7 ms·

Increasing your practice surface area

169 points by ChanningAllen 1y ago

BinaryIgor 1y ago
Good read, a summary: When you become obsessed with A, your whole life becomes a practice of A.
Zambyte 1y ago
This article might be interesting, and I'm not against AI use. I am not interested in AI slop though, and I immediately lost interest in the banner photo with nonsense text in it.
- mirror_neuron 1y ago
  That was my first reaction, too, but it’s not actually nonsense - it’s a depiction of Eminem practicing rhymes in a casual conversation. It’s valid feedback for the author, though. I had to read the article to understand the image.
  - chrisweekly 1y ago
    Yeah, it would probably work better if that image were positioned after the reference to Eminem thinking of rhymes all day.
  - NiloCK 1y ago
    AI polarization is a little interesting. The AI generated image prompted the parent to not even consider whether the content was on topic. This might be a decent heuristic, but it's bound to throw out a lot of potentially useful stuff as well.
- ChanningAllen 1y ago
  Author here. Good feedback: the text isn't nonsense, but it requires background knowledge that the man on the right is the rapper Eminem.
- AznHisoka 1y ago
  I'm an Eminem fan and didn't get that reference FWIW. I thought it was some "Silicon Valley bro" that wanted you to drink kelp, and build your biceps or something
  - ChanningAllen 1y ago
    Gotcha! Shame on me. Just slapped a "Slim Shady" label on his hoodie. Won't fully stop the bleeding but at least a few more people will get it.
    - Zambyte 1y ago
      Thanks for the change, sorry if I came off as too aggressive. I've seen some uses of AI that were very similar that strictly made the article worse and it would have been better to simply delete it. I'll concede that I simply didn't get it, and that's a me problem here. I'll give the article a more fair chance when I have some time later :)
    - gcanyon 1y ago
      Orange door hinge. I got the reference.
- jannyfer 1y ago
  I lost interest when I got to the email address box to subscribe. Interrupts the flow and makes me skim the rest.
  - ChanningAllen 1y ago
    Sorry for the interruption. We're an indie business with no banner ads, and our newsletter helps us keep the lights on. Hope you enjoyed the piece up to that point.
danjl 1y ago
Or, you can live a balanced happy life with relationships and touching grass where you are "in the moment", and not always distracted.
- bdangubic 1y ago
  being passionate about something is not a distraction
  - wiseowise 1y ago
    Being passionate and obsessive are two different things. > Turn idle time into mental rehearsal Any psychologist would bash your head with a book for following this.
    - bdangubic 1y ago
      Good thing I would neither ever see a psychologist nor take a silly advise like that
  - bloomca 1y ago
    It unironically is. Maybe if you can afford not working, it's fine, but with a regular job you simply don't have that much free time. In vacuum, there is a lot of it, in practice once you get a few commitments, it gets very challenging. There are some tricks -- if you are already good at something, maintaining that good level is usually not that hard (you already know how and can recalibrate your level to the available time), but picking up new concepts is very time consuming. I'd also say that the article talks about living through something, that's probably more involved than just passionate.
AznHisoka 1y ago
This is the same thing that AJATT (All Japanese All The Time or something) recommends to learn a new language too.
- boerseth 1y ago
  I was gonna say. I did it with French some years ago and it worked like a charm. Later I became obsessed with Argentine tango. Unfortunately, I thought, "comprehensible input" won't work with dancing, especially not a couple's dance. Nevertheless, unable to dance every day due to my local scene being quite small, I instead consumed a boatload of YouTube videos during my spare time. Instructional content, performances, class summaries, and what have you. And I progressed super quickly. First off, as a leader, it is good to have seen competent dancers with good musicality and how they choose their steps to fit with phrases of songs. That much fits in parallel with input-based language acquisition techniques. But I also think I gained a good amound of intuition about how to move my own body. Not perfect intuition, but more than nothing, which was very much my starting point.
  - peterfirefly 1y ago
    Watching lots of Doom videos on Youtube helped me learn some aspects of the game surprisingly fast. I can't control Doomguy as fast and as precisely as the best Doom youtubers but I can read a situation in the game about as fast and as good as they can and often come up with the plan they eventually follow faster than they do.
    - boerseth 1y ago
      I get it! Years ago my obsession was Classic Tetris, and it was common knowledge that watching skilled players at work would improve your own stacking and strategy. A lot of the pros openly admitted to watching their competition while starting out in order to get good
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
ge96 1y ago
I wonder how the indie/entrepreneur space is doing nowadays. I tried to do it myself but never really got anywhere this was back in 2016. Whenever I go on sites/subreddits around this topic a lot of the posts just seem to be about generating clout/some fake revenue numbers/screenshot of earnings. It's like entrepreneurs selling to each other. I suppose nowadays it's probably around LLM wrappers, photo generation, video generation services... there were those niche ones in the past like the teacher with her bingo cards maker It's still in my mind as I don't like waiting for a paycheck, just wondering how the space is doing nowadays
- ChanningAllen 1y ago
  It's doing better than ever! LLMs offer the equivalent of $500k+ in outside funding if used correctly, so there's a huge uptick in # of new bootstrapped startups. In fact we (the Indie Hackers founders) are bootstrapping a new B2B app now that Claude Code & Codex CLI (etc) are on the org chat.
