically gifted and before long were shuttled out of Suzuki to hard-core classical violin teachers.”
(Talent is just the way we describe people who have some competence in a field which is inexplicit; nobody knows why they are good, otherwise one could learn it.)
Another thing to point out is that apparently none of the children have developed careers in music or composition (yet), so it remains to be seen if they have any creativity intact.
Why might they have lost creativity in adulthood? Because of childhood coercion. Those long hours of practice -- children don’t do that without being forced. It can be subtle, such as the worry of a slight loss of parental affection, sibling rivalry encouraged, etc.
Children will play for hours on end and this is where true learning occurs. Some children are bright enough to make their ‘practice’ a form of play, so they manage to improve despite appearances.
Creative adults continue to play, it’s just that the subject matter appears more serious. But progress remains open-ended, with stops and starts, switching between activities, and unpredictable (not ‘guaranteed’) results. The unpredictable nature of achievement follows from a law of epistemology: we can’t predict future knowledge (including our own).
Interestingly, this is exactly compatible with what Andrea Dwork writes about in "Mindset" [1]: people whose identity evolves around being "smart" or "talented" are often less willing to take on risks or big projects than those who have grown up being praised for their efforts.
My girlfriend is a violinist and violin pedagogue. Everybody has always called her gifted but she has resisted every time and said: it is all about having the gift to be able to do 4 hours of intense practice each day from an early age.
Not everybody has the ability to practice this hard.
Because I feel that people on HN try to micromanage their neurons to an extent that they evaluate themselves as if they were computer hardware....
"Well I only have so much RAM to do this task, but if increase my computer processing power through deliberate practice..."
I was a bit offhand, I admit. I was in a bad mood when I made that comment. But I stand by the fact people on HN take themselves and their capabilities way too seriously, without any thought to the fact, say, that the internet and programming are only a minuscule fraction of our history as intelligent lifeforms. While I love the internet/programming/topics discussed on HN, I just think that people here are too hard on themselves. You're not a computer with specs, you are the results of hundreds of thousands of years of evolution.
Well, yes and no. I remember reading, when I was in my teens, about a star guard in Louisiana who spent 8 or 10 hours a day playing basketball during his summers. I realized then that "adequate driveway player" was about where I was and would remain; I didn't have the drive to put in that kind of work. I realized also, though, that a) my body probably wouldn't stand up to that kind of intense work, and b) even if it did, I would be a much better but not much more than high-school JV quality.
One of my personality traits is that I don't like taking shortcuts. In fact, I hate taking them. I much prefer doing things "properly" and thoroughly. From painstakingly teaching myself programming to not incessantly 'cheesing' in SC2 to washing the dishes multiple times to brushing my teeth slowly.
I am often ridiculed by my wife, and I always wondered where I got this from. This trait is something I want to teach my kids, but I never knew quite how.
Until I read this article and it reminded me that I too did the Suzuki program, into classical violin after. I remembered practicing a lot - and I remember getting frustrated frequently.
I also remember the short burst of adrenaline I would feel, and the overwhelming feeling of accomplishment, when I get that 'trill' just perfect or when I perfected my vibrato.
Even though I have since put down the violin, I feel the same accomplishment when I tackle something hard (in programming) and I eventually figure it out.
I need to remember to thank my parents for insisting that I keep at the violin, even when I was very frustrated and wanted to rage quit.
In light of evolutionary psychology, talent is a combination of domain-specific neural adaptations and illusions. We know from data mining and machine learning that more data equals better results. Since one example of machine learning is neural networks (i.e. you), we know that more data (i.e. practice) leads to improved performance. For example, we know that the brain implements certain cognitive adaptations multiple times in differing but co-adaptive formats. If you had four neural clusters dedicated to spatial visualization and your friend had only three, you would be better at geometry. But if your friend practiced a lot, he could repurpose chunks of his neocortex to use his three clusters and then some with finer heuristics, with the result of beating you in geometry even though you had more "talent" and potential at equivalent practice rates. Moral of the story: don't worry about talent, practice makes better, kids.
In most domains, talent is overrated compared to determination—partly because it makes a better story, partly because it gives onlookers an excuse for being lazy, and partly because *after a while determination starts to look like talent*.
