6 ms·

Permission to Suck

166 points by rishi 14y ago

vidar 14y ago
Many branches of meditation are based on the idea that there is no way to suck at meditating. Simply observe the thoughts arise and fade away. If you are trying to succeed at meditating you are working against your self.
- irollboozers 14y ago
  This is why I hilariously love meditation. The goal is to suck at meditating, because there is no goal.
batgaijin 14y ago
No! Meditation is not about thinking about nothing! It's about focusing on your breath. Think only about breathing. That sounds boring but manageable. 'Thinking about nothing' seems impossible and stupid at the same time; people who do the disservice of saying that should be slapped. The point of meditation is to learn how to control your thoughts, specifically in being able to realize that your are choosing your current train of thought, and that you can switch it at any time. If you are stuck worrying, or being sad, or unable to see the richness in something, it's most likely because you can't properly focus on the only thing you'll ever have in life: this moment.
- zkoch 14y ago
  There are many goals to meditation. Sometimes it starts with focusing on your breath. Sometimes it's in the form of chanting. Depends on the school of thought, the individual, the goal (if you have one). It's not valid to say "No!" as though what he's proposing is wrong.
  - civilian 14y ago
    No! While you & the author are technically right, batgaijin is saying that it's bad advice for beginners to be told "think of nothing".
- kadavy 14y ago
  Hehe, I was just describing what my friend said about meditating. I did, in fact, tell her that it wasn't really about thinking about "nothing." Talking about the specifics of meditation wasn't really my aim here :)
- lnanek2 14y ago
  Agreed. That's how I was trained, at least. Although the end goal is to quiet your mind and gain more control over it, to think of one thing instead of a bunch of crabs on a string scuttling everywhere. So you could sort of sum of the end goal of a quiet mind as "think of nothing" but the one current thing...I'd definitely prefer other wording.
  - Natsu 14y ago
    If you imagine your thoughts as a directed graph of associations, it's clear that the only way to stay in one place is with a thought that links back to itself. Otherwise, you'll go off along some tangent and end up elsewhere.
- mcphilip 14y ago
  >That sounds boring but manageable. 'Thinking about nothing' seems impossible and stupid at the same time; people who do the disservice of saying that should be slapped. Sounds like you could use some time meditating about your hostile attitude :) Seriously though, so much of eastern thought related to mediation involves paradoxes that a practitioner reflects on in order to grow. Think about nothing Observe your thoughts in a detached state Do no work but get everything done etc I started learning about meditation from the standpoint of trying to detach myself from the constant buzz of thoughts (i.e. 'thinking about nothing'). I seriously doubt that there is a entirely right or wrong way to teach meditation since it ultimately involves a process of self discovery and coming up with whatever metaphor works best for oneself is an important part of the process.
  - batgaijin 14y ago
    I am hostile because I put off seriously trying meditation for a long time in life simply because of how poorly it had been explained and how religions and hippies co-opted it.
    - mcphilip 14y ago
      Religion co-opted meditation? Now that's an interesting take... How then did meditation originate if not in the context of the religions that originally incorporated it?
    - biscarch 14y ago
      It sounds like you let other's understandings create your own, instead of using your own interests to drive your understanding.
- jh3 14y ago
  > 'Thinking about nothing' seems impossible That's because it is impossible.
minikites 14y ago
I found this out on my own in some sense, but I still have trouble putting it into practice. I was taking guitar lessons and I would always be afraid to bring in side tunes I had been working on because I thought they were terrible (and they are) but it's tough to give yourself permission to suck when doing nothing hurts a lot less.