  - mikestorrent 1y ago
    I hope this is a parody post and not actually the real exhultations of an actual founder.
    - zrules 1y ago
      For post-product-market-fit hires or scale-up engineering teams, the interview process could skip LeetCode and instead test how well candidates can identify and debug issues introduced by LLMs. Less binary trees, more LLM bug-hunting
    - myth_drannon 1y ago
      Well the OP is the co-founder of Indie Hackers...
      - mikestorrent 1y ago
        :shrug: Good for him
kalap_ur 1y ago
There is a book called "Talent is overrated" it essentially says, you need to 1) invest time, 2) do targeted practice, and 3) have a mentor, who helps you in targeted practice. Practice alone is not enough, it must be targeted at 1) what is relevant and/or 2) where your biggest weakness is at the moment.
satvikpendem 1y ago
How is IndieHackers doing since being independent? I used to use it quite a bit but it seemed like recently it's focused more on articles, similar to Starter Story I guess, which makes a ton of money so I can't blame you for going that route, than the forum (which I can't even figure out how to get to anymore). But then again, the forum had quite a lot of promotion and spam that got boring to read after a while.
- ChanningAllen 1y ago
  It's doing quite well. Thanks for asking. :) Good observation re the forum: folks find it novel and engaging for about a week, then get bored of the repetition. Not very monetizable for an indie team.
JackFr 1y ago
> The difference between being good and being great isn’t talent or formal training, but the invisible practice that happens when you're just living life. Pure nonsense. Necessary != sufficient, and honestly neither are demonstrated in the anecdotes.
- jvanderbot 1y ago
  Two things. It's possible to be great at something simply by practicing, assuming normal capabilities. But great here just means "better than virtually everyone". Being mediocre among people who practice regularly it makes you immediately better than basically everyone who has done it once or twice. By most definitions that's "great". Median daily StarCraft ranked player? You're great at StarCraft. Second, if you start young enough, you get the compounding effects of time. You're now "pretty good among lifelong daily players in their prime". That's Olympic/ world class. Like that guy who had kids just to make them Chess masters. He did so by making chess part of the family life, so integral it wasn't working it just was. The guy from the original post actually. So it's tempting to say things like TFA posits, and while I'm not sure it's 100% true, it's definitely not 100% false or pure rubbish.
  - bloomca 1y ago
    I think the article itself mixes these concepts. It starts with the world-class level example, and then jumps into learning new skills over a week. In order to be great, indeed, you don't need to be obsessed, and very rarely you cannot achieve it -- you just need to be relatively consistent. And I 100% agree that if you start early, maintaining a skill on the "better than vast majority" level is not too hard (the hard work was done in the past). But to achieve truly outstanding results, you definitely need to dedicate tons of time and ideally be obsessed with it (at least very-very interested).
wiseowise 1y ago
This is new level of snake oil. When you're not selling your own snake oil, but trying to piggyback off of other people. Burn out speedrun 101. If you want to keep your sanity, you need to find your own passion, not try to emulate others (especially with crazy routines like the examples).
- ChanningAllen 1y ago
  Author here. I've spent a decade drinking my own "snake oil" (the advice in this essay), and I've only now committed it to writing so that others can apply it or ignore it as they wish. I haven't burned out. Instead, I find my work fulfilling, endlessly novel, and valuable to others. Does this do anything to change your mental model?
  - wiseowise 1y ago
    No. My 2 cents: article like these need to be presented with a big red disclaimer for folks who tend to obsess over things like ambition, prestige, fame. Trying to emulate the greats is like trying to emulate WW2 pilot during the Battle of Britain. Sure, you might become one, but if odds are against you then there’s nothing you can do. Idle time is extremely important for psyche and feeding it to your obsession will eventually drive you insane if you can’t achieve what you want. On top of that, you’re not really providing any advice. You’re not explaining why they had the drive, what motivated them to do it in the first place. How do they maintain their life’s, how did they overcome difficulties, what families and environments they come from. You’re essentially shaming the reader for not being driven enough. As is being driven and motivated are the only things that you need to succeed. I wouldn’t say it better than https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45442479 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45442479 * Breath * Touch grass * Breath again * Create a plan for yourself, follow it and don’t obsess over things
bitbasher 1y ago
This article is quite shallow. It's essentially saying, in order to excel at something it needs to become a part of you. There's some truth there, but Charles Bukowski said it much better and more succinctly with, "Don't try." [1] 1: https://poets.org/poem/so-you-want-be-writer https://poets.org/poem/so-you-want-be-writer
- cm2012 1y ago
  Telling people to ignore things they dont like thinking about is completely terrible advice. Its almost the worst possible advice.
  - gridspy 1y ago
    Either that or specialization
  - bitbasher 1y ago
    I don't think he meant to not try. I think he meant you shouldn't have to try. Trying implies some resistance or conformity. To him, art and creation was something that was there and natural. You just did it. You were mad with it [1]. It reminds me of nights when I was a teen hacking away at some computer games or writing my first emulator. There was no class, no jira tickets, no books. Just a teen struck with a madness. 1: https://bookshavepores.tumblr.com/post/9013559249/charles-bukowskis-letter-to-william-packard-in https://bookshavepores.tumblr.com/post/9013559249/charles-bu...