I would say you have to consider the competition. (how competitive is the market you want to participate in). If you compete with very hardworking people ('everybody in the field works hard') then talent will be a differentiator. If you compete in a competition/market where for some reason hard work is not yet common then your hard work can be your differentiator. Choose your fights wisely.
"Me, I want to be a natural. I want to show up at the first class and discover I have a knack for whatever it is we're going to study - pottery, Japanese calligraphy, racquetball, oil painting, flute. I don't mind work, as long as it comes easily, with guaranteed results. But I'm usually the class dunce, or at least that's what it feels like as I struggle to keep up after the going gets tough. Eventually I quit, loath to spend precious effort on what could be a mediocre outcome."
96 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 161 ms ] threadIt doesn't matters if you have an IQ of 200 when you're born several thousand years too early. You never make use of your genius, except to make lot of babies and become the chief of your tribe, if you're lucky.
Granted, there's lot of people who are innately smarter than you, but chance are they're also stuck in various positions of life where they can't become a genius like a job at wal-mart, or having children too early, or is stuck in a hut in a third world country somewhere.
If you're reading this, chance are you have the money and the time to rearrange your environment and your behaviors to achieve mastery. The hard part is figuring out how to do that and how to sustain that.
If you're in a stone age tribe, that is probably the most important thing you can do. Just because some stone age chieftain can't figure out how to smelt iron doesn't mean that they failed or are wasting their talents.
The point is, if you're really determined, working hard can go a long way. The key is to try not to worry about the other people that make it look easy. Later I heard this quote:
"If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it would not seem so wonderful at all." - Michaelangelo
The greatest problem with our educational system is to neglect the fact that students begin to forget immediately after graduation. All these years in k-12 education gradually turns to dust until only reading, writing, and some basic agelbra are left, and some career related knowledge.
Trignometry? Biology? Chemistry? These are subjects that all adults once know in their high school years, now all forgotten.
Instead of documentaries assuming we know chemistry, or trignometery, or biology, they introduced "DNA" as if we never been in a biology class. They only skims the top of the scientific knowledge cake because they never assume everybody knows.
Imagine the complexity and increased believablity of fiction and non-fiction if they have to wrestle with an audience that know those things by heart, even if they only took a chemistry class that single semester?
Alas, we forgotten and our educational dollars disappeared in a puff of smoke.
The real tragedy is that many educational programs emphasize the kind of rote learning you seem to want everyone to aspire to instead of critical thinking faculties which, properly instilled, will assert themselves for a lifetime.
I don't particularly care about English literature or any <subject x> for the sake of building a well rounded education. The more important thing is retaining what you learned and building on that.
The real tragedy is that many educational programs emphasize the kind of rote learning you seem to want everyone to aspire to instead of critical thinking faculties which, properly instilled, will assert themselves for a lifetime.
To think memorization is bad is incredibly short sighted and stupid. Would you like to look up a book every time you do programming? No. You remember certain methods and certain part of the standard library so that you don't have to spend 10 minutes googling method x to accomplish result y.
Principles is nice and all, but what make you an efficient problem solver is because you have access to an inner world of factoids and knowledge.
Sure, memorization for the sake of memorization is useless. That's why you learn critical thinking skills that you love so much so that memorization will be useful.
I disagree that what makes people efficient problem solvers is having an "inner world of factoids". Knowledge isn't irrelevant, but knowing where to look is key. Sometimes the knowledge is internal, but the CS whiz who jumps into coding his own libraries for everything without having the wisdom to browse the standard documentation first is surely not a model of efficiency.
Of course it does matter, because latency of lookup matters. He could spent it one hour googling things up or he can spend one minute remembering something and using it. That requires memorization.
The wisdom part to use the standard library instead of implementing something something from scratch is just extra efficiency.
Of course, deep learning is difficult to teach and assess on a large scale, so it is easier to test for knowledge of facts and procedural skills and teach children to perform well on these kind of tests.
This property of brain to forget less use facts to make room for what you use more often has been acquired over a very long period of evolution. I don't know what schools can do to make sure that the students NEVER FORGET what they learn in a class. And imo to expect that is completely unreasonable.
It's possible, if you practice.
I don't know what schools can do to make sure that the students NEVER FORGET what they learn in a class. And imo to expect that is completely unreasonable.
You can't do this, but adults could take some time out of their days to practice what they learned. That way, they will keep retaining what they learned over decades, and the amount of practices should keep going down.