- kadavy 14y ago
  I've been playing guitar for 13 years, and I still am not very good. A breakthrough for me though, was when I stopped obsessing over getting every note right, and instead focused on strumming the right chords. Then, I found playing much more enjoyable, and it was easier to play whole songs and sing. Once I got that down, I was able to move on to more complex things. Like many things, it helps to embrace your suckage with musical instruments.
  - biscarch 14y ago
    Randomly connected, but the game Rocksmith takes this approach. It'll give you points if you get the strumming correct, but are fretting 2/5 notes correctly. There's a huge focus on "get as much as you can right now, but we're going to keep throwing this at you until you get it right."
ebiester 14y ago
This is where my startup failed -- We made the decision to work in a new technology (then another!) but I was afraid of writing code I was less than proud of. I then proceeded to learn what I could of best practices, spending far too long experimenting with the language and far too little actually doing. In the end, we ended up with two half-baked infrastructures in two different languages and reached the trough of disillusionment before anything we could show to be disillusioned about! It's something that I've learned in other parts of my life, especially through writing, but have never quite managed in coding. The primary tenet of National Novel Writing Month is that to finish a rough draft of a long fiction work, you must, starter to professional, give yourself permission to suck, to write something you know is sometimes horrible. You do this so that you have a canvas to fix during editing, to find nuggets that you love, and can revise, and can work with. Intellectually, I know this about programming as well, but I always have this twinge of guilt when implementing it, and go back to my old ways. The irony is that in larger projects, this can be a useful quality. Having someone on the team that can go back and look at the code, showing exactly where we need to improve before we ship is useful. In solo projects it is often disaster. At least for me. :)
- kadavy 14y ago
  Good points. Part of being okay with sucking is that if you're okay with sucking – you're more likely to be okay with shipping. The surprising thing I've found about being okay about sucking at writing is that often the "barf drafts" (as I call them) that seem god-awful when I'm actually writing them, turn out being pretty darn good when I revisit them.
  - irollboozers 14y ago
    Is it possible to be good at sucking? Or, is there anyone who is the best at it, and either in frequency or strength of sucking (e.g. do you want to suck tremendously hard once or suck very little very often)?
    - kadavy 14y ago
      Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job comes to mind. They make an art of "sucking." Lou Reed has a horribly sucky singing voice. I love him for it.
thenomad 14y ago
This is a well-worn piece of advice, but it's well-worn for a reason - because it's incredibly valuable. Observing a lot of my friends over a lot of years, I'm starting to suspect that the willingness to fail, and particularly to fail in public, is possibly the key differentiator for people who achieve impressive things. (I'm currently learning a new skill myself. I was sucking very badly, I'm now just sucking pretty badly, and I'm enjoying the progress.)
- kadavy 14y ago
  > particularly to fail in public This reminds me of when I learned to dance Salsa, and more recently, Tango. It's a far more public failure than writing a blog post. Your body – the very thing that experiences the embarrassment of failure – is your instrument when dancing. To add insult to injury, you're failing in front of a never-ending stream of women. But, thankfully, sucking is temporary and life is long. EDIT: I'd like to add that life is much, much, better when you know how to dance.
  - thenomad 14y ago