    - Swizec 1y ago
      As the saying goes: don’t write unless you can’t not write. There are so many better ways to spend your time. Pushing a boulder uphill is hard. If it never gets over the hump and starts pulling, find a different boulder!
      - PandaRider 1y ago
        I think the problem statement is: How do you know when to Let Go of the current boulder? The poem suggested many many many possible when. Here's one: "unless it comes out of / your soul like a rocket,". Unfortunately (or fortunately), in life, there is no methodology to prove that a given search problem is futile (e.g. NP-complete)... so we have to take our chances and choose. I believe that's the beauty of life: choice.
seaucre 1y ago
The thing that doesn't click in articles like this is the advice section afterwards. Do you think the people described thought about how to increase their practice surface area? No, they were simply /interested/. And part of the reason they were interested was because of natural talent! Do you want to know how to increase your practice surface area? Find things you're interested in. But the reality is that many people just aren't as interested in anything as some people are interested in something. And that's okay. The real advice is to learn to accept yourself as you are, whether you're an obsessive or not.
- philipallstar 1y ago
  > The real advice is to learn to accept yourself as you are, whether you're an obsessive or not. Accepting yourself as you are is the opposite of practicing to get better at something.
  - luckyandroid 1y ago
    I see what you're getting at, but I'd disagree. I think accepting who you are also comes with commitment to pursue the things you're interested in, because non-acceptance would be "ignoring this part of me I wanted to pursue but didn't think I should".
    - philipallstar 1y ago
      Pursuing interest isn't the same as practicing things to get better at them. Things can be superficially interesting, and it takes an understanding that self not being perfect is totally fine to know that the process of change is not necessarily interesting, but it has rewards.
- ChanningAllen 1y ago
  > Do you think the people described thought about how to increase their practice surface area? No, they were simply /interested/. In fact, many of them did think about it. Many of them designed, tested, experimented, and tweaked their approaches to their crafts endlessly throughout their lives. It can be comforting (because it lets us off the hook) to think that masters of their craft all follow the "just do it" ethos while simply "accepting themselves as they are," but usually the opposite is true. At least at the margin.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
vstollen 1y ago
I like the idea of the article. However, I wonder what are ways to increase the practice surface area for programming / software engineering? I can think of various high-Level activities such as analyzing systems we interact with on a day-to-day basis. However, I cannot come up with exercises that would improve my code itself.
cjs_ac 1y ago
I'm currently building the product for my startup - I'm hoping to launch in the next few months. I'm very grateful to IndieHackers for showing me how to make that happen, but when I look at the website now, I can't help but feel that it's jumped the shark. At the top of the page, there's a link labelled Starting Up that takes you to a page with links to articles that taken together form a Guide to Starting Up. Those links, and those articles, represent the entire value of the IndieHackers website. There's a lot of value in those articles, but the rest of the website provides no value. Members of the IndieHackers community talk about their 'shovel companies' - typically things like AI-powered marketing services, or the like. This is nonsense: the real shovel companies in the SaaS space are cloud providers and payment processors. Indie hackers claiming to have made a shovel company aren't Levi Strauss selling sturdy trousers to prospectors, they're urchins offering to help dig in plots in exchange for a bit of bread. IndieHackers itself has become one of these urchins, exhibiting increasing desperation to show ongoing relevance. Skill at software development isn't the thing that's holding most indie hackers back; what's holding them back is that they don't know any good problems to solve. There's an awful lot of money out there waiting to be spent on simple CRUD apps that don't yet exist. You don't need to push the limit of what's possible with computers to make money; you just need to go out into the world to find an actual problem.
listenfaster 1y ago
Nice succinct read outlining something I think a lot of people are aware of, but don’t often describe. It’s my first time reading Indie Hacker, and I think there’s nice balance of quality, depth, and brevity that you’re trying to strike? I recently watched a YouTube on cultural communication pathways, and there was a comparison of “engineered communication” being a top down approach, as opposed to a gardening approach to communication being a bottoms up approach; one being predictable with measurable outcomes, and the other being organic and unpredictable. In gardening we plant seeds, help them germinate, watch them grow. A lot of the articles on Indie hackers seem to be planting seeds, which I appreciate. I wish HN would see value in a range of articles, and not skew to preferring engineered rigid predictability. Pardon the overstatement but you get my drift.
vunderba 1y ago
A lot of the article goes into trying to "multitask" your practice - building it into some minimal viable practice routine. I would urge caution around this - in fact - deliberate practice is probably worth 10 times this. There's a reason people tend to plateau early in their efforts to master something. Once your brain figures out how to put the skill on autopilot you're going to find your rate of improvement significantly slower. It's not just about the time you put in - it's about the type of practice you put in.