This process works well enough, there's little that you've learned a long time ago that you can't pick up again in a relatively short amount of time.
Those residual knowledge help make practicing and maintenance of our existing knowledge much easier. We could take advantage of it.
Anyway, if you want to retain everything you learned, you should take a look into spaced repetition which is a learning technique that help make knowledge maintenance an efficient process.
All that is left is our educational system to recognize that knowledge maintenance is important.
Well, don't let five years go by without touching the subject. Occasionally practice the things you once learned, integrate them into your larger body of knowledge, and you'll never forget how red-black trees and quickselect work --- even if you never implemented them from scratch.
"You will be fooled by a trick if it involves more time, money and practice than you (or any other sane onlooker) would be willing to invest."
http://www.esquire.com/features/teller-magician-interview-10...
"Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect"
[1] http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/Teller-Reveals-Hi...
At the end of the talk he actually breaks down. Its one of my best TED Talks, I watch it almost every week to remind that even the most magical thing is hardly magical when you look at the effort that goes behind it.
I noticed something similar happens when I want to pickup some basic skill I wish I had, like juggling, shuffling decks of cards, or emacs or walking the slackline: first it seems impossible, then I insist for a few days, many hours per day, sleep on it, and then its trivial.
But most people won't go to youtube to learn how to shuffle a deck of cards, and probably consider that very nerdy.
(The crazy tricks I won't even try, because that kind of agility doesn't go well with my body weight/motor coordination - I'm one of those kids who could never do ollies :P)
While I have no doubt that this is a carefully considered evaluation, I think one has to be careful making this kind of remark; just imagine the student who says "The crazy mathematics I won't even try, because that kind of thinking doesn't go well with my mindset --I'm one of those kids who could never do algebra."
The truth is people learn at different rates, and compensating intelligence with effort works a lot of the time.
Practicing violin since before birth is a thing that is just impossible to do for anyone here not to mention not many would really like to play violin. As such, it's hypothetical, abstract situation that can be discussed safely.
On the other hand, putting tremendous amount of work into preparation for Google interview is something everyone here could, but is not doing, and a good deal of people would really like to do (or, at least, they would like to work at Google). As such, it triggers defensive mechanisms, many of which we could see in the linked thread.
It's not funny at all.
I was someone who had it easy in HS and almost failed out of college because I simple didn't know how to study. Watching these two taught me the level of effort required to really do well.
I'm not sure what the moral of the story is.
I really think that this ability to doggedly focus, practice, and maintain this level of effort is, itself, a talent.
I mean, I can't study for 10 minutes straight, much less 10 hours. It's certainly a talent I wish I had.
'The Art of Learning' by Josh Waitzkin could be a good start for someone who wants to improve in this area.
Of course, one could also learn how to make their study technique more effective so they don't need to spend 10 hours. See 'Your Memory: How It Works and How To Improve It' by Higbee for that.
You need to cover enough material that reviewing is not quite trivial, but no so much that your mind starts to wonder.
When I was a kid, I had difficulty staying on the same task. My daydreams were (and still are) incredibly vivid. I had a lot of physical energy, and I wanted to run around as a kid. And when I can't, being stuck inside studying, I'd have near lucid daydreams of running around outside. Combined with being able to pick up many things up, I become more and more intolerant of my own mistakes and challenging situations. As I entered my early adulthood, my experiences of life started narrowing down as I avoided challenges. And when I try taking on those challenges, I'd run straight into them.
It was later in life that I learned the methods for concentration practice. There are no shortcuts to concentration. There are no clever hacks. Searching for a shortcut is precisely why most people have difficulty concentrating. Your mind does not want to accept what you are doing here and now. So you think you have to "force" yourself to concentrate, and end up burning a lot of energy keeping you on track. This is NOT how you concentrate.
Concentration grows a little bit each time you practice, and the more you practice, the more you learn about how your mind works.
Growing the raw skill of concentration as you learn your primary art is itself the reason other skills take years of practice to master. It is also why, without practice, talent does not blossom into mastery.
Someone asked me to post up a cheatsheet on how to practice concentration; maybe other people here will find it useful: http://www.quora.com/Meditation/Whats-a-nice-little-cheat-sh...
It has interesting framework, divided into two. The first part is what you can do. The second is how you can create an environment that keeps you on track.