    Yes. I had a similar experience when I tried to learn to dance, some time ago. The "right, now go and dance freestyle with Random Attractive Woman #1" moment was particularly terrifying. (I still can't dance very well.)
- ChuckMcM 14y ago
  The subtext of this message is to disassociate your sense of self from your abilities. There is a great quote in one of the "Little Bear" children's books that I would read to my kids when they were toddlers, Little Bear is explaining that he knows how to fly, but so far he has only mastered flying straight down. It is hard to be 'Ok' with yourself not being able to do something you perceive as 'easy.' Or worse when someone you consider to be less talented than yourself is better at something than you, its hard to internalize that too. But all of these stem from the notion that your own value is determined by what you can do. That notion gets in the way of getting better at things.
zobzu 14y ago
In a nutshell: humans learn, live, and eventually succeed via a simple try-fail-try-again process. If you can't suck, you can't fail. If you can't fail, you can't learn, you can't progress. In most corporate places, you're not allowed to fail. Most will refuse changes, even if it's for the better, because, it may suck. It may fail. So yeah. If you wanna be great, you gotta suck.
UnoriginalGuy 14y ago
Do you know what I like about HNs compared to other sites (e.g. Reddit, /., etc)? It is constructive. There are a bunch of people who are interested in self improvement, trying things, failing, and then picking themselves up and trying again. That's rare. You don't find that in many communities. Most of the time it is just negativity and "you can't," "you shouldn't," "here are all the flaws," etc. Hopefully this grouping of people and ideas will help all of us in some way, they do say that it is the people you surround yourself with...
- levesque 14y ago
  Well reddit is also a lot of this when you dig in the smaller communities. Sure, if you stay on r/AdviceAnimals you are bound to be disappointed ;)
  - UnoriginalGuy 14y ago
    There are tons of cool communities but none that I've found yet about starting a small business or similar. If you know of any along the same themes as HN then I'd love to join them.
    - tspike 14y ago
      /r/startups /r/Entrepreneur /r/smallbusiness ... of course, you'll find plenty of reposts from HN.
    - vampirechicken 14y ago
      startupguild.net is a yammer site started by TechZing's Justin Vincent.
- coroxout 14y ago
  Agreed. I recently saw a thread on Slashdot (which I hardly ever read these days) started by someone who'd got a bit burnt out and whose skills were by his own admission out of date, asking how to get himself back into the game. It got a lot of replies saying "staying on top of the game is your job, which you are clearly terrible at: give up now" and no actual advice. Which made me realise just how (generally) positive, inspiring and helpful HN's occasional burnout threads are.
deleted 14y ago
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deleted 14y ago
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aufreak3 14y ago
I used to refer to this in some conversations as the "permission to be less than perfect", but "permission to suck" is crisper :) The "permission to suck" pill needs to be taken along with the "desire to improve" pill. In other words, pay less attention to your current state and more to the trajectory - i.e. where you're heading. If the heading is right, then it is only a matter of time before you reach an arbitrary benchmark of your choosing.
erikpukinskis 14y ago
I tell people all the time: you get good at things you enjoy sucking at.
prezjordan 14y ago
This especially resonated with me. I wrote about a similar topic [1] a few weeks ago, but being a college student - I love this "permission to suck" idea. It gives me the ability to stop being ashamed of my crappy projects, knowing that I'll get better. I find most college students simply don't work on stuff outside of school - probably because they don't give themselves permission to suck - and it really affects their abilities in the long run. [1]: http://jscal.es/2012/10/12/you-oughta-be-ashamed/ http://jscal.es/2012/10/12/you-oughta-be-ashamed/