169 points by ChanningAllen 1y ago

Good read, a summary: When you become obsessed with A, your whole life becomes a practice of A.

This article might be interesting, and I'm not against AI use. I am not interested in AI slop though, and I immediately lost interest in the banner photo with nonsense text in it.

mirror_neuron 1y ago
That was my first reaction, too, but it’s not actually nonsense - it’s a depiction of Eminem practicing rhymes in a casual conversation. It’s valid feedback for the author, though. I had to read the article to understand the image.
- chrisweekly 1y ago
  Yeah, it would probably work better if that image were positioned after the reference to Eminem thinking of rhymes all day.
- NiloCK 1y ago
  AI polarization is a little interesting. The AI generated image prompted the parent to not even consider whether the content was on topic. This might be a decent heuristic, but it's bound to throw out a lot of potentially useful stuff as well.
ChanningAllen 1y ago
Author here. Good feedback: the text isn't nonsense, but it requires background knowledge that the man on the right is the rapper Eminem.
AznHisoka 1y ago
I'm an Eminem fan and didn't get that reference FWIW. I thought it was some "Silicon Valley bro" that wanted you to drink kelp, and build your biceps or something
- ChanningAllen 1y ago
  Gotcha! Shame on me. Just slapped a "Slim Shady" label on his hoodie. Won't fully stop the bleeding but at least a few more people will get it.
  - Zambyte 1y ago
    Thanks for the change, sorry if I came off as too aggressive. I've seen some uses of AI that were very similar that strictly made the article worse and it would have been better to simply delete it. I'll concede that I simply didn't get it, and that's a me problem here. I'll give the article a more fair chance when I have some time later :)
  - gcanyon 1y ago
    Orange door hinge. I got the reference.
jannyfer 1y ago
I lost interest when I got to the email address box to subscribe. Interrupts the flow and makes me skim the rest.
- ChanningAllen 1y ago
  Sorry for the interruption. We're an indie business with no banner ads, and our newsletter helps us keep the lights on. Hope you enjoyed the piece up to that point.