1. The Pomodoro Technique. http://www.pomodorotechnique.com/get-to-work/
2. Reading The War of Art can help with issues of procrastination if the thing you're having trouble focusing on is a creative endeavor.
I still procrastinate like crazy sometimes though, so I'd add to this small list a book called the power of habit. This is the missing link on how to make your behaviour automatic.
I bet if you try enough you can add another 5 minutes to those 10 minutes. And then later another 5 minutes, and then later another 5... And so on and some day you will go to 10 hours.
People often ask how somebody can sleep only for 6 hours. Or get up to work at 3 AM in the morning. That's possible only after trying hard enough for weeks a little bit at a time.
I play a text based online game where activity is extremely important and I often only have 3 or 4 hours of sleep every day, and even that is broken in to chunks so I can be online every 3 hours - and this is for the past 5 and a half years.
Outside of the obvious physical and mental stress it can put you under, you are perfectly right when you say that it takes time to perfect, at first I was tired from having 8 hours of sleep, now I can have 3 hours of sleep per night, wake up and operate at 100%.
I'm not sure when, but somewhere along the line I lost the need for sleep, I don't get tired any more or yawn and even on nights where I can sleep as long as I want, I find myself only wanting 4 or 5 hours anyway.
I'm without a doubt the highest ranked player on the game, fought for through perseverance and a refusal to let my ego take a hit, but was it worth it? I'm not sure.
>>but was it worth it? I'm not sure.
I won't comment on your habits and whats important to you. But speaking objectively. I would say its bad use of time.
If you are in need of entertainment, which demands a lot of engaging activity I would advice you start to learn playing a music instrument. Again not risking your health in the course of it, but music is a liberating experience. Especially if you learn how to play yourself. It can be very joyful.
And its generally a good skill to have and a lot better than fighting for internet points.
"after just a few days, the four- and six-hour group reported that, yes, they were slightly sleepy. But they insisted they had adjusted to their new state. Even 14 days into the study, they said sleepiness was not affecting them. In fact, their performance had tanked. In other words, the sleep-deprived among us are lousy judges of our own sleep needs. We are not nearly as sharp as we think we are."
So, although you can get used to being sleepy, it's unlikely you're performance isn't being impacted. You could argue that the 2 week study wasn't long enough, but it still seems to show that you can't really judge your own cognitive performance, so any anecdotal evidence to the contrary wouldn't hold much water.
Just out of curiosity, how old were you when you took up calculus, and did you go back to college full time?
Lately, I weave in and out of painting, coding, and studying mathematics. The switch between the fields often has me feeling lost when initially starting back up into one or the other, since I sort of go through these manic cycles of learning rather than something continuous and balanced throughout. When I switch from painting to math or coding, I usually feel very dumb for a while, relearning all of the new terminology I have missed. It is often a significant blow to my ego, and over the years it has required me to develop sort of a thick skin to approaching sets of people who are technically minded, while my mind is still in the la-la land art world, and vice-verse.
But I mean, out of everything I have approached to learn to do or learn about, the one thing I know that is true for all of them is that nothing is actually simple. Doing calculus and memorizing formula to apply to a very specific set of a problems requires a strong memory, which younger people tend have the advantage on (not myself though, 26 and my memory is garbage). But actually understanding the concepts, and being capable of applying them after you take the class, that's different.
I surprised someone, in grad school I think, explaining how to calculate how large a container we would need to clean the espresso machine (it drips water through), based on some simple dimensions of the input container, and the flow rate. That's calculus. I knew a lot of students in engineering who did really well in the class, and are doing really well in their specific sub-field. But to actually understand what one is learning, that is different. Everyone can do it no matter what age, it just requires dedication and actually being able to think about what confuses you. And it is often a person's ego or fear of their ego appearing 'less than' that hinders progress in learning and doing. Or probably, it is always the case that that is why people stop learning and doing.
It is not difficult to ask simple questions. I mean last night I spent about 6 hours thinking about what a point on a number line actually is. Had anyone seen my notes, they would probably look like they came from a 1st grade maths class. But I'm connecting it to many other topics I understand - and that is something those people don't see, the tangential thought process that develops along with my learning and questioning. So when someone asks a simple question that may seem trivial, instead of scoffing at the fact that that person does not know the answer, I prefer to ask myself "Why did they ask that question?", or, "Why is it important that this thing is so clearly defined or understood - what about this thing is necessary or important to understanding of the whole?". And those are my favorite kinds of questions to ask in learning, because it keeps every topic interesting.