166 points by rishi 14y ago

vidar 14y ago

Many branches of meditation are based on the idea that there is no way to suck at meditating. Simply observe the thoughts arise and fade away. If you are trying to succeed at meditating you are working against your self.

irollboozers 14y ago
This is why I hilariously love meditation. The goal is to suck at meditating, because there is no goal.

batgaijin 14y ago

No! Meditation is not about thinking about nothing! It's about focusing on your breath. Think only about breathing. That sounds boring but manageable. 'Thinking about nothing' seems impossible and stupid at the same time; people who do the disservice of saying that should be slapped. The point of meditation is to learn how to control your thoughts, specifically in being able to realize that your are choosing your current train of thought, and that you can switch it at any time. If you are stuck worrying, or being sad, or unable to see the richness in something, it's most likely because you can't properly focus on the only thing you'll ever have in life: this moment.

zkoch 14y ago
There are many goals to meditation. Sometimes it starts with focusing on your breath. Sometimes it's in the form of chanting. Depends on the school of thought, the individual, the goal (if you have one). It's not valid to say "No!" as though what he's proposing is wrong.
- civilian 14y ago
  No! While you & the author are technically right, batgaijin is saying that it's bad advice for beginners to be told "think of nothing".
kadavy 14y ago
Hehe, I was just describing what my friend said about meditating. I did, in fact, tell her that it wasn't really about thinking about "nothing." Talking about the specifics of meditation wasn't really my aim here :)
lnanek2 14y ago
Agreed. That's how I was trained, at least. Although the end goal is to quiet your mind and gain more control over it, to think of one thing instead of a bunch of crabs on a string scuttling everywhere. So you could sort of sum of the end goal of a quiet mind as "think of nothing" but the one current thing...I'd definitely prefer other wording.
- Natsu 14y ago
  If you imagine your thoughts as a directed graph of associations, it's clear that the only way to stay in one place is with a thought that links back to itself. Otherwise, you'll go off along some tangent and end up elsewhere.
mcphilip 14y ago
>That sounds boring but manageable. 'Thinking about nothing' seems impossible and stupid at the same time; people who do the disservice of saying that should be slapped. Sounds like you could use some time meditating about your hostile attitude :) Seriously though, so much of eastern thought related to mediation involves paradoxes that a practitioner reflects on in order to grow. Think about nothing Observe your thoughts in a detached state Do no work but get everything done etc I started learning about meditation from the standpoint of trying to detach myself from the constant buzz of thoughts (i.e. 'thinking about nothing'). I seriously doubt that there is a entirely right or wrong way to teach meditation since it ultimately involves a process of self discovery and coming up with whatever metaphor works best for oneself is an important part of the process.
- batgaijin 14y ago
  I am hostile because I put off seriously trying meditation for a long time in life simply because of how poorly it had been explained and how religions and hippies co-opted it.
  - mcphilip 14y ago
    Religion co-opted meditation? Now that's an interesting take... How then did meditation originate if not in the context of the religions that originally incorporated it?
  - biscarch 14y ago
    It sounds like you let other's understandings create your own, instead of using your own interests to drive your understanding.
jh3 14y ago
> 'Thinking about nothing' seems impossible That's because it is impossible.

minikites 14y ago

I found this out on my own in some sense, but I still have trouble putting it into practice. I was taking guitar lessons and I would always be afraid to bring in side tunes I had been working on because I thought they were terrible (and they are) but it's tough to give yourself permission to suck when doing nothing hurts a lot less.

kadavy 14y ago
I've been playing guitar for 13 years, and I still am not very good. A breakthrough for me though, was when I stopped obsessing over getting every note right, and instead focused on strumming the right chords. Then, I found playing much more enjoyable, and it was easier to play whole songs and sing. Once I got that down, I was able to move on to more complex things. Like many things, it helps to embrace your suckage with musical instruments.
- biscarch 14y ago
  Randomly connected, but the game Rocksmith takes this approach. It'll give you points if you get the strumming correct, but are fretting 2/5 notes correctly. There's a huge focus on "get as much as you can right now, but we're going to keep throwing this at you until you get it right."

ebiester 14y ago

This is where my startup failed -- We made the decision to work in a new technology (then another!) but I was afraid of writing code I was less than proud of. I then proceeded to learn what I could of best practices, spending far too long experimenting with the language and far too little actually doing. In the end, we ended up with two half-baked infrastructures in two different languages and reached the trough of disillusionment before anything we could show to be disillusioned about! It's something that I've learned in other parts of my life, especially through writing, but have never quite managed in coding. The primary tenet of National Novel Writing Month is that to finish a rough draft of a long fiction work, you must, starter to professional, give yourself permission to suck, to write something you know is sometimes horrible. You do this so that you have a canvas to fix during editing, to find nuggets that you love, and can revise, and can work with. Intellectually, I know this about programming as well, but I always have this twinge of guilt when implementing it, and go back to my old ways. The irony is that in larger projects, this can be a useful quality. Having someone on the team that can go back and look at the code, showing exactly where we need to improve before we ship is useful. In solo projects it is often disaster. At least for me. :)

kadavy 14y ago
Good points. Part of being okay with sucking is that if you're okay with sucking – you're more likely to be okay with shipping. The surprising thing I've found about being okay about sucking at writing is that often the "barf drafts" (as I call them) that seem god-awful when I'm actually writing them, turn out being pretty darn good when I revisit them.
- irollboozers 14y ago
  Is it possible to be good at sucking? Or, is there anyone who is the best at it, and either in frequency or strength of sucking (e.g. do you want to suck tremendously hard once or suck very little very often)?
  - kadavy 14y ago
    Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job comes to mind. They make an art of "sucking." Lou Reed has a horribly sucky singing voice. I love him for it.

thenomad 14y ago

This is a well-worn piece of advice, but it's well-worn for a reason - because it's incredibly valuable. Observing a lot of my friends over a lot of years, I'm starting to suspect that the willingness to fail, and particularly to fail in public, is possibly the key differentiator for people who achieve impressive things. (I'm currently learning a new skill myself. I was sucking very badly, I'm now just sucking pretty badly, and I'm enjoying the progress.)