danjl 1y ago

Or, you can live a balanced happy life with relationships and touching grass where you are "in the moment", and not always distracted.

bdangubic 1y ago
being passionate about something is not a distraction
- wiseowise 1y ago
  Being passionate and obsessive are two different things. > Turn idle time into mental rehearsal Any psychologist would bash your head with a book for following this.
  - bdangubic 1y ago
    Good thing I would neither ever see a psychologist nor take a silly advise like that
- bloomca 1y ago
  It unironically is. Maybe if you can afford not working, it's fine, but with a regular job you simply don't have that much free time. In vacuum, there is a lot of it, in practice once you get a few commitments, it gets very challenging. There are some tricks -- if you are already good at something, maintaining that good level is usually not that hard (you already know how and can recalibrate your level to the available time), but picking up new concepts is very time consuming. I'd also say that the article talks about living through something, that's probably more involved than just passionate.

AznHisoka 1y ago

This is the same thing that AJATT (All Japanese All The Time or something) recommends to learn a new language too.

boerseth 1y ago
I was gonna say. I did it with French some years ago and it worked like a charm. Later I became obsessed with Argentine tango. Unfortunately, I thought, "comprehensible input" won't work with dancing, especially not a couple's dance. Nevertheless, unable to dance every day due to my local scene being quite small, I instead consumed a boatload of YouTube videos during my spare time. Instructional content, performances, class summaries, and what have you. And I progressed super quickly. First off, as a leader, it is good to have seen competent dancers with good musicality and how they choose their steps to fit with phrases of songs. That much fits in parallel with input-based language acquisition techniques. But I also think I gained a good amound of intuition about how to move my own body. Not perfect intuition, but more than nothing, which was very much my starting point.
- peterfirefly 1y ago
  Watching lots of Doom videos on Youtube helped me learn some aspects of the game surprisingly fast. I can't control Doomguy as fast and as precisely as the best Doom youtubers but I can read a situation in the game about as fast and as good as they can and often come up with the plan they eventually follow faster than they do.
  - boerseth 1y ago
    I get it! Years ago my obsession was Classic Tetris, and it was common knowledge that watching skilled players at work would improve your own stacking and strategy. A lot of the pros openly admitted to watching their competition while starting out in order to get good

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

ge96 1y ago

I wonder how the indie/entrepreneur space is doing nowadays. I tried to do it myself but never really got anywhere this was back in 2016. Whenever I go on sites/subreddits around this topic a lot of the posts just seem to be about generating clout/some fake revenue numbers/screenshot of earnings. It's like entrepreneurs selling to each other. I suppose nowadays it's probably around LLM wrappers, photo generation, video generation services... there were those niche ones in the past like the teacher with her bingo cards maker It's still in my mind as I don't like waiting for a paycheck, just wondering how the space is doing nowadays

ChanningAllen 1y ago
It's doing better than ever! LLMs offer the equivalent of $500k+ in outside funding if used correctly, so there's a huge uptick in # of new bootstrapped startups. In fact we (the Indie Hackers founders) are bootstrapping a new B2B app now that Claude Code & Codex CLI (etc) are on the org chat.
- mikestorrent 1y ago
  I hope this is a parody post and not actually the real exhultations of an actual founder.
  - zrules 1y ago
    For post-product-market-fit hires or scale-up engineering teams, the interview process could skip LeetCode and instead test how well candidates can identify and debug issues introduced by LLMs. Less binary trees, more LLM bug-hunting
  - myth_drannon 1y ago
    Well the OP is the co-founder of Indie Hackers...
    - mikestorrent 1y ago
      :shrug: Good for him

kalap_ur 1y ago

There is a book called "Talent is overrated" it essentially says, you need to 1) invest time, 2) do targeted practice, and 3) have a mentor, who helps you in targeted practice. Practice alone is not enough, it must be targeted at 1) what is relevant and/or 2) where your biggest weakness is at the moment.

satvikpendem 1y ago

How is IndieHackers doing since being independent? I used to use it quite a bit but it seemed like recently it's focused more on articles, similar to Starter Story I guess, which makes a ton of money so I can't blame you for going that route, than the forum (which I can't even figure out how to get to anymore). But then again, the forum had quite a lot of promotion and spam that got boring to read after a while.

ChanningAllen 1y ago
It's doing quite well. Thanks for asking. :) Good observation re the forum: folks find it novel and engaging for about a week, then get bored of the repetition. Not very monetizable for an indie team.