Let me share with you an anecdote: In undergrad, I took an intro computer networking class. Everyone else could understand what was going on. There was no assigned reading material and lectures didn't follow from any text. I always was the lowest student in the class, no matter how hard I tried. Everyone else could understand it quickly. I worked hard on that class but it didn't matter. Not everyone who works hard will show positive results, I guess. I more or less flunked my way through school. Sometimes I'd work hard, sometimes not. It didn't seem to matter.
Or, if I'm facing someone who has worked hard and is also very intelligent? I don't have a chance.
The rhetoric of these articles and the rest of these posts here have a coded meaning behind them: there are no disadvantaged people or students -- only stupid or lazy ones. It's a corollary of Survivor Bias. If you work hard, everything will be peachy-keen OK and nothing will go wrong. If you work hard and fail, you deserve only scorn.
For me, it was, never mind if you work so hard that ignored everything else, worked so hard to not get beaten by your parents, worked so hard to get mastery of material -- I must be still too lazy or stupid since I failed.
I don't know what it is that I don't have that everyone else does. I'm likely to not ever know.
This is a topic that I'm very familiar with so that's why I wrote a lot about it and sound perhaps a little crazy.
Should be easy for you, working smarter is easier than working hard.
You have to know how it feels when you have tried all you can and you still come up short.
I think your primary need is to be more comfortable in your own skin. That book talks about how. After that, you'll still fail at some things---like the rest of us---but it won't hurt so much. Then, because quitting won't have so much meaning to you, it will be easier for you to give up on something that isn't going anywhere which, ironically, is crucial to eventual success.
I ask because I've mentored folks who have similar feelings and one thing that correlated with them was that they didn't actually enjoy learning new stuff. In particular they almost had a mental block when it came to learning something first in order to achieve a secondary goal.
One story I heard was a student who was failing English composition repeatedly. The person failing's attitude was "I have to have this to get my degree, but frankly I don't give a flying f*ck about English composition." Absolutely no amount of work, practice, tutoring, or study helped. The only thing that worked, was getting past the 'I have to do this but don't want to' attitude was to find some small way that learning composition could become an interesting thing to do.
Thus the question, and now a corollary, is there any subject area you know really well? And by "any" I mean "any" from an academic subject like Math to the back story of all the characters on "Twilight." If so how does that subject matter differ from the subject matter you aren't good at?
1) You have keen analytical and writing skills, intelligence is not a lack for what you want to achieve.
2) You suffer from victim mentality being too concerned about the abilities of others while easily dismissive of your own. No matter how much/hard you work, without being able to chuck this aside, every failure will be magnified and your successes will be mitigated to an irrational degree.
The fact of the matter is the road to mastery is paved with tons of mistakes, tons of situations where you will feel like an absolute moron. You have to learn to reframe those moments and treasure them, because they are signals that you are encountering moments of true growth. Learn to compete against your own competence and not others. You don't know what they've been through to get where they are.
Whenever something seems unreasonably tough, break it down into simpler problems to digest. Hack the art of learning itself. Don't look at the same problem until you're blue in the face, change it up so that there is a measurable degree of progress.
Your blockage is more emotional than intellectual.
> The fact of the matter is the road to mastery is paved > with tons of mistakes, tons of situations where you will > feel like an absolute moron.
This is so true. Feeling like you're stupid is just part of the process. Try to ignore the temptation to worry about how it appears to be so easy for everyone else. You may have to work twice as hard as the next person, but do it. They say it's darkest before the dawn, and that totally applies to learning for me.
When I learned Windows SDK programming back with Windows 3.0, I really felt like I was not smart enough for this. When I learned functional programming in Erlang, I really was quite confident that this was too much for me to be able to cope with. I've felt stupid so many times trying to learn things that I finally identified it as a pattern, a sign that I'm about to break through as long as I don't give up.
Feeling like you are stupid is an attitude. I find it is one of the biggest barriers to learning. If you feel stupid, you are less likely to try "stupid" things that teach you a lot. Also, feeling stupid leads to anger, and anger prevents learning.