kadavy 14y ago
> particularly to fail in public This reminds me of when I learned to dance Salsa, and more recently, Tango. It's a far more public failure than writing a blog post. Your body – the very thing that experiences the embarrassment of failure – is your instrument when dancing. To add insult to injury, you're failing in front of a never-ending stream of women. But, thankfully, sucking is temporary and life is long. EDIT: I'd like to add that life is much, much, better when you know how to dance.
- thenomad 14y ago
  Yes. I had a similar experience when I tried to learn to dance, some time ago. The "right, now go and dance freestyle with Random Attractive Woman #1" moment was particularly terrifying. (I still can't dance very well.)
ChuckMcM 14y ago
The subtext of this message is to disassociate your sense of self from your abilities. There is a great quote in one of the "Little Bear" children's books that I would read to my kids when they were toddlers, Little Bear is explaining that he knows how to fly, but so far he has only mastered flying straight down. It is hard to be 'Ok' with yourself not being able to do something you perceive as 'easy.' Or worse when someone you consider to be less talented than yourself is better at something than you, its hard to internalize that too. But all of these stem from the notion that your own value is determined by what you can do. That notion gets in the way of getting better at things.

zobzu 14y ago

In a nutshell: humans learn, live, and eventually succeed via a simple try-fail-try-again process. If you can't suck, you can't fail. If you can't fail, you can't learn, you can't progress. In most corporate places, you're not allowed to fail. Most will refuse changes, even if it's for the better, because, it may suck. It may fail. So yeah. If you wanna be great, you gotta suck.

UnoriginalGuy 14y ago

Do you know what I like about HNs compared to other sites (e.g. Reddit, /., etc)? It is constructive. There are a bunch of people who are interested in self improvement, trying things, failing, and then picking themselves up and trying again. That's rare. You don't find that in many communities. Most of the time it is just negativity and "you can't," "you shouldn't," "here are all the flaws," etc. Hopefully this grouping of people and ideas will help all of us in some way, they do say that it is the people you surround yourself with...

levesque 14y ago
Well reddit is also a lot of this when you dig in the smaller communities. Sure, if you stay on r/AdviceAnimals you are bound to be disappointed ;)
- UnoriginalGuy 14y ago
  There are tons of cool communities but none that I've found yet about starting a small business or similar. If you know of any along the same themes as HN then I'd love to join them.
  - tspike 14y ago
    /r/startups /r/Entrepreneur /r/smallbusiness ... of course, you'll find plenty of reposts from HN.
  - vampirechicken 14y ago
    startupguild.net is a yammer site started by TechZing's Justin Vincent.
coroxout 14y ago
Agreed. I recently saw a thread on Slashdot (which I hardly ever read these days) started by someone who'd got a bit burnt out and whose skills were by his own admission out of date, asking how to get himself back into the game. It got a lot of replies saying "staying on top of the game is your job, which you are clearly terrible at: give up now" and no actual advice. Which made me realise just how (generally) positive, inspiring and helpful HN's occasional burnout threads are.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

aufreak3 14y ago

I used to refer to this in some conversations as the "permission to be less than perfect", but "permission to suck" is crisper :) The "permission to suck" pill needs to be taken along with the "desire to improve" pill. In other words, pay less attention to your current state and more to the trajectory - i.e. where you're heading. If the heading is right, then it is only a matter of time before you reach an arbitrary benchmark of your choosing.

erikpukinskis 14y ago

I tell people all the time: you get good at things you enjoy sucking at.

prezjordan 14y ago

This especially resonated with me. I wrote about a similar topic [1] a few weeks ago, but being a college student - I love this "permission to suck" idea. It gives me the ability to stop being ashamed of my crappy projects, knowing that I'll get better. I find most college students simply don't work on stuff outside of school - probably because they don't give themselves permission to suck - and it really affects their abilities in the long run. [1]: http://jscal.es/2012/10/12/you-oughta-be-ashamed/ http://jscal.es/2012/10/12/you-oughta-be-ashamed/