JackFr 1y ago

> The difference between being good and being great isn’t talent or formal training, but the invisible practice that happens when you're just living life. Pure nonsense. Necessary != sufficient, and honestly neither are demonstrated in the anecdotes.

jvanderbot 1y ago
Two things. It's possible to be great at something simply by practicing, assuming normal capabilities. But great here just means "better than virtually everyone". Being mediocre among people who practice regularly it makes you immediately better than basically everyone who has done it once or twice. By most definitions that's "great". Median daily StarCraft ranked player? You're great at StarCraft. Second, if you start young enough, you get the compounding effects of time. You're now "pretty good among lifelong daily players in their prime". That's Olympic/ world class. Like that guy who had kids just to make them Chess masters. He did so by making chess part of the family life, so integral it wasn't working it just was. The guy from the original post actually. So it's tempting to say things like TFA posits, and while I'm not sure it's 100% true, it's definitely not 100% false or pure rubbish.
- bloomca 1y ago
  I think the article itself mixes these concepts. It starts with the world-class level example, and then jumps into learning new skills over a week. In order to be great, indeed, you don't need to be obsessed, and very rarely you cannot achieve it -- you just need to be relatively consistent. And I 100% agree that if you start early, maintaining a skill on the "better than vast majority" level is not too hard (the hard work was done in the past). But to achieve truly outstanding results, you definitely need to dedicate tons of time and ideally be obsessed with it (at least very-very interested).

wiseowise 1y ago

This is new level of snake oil. When you're not selling your own snake oil, but trying to piggyback off of other people. Burn out speedrun 101. If you want to keep your sanity, you need to find your own passion, not try to emulate others (especially with crazy routines like the examples).

ChanningAllen 1y ago
Author here. I've spent a decade drinking my own "snake oil" (the advice in this essay), and I've only now committed it to writing so that others can apply it or ignore it as they wish. I haven't burned out. Instead, I find my work fulfilling, endlessly novel, and valuable to others. Does this do anything to change your mental model?
- wiseowise 1y ago
  No. My 2 cents: article like these need to be presented with a big red disclaimer for folks who tend to obsess over things like ambition, prestige, fame. Trying to emulate the greats is like trying to emulate WW2 pilot during the Battle of Britain. Sure, you might become one, but if odds are against you then there’s nothing you can do. Idle time is extremely important for psyche and feeding it to your obsession will eventually drive you insane if you can’t achieve what you want. On top of that, you’re not really providing any advice. You’re not explaining why they had the drive, what motivated them to do it in the first place. How do they maintain their life’s, how did they overcome difficulties, what families and environments they come from. You’re essentially shaming the reader for not being driven enough. As is being driven and motivated are the only things that you need to succeed. I wouldn’t say it better than https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45442479 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45442479 * Breath * Touch grass * Breath again * Create a plan for yourself, follow it and don’t obsess over things

bitbasher 1y ago

This article is quite shallow. It's essentially saying, in order to excel at something it needs to become a part of you. There's some truth there, but Charles Bukowski said it much better and more succinctly with, "Don't try." [1] 1: https://poets.org/poem/so-you-want-be-writer https://poets.org/poem/so-you-want-be-writer

cm2012 1y ago
Telling people to ignore things they dont like thinking about is completely terrible advice. Its almost the worst possible advice.
- gridspy 1y ago
  Either that or specialization
- bitbasher 1y ago
  I don't think he meant to not try. I think he meant you shouldn't have to try. Trying implies some resistance or conformity. To him, art and creation was something that was there and natural. You just did it. You were mad with it [1]. It reminds me of nights when I was a teen hacking away at some computer games or writing my first emulator. There was no class, no jira tickets, no books. Just a teen struck with a madness. 1: https://bookshavepores.tumblr.com/post/9013559249/charles-bukowskis-letter-to-william-packard-in https://bookshavepores.tumblr.com/post/9013559249/charles-bu...
  - Swizec 1y ago
    As the saying goes: don’t write unless you can’t not write. There are so many better ways to spend your time. Pushing a boulder uphill is hard. If it never gets over the hump and starts pulling, find a different boulder!
    - PandaRider 1y ago
      I think the problem statement is: How do you know when to Let Go of the current boulder? The poem suggested many many many possible when. Here's one: "unless it comes out of / your soul like a rocket,". Unfortunately (or fortunately), in life, there is no methodology to prove that a given search problem is futile (e.g. NP-complete)... so we have to take our chances and choose. I believe that's the beauty of life: choice.