Aaron Hillegass said this best in the beginning of Cocoa Programing for Mac OS X, and I'll never forget it. You can preview it on Amazon under "How to learn."
Looks like a great book.
1. Don't give up. 2. Never complain. Take the 30 day no complaining challenge[1]. Not complaining is about focusing your mind on positive things, because complaining and thinking about negative things is self-reinforcing and makes you more sad. The only way to go for 30 days straight without complaining is to re-form how you think, and it worked wonders for me. 3. Read Letters from a Stoic.
[1] http://www.acomplaintfreeworld.org/
If it's one big goal - "I want to be an X" - well guess what, you're going to have to have a thousand smaller victories to get there. And by the time you do get there you're most certainly going to have bigger goals beyond that on the horizon. Otherwise life will get very boring.
It's the messy room syndrome, for you only have two hands you can't will the whole thing into becoming clean at once. You have to pick some part of it that you can handle and make it clean, then move onto another part. As you make your way through interesting patterns will emerge that will allow you to clean smarter, so the first act of cleaning will go much slower than the last act. You still only have 2 hands, but you have something else - wisdom.
sown - quit. Not everything is possible. Stop beating your head against a wall and try and enjoy your damn life
However, it does not follow that "everyone can be a computer programmer for Google" or "everyone can be a professional quarterback." If you want to make it to a high-level in a high paying or high status field, you must compete against other people who are also practicing really hard and who also have great natural talent.
Personally, I have around natural athletic ability. I play flag football, and am likely in the top 95th percentile of QB ability. When I throw the ball around with friends at a BBQ, I can hit people in stride with tight spirals. But I could never, ever be a pro-QB, or even a QB in a competitive amateur league. My body simply does not have the appropriate build, and I simply cannot build the muscle strength to make the passes needed to be a great QB.
On the flip side, I have always had an innate knack for cognitive problems, I was always that guy in math class who got A's despite barely doing homework and not studying for tests. Now another person could also get A's in that class with only mediocre natural talent by studying very hard. They might think that, "Hey, I've worked hard, I got A's, I can do anything, I can get a job at Google some day." But if they go into the most cognitively demanding career, they will find themselves competing against the most naturally talented people, who also now have a financial incentive to work extremely hard, and the less naturally talented people will simply not be able to compete.
I find it unfortunate and self-serving, that so there are so many commentators and intellectuals, who are above average cognitively and (likely) mediocre athletically, who assume that the other people's failings at cognitive skills are due to lack of practice or lack of sufficient schooling. Meanwhile they assume their own lack of athletic ability is due to accidents of birth.
That said, it can be very difficult to determine if your having difficultly in a subject is really due to innate talent or due to lack of practice. When I took an intro computer science course, I noticed the professor was a completely horrible teacher (and lectures are generally a horrible way to teach math, computer science or any technical subject). The textbook sucked too. The people who did well in that class already had been programming on their own during high school. The people taking the class expecting it to be an actual introductory course, who expected that if you just followed the lectures and textbooks that you would know how to do the assignment, ended up doing very poorly. Even if they worked very hard, their total hours dedicated to understanding computer science was far below that of fellow classmates.
One piece of advice that might help you: when you're trying to measure your progress, instead of looking at the people who are ahead of you all the time, sometimes look at the people who are behind you. The people who you've exceeded, who you have done better than. It's an important part of motivation that's often overlooked. (This and a bunch of other really excellent advice I got from Seneca in Letters from a Stoic.)
Also, don't give up. You've only truly failed when you quit learning or give up.
I would:
-start a blog.
-start working on a personal project in another hacker or designer. Find some at some mailing list near you.
Your repeated references to hard work stood out:
There's a pattern you can fall into where you stare at the page and get stressed, and then come away hours later none the wiser but exhausted and feeling unduly virtuous from your hard but meaningless work.Hard work doesn't count for anything of itself. Only when you're pursuing effective strategies.
If you want to, you could dig up your syllabus notes or email the uni for a copy of them. Identify the topics, and see if you understand them. Get past exams out of the library and identify the topics in them. Find a mentor and go back over the stuff again until you have an easy understanding of each of the concepts.I mean, it's also possible you're struggling against some kind of mental handicap. But if your IQ was really 75 or something, I don't think you'd be able to write such long sentences.
One mantra tossed around of late is "_perfect_ practice makes perfect," meaning not to never make mistakes, but to be conscious and analytical when you do.
http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html
". . . . In fact I suspect if you had the sixteen year old Shakespeare or Einstein in school with you, they'd seem impressive, but not totally unlike your other friends.
"Which is an uncomfortable thought. If they were just like us, then they had to work very hard to do what they did. And that's one reason we like to believe in genius. It gives us an excuse for being lazy. . . . "
In "How do Do What You Love" (January 2006),
http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html
he wrote,
"Sometimes jumping from one sort of work to another is a sign of energy, and sometimes it's a sign of laziness. Are you dropping out, or boldly carving a new path? You often can't tell yourself. Plenty of people who will later do great things seem to be disappointments early on, when they're trying to find their niche.
"Is there some test you can use to keep yourself honest? One is to try to do a good job at whatever you're doing, even if you don't like it. Then at least you'll know you're not using dissatisfaction as an excuse for being lazy. Perhaps more importantly, you'll get into the habit of doing things well."
And in "The Anatomy of Determination" (December 2009),
http://www.paulgraham.com/determination.html
he wrote,
"In most domains, talent is overrated compared to determination—partly because it makes a better story, partly because it gives onlookers an excuse for being lazy, and partly because after a while determination starts to look like talent."
Mathematician Hung-hsi Wu wrote an article more than a decade ago, Basic skills versus conceptual understanding: A bogus dichotomy in mathematics education, American Educator, Fall 1999, Vol. 23, No. 3, pp. 14-19, 50-52,
http://www.aft.org/pdfs/americaneducator/fall1999/wu.pdf
to point out that any distinction between understanding a topic and having basic skills in the topic is a "bogus dichotomy." The two go together like two sides of the same coin.
This is true in the discussion of Penn & Teller below, as well as game programming, and probably all worthy endeavors. Wish I could remember the reference...
Thank you for posting this and thank you PG for saying it.
The author rightly belittles the concept of talent but it seems to have found its way in through the back door: “Two of our four turned out to be musically gifted and before long were shuttled out of Suzuki to hard-core classical violin teachers.”
(Talent is just the way we describe people who have some competence in a field which is inexplicit; nobody knows why they are good, otherwise one could learn it.)
Another thing to point out is that apparently none of the children have developed careers in music or composition (yet), so it remains to be seen if they have any creativity intact.
Why might they have lost creativity in adulthood? Because of childhood coercion. Those long hours of practice -- children don’t do that without being forced. It can be subtle, such as the worry of a slight loss of parental affection, sibling rivalry encouraged, etc.
Children will play for hours on end and this is where true learning occurs. Some children are bright enough to make their ‘practice’ a form of play, so they manage to improve despite appearances.
Creative adults continue to play, it’s just that the subject matter appears more serious. But progress remains open-ended, with stops and starts, switching between activities, and unpredictable (not ‘guaranteed’) results. The unpredictable nature of achievement follows from a law of epistemology: we can’t predict future knowledge (including our own).
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Mindset-Psychology-Success-Carol-Dweck...
Not everybody has the ability to practice this hard.
"Well I only have so much RAM to do this task, but if increase my computer processing power through deliberate practice..."
I was a bit offhand, I admit. I was in a bad mood when I made that comment. But I stand by the fact people on HN take themselves and their capabilities way too seriously, without any thought to the fact, say, that the internet and programming are only a minuscule fraction of our history as intelligent lifeforms. While I love the internet/programming/topics discussed on HN, I just think that people here are too hard on themselves. You're not a computer with specs, you are the results of hundreds of thousands of years of evolution.
That said, the best do work damned hard.
I am often ridiculed by my wife, and I always wondered where I got this from. This trait is something I want to teach my kids, but I never knew quite how.
Until I read this article and it reminded me that I too did the Suzuki program, into classical violin after. I remembered practicing a lot - and I remember getting frustrated frequently.
I also remember the short burst of adrenaline I would feel, and the overwhelming feeling of accomplishment, when I get that 'trill' just perfect or when I perfected my vibrato.
Even though I have since put down the violin, I feel the same accomplishment when I tackle something hard (in programming) and I eventually figure it out.
I need to remember to thank my parents for insisting that I keep at the violin, even when I was very frustrated and wanted to rage quit.
This almost hurt me phisically.