seaucre 1y ago

The thing that doesn't click in articles like this is the advice section afterwards. Do you think the people described thought about how to increase their practice surface area? No, they were simply /interested/. And part of the reason they were interested was because of natural talent! Do you want to know how to increase your practice surface area? Find things you're interested in. But the reality is that many people just aren't as interested in anything as some people are interested in something. And that's okay. The real advice is to learn to accept yourself as you are, whether you're an obsessive or not.

philipallstar 1y ago
> The real advice is to learn to accept yourself as you are, whether you're an obsessive or not. Accepting yourself as you are is the opposite of practicing to get better at something.
- luckyandroid 1y ago
  I see what you're getting at, but I'd disagree. I think accepting who you are also comes with commitment to pursue the things you're interested in, because non-acceptance would be "ignoring this part of me I wanted to pursue but didn't think I should".
  - philipallstar 1y ago
    Pursuing interest isn't the same as practicing things to get better at them. Things can be superficially interesting, and it takes an understanding that self not being perfect is totally fine to know that the process of change is not necessarily interesting, but it has rewards.
ChanningAllen 1y ago
> Do you think the people described thought about how to increase their practice surface area? No, they were simply /interested/. In fact, many of them did think about it. Many of them designed, tested, experimented, and tweaked their approaches to their crafts endlessly throughout their lives. It can be comforting (because it lets us off the hook) to think that masters of their craft all follow the "just do it" ethos while simply "accepting themselves as they are," but usually the opposite is true. At least at the margin.

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vstollen 1y ago

I like the idea of the article. However, I wonder what are ways to increase the practice surface area for programming / software engineering? I can think of various high-Level activities such as analyzing systems we interact with on a day-to-day basis. However, I cannot come up with exercises that would improve my code itself.

cjs_ac 1y ago

I'm currently building the product for my startup - I'm hoping to launch in the next few months. I'm very grateful to IndieHackers for showing me how to make that happen, but when I look at the website now, I can't help but feel that it's jumped the shark. At the top of the page, there's a link labelled Starting Up that takes you to a page with links to articles that taken together form a Guide to Starting Up. Those links, and those articles, represent the entire value of the IndieHackers website. There's a lot of value in those articles, but the rest of the website provides no value. Members of the IndieHackers community talk about their 'shovel companies' - typically things like AI-powered marketing services, or the like. This is nonsense: the real shovel companies in the SaaS space are cloud providers and payment processors. Indie hackers claiming to have made a shovel company aren't Levi Strauss selling sturdy trousers to prospectors, they're urchins offering to help dig in plots in exchange for a bit of bread. IndieHackers itself has become one of these urchins, exhibiting increasing desperation to show ongoing relevance. Skill at software development isn't the thing that's holding most indie hackers back; what's holding them back is that they don't know any good problems to solve. There's an awful lot of money out there waiting to be spent on simple CRUD apps that don't yet exist. You don't need to push the limit of what's possible with computers to make money; you just need to go out into the world to find an actual problem.

listenfaster 1y ago

Nice succinct read outlining something I think a lot of people are aware of, but don’t often describe. It’s my first time reading Indie Hacker, and I think there’s nice balance of quality, depth, and brevity that you’re trying to strike? I recently watched a YouTube on cultural communication pathways, and there was a comparison of “engineered communication” being a top down approach, as opposed to a gardening approach to communication being a bottoms up approach; one being predictable with measurable outcomes, and the other being organic and unpredictable. In gardening we plant seeds, help them germinate, watch them grow. A lot of the articles on Indie hackers seem to be planting seeds, which I appreciate. I wish HN would see value in a range of articles, and not skew to preferring engineered rigid predictability. Pardon the overstatement but you get my drift.

vunderba 1y ago

A lot of the article goes into trying to "multitask" your practice - building it into some minimal viable practice routine. I would urge caution around this - in fact - deliberate practice is probably worth 10 times this. There's a reason people tend to plateau early in their efforts to master something. Once your brain figures out how to put the skill on autopilot you're going to find your rate of improvement significantly slower. It's not just about the time you put in - it's about the type of practice you put in.