Stop trying to ‘be original’ and be prolific instead (2016)
prolifiko.comI stopped caring about this type of ambition porn in my late twenties, and I'm a lot happier for it. I'm a lazy, average guy who will probably have a pretty average life. When I stopped being so "hungry," it opened up a world of tranquility and joy that had always been there.
There's a weird mentality in America (assuming that's where you are located) that average is bad.
Average is just average. There's no reason you need to be a multi-millionaire with 6 houses, 12 cars, and endless spending cash.
I also think that there should be more emphasis on separating personal/professional ambition from how much you earn. When people talk about career goals, they usually only mean "money making goals".
There's nothing wrong with working just enough to survive and finding satisfaction outside of spending money on crap you don't need. There's nothing "lazy" about making a living (even if its bare minimum to pay the essential bills).
What's the point in working 80 hour weeks for a set number of years, spending money excessively, and having a heart attack by age 50 from being over worked? Personally I'd rather be dead broke and happy then over worked and stressed about un-important crap.
That's not to say you shouldn't work hard towards your goals, they should just be defined out side of "make more money so I can impress my friends with a new car"
The problem is that if you're 30 and "average" in America, you're probably barely scraping by, don't own a house, and have a mountain of debt. It's not a great life if you have to worry whether you're going to make rent on a monthly basis.
If you have a job that makes enough to afford the trappings of a comfortable life (place to live, enough left over to save, emergency account for if you get sick/injured, invest in retirement, etc.) and work 40 hours a week, you're in the minority.
Outside of HN, people aren't working 80 hour weeks because they're trying to be a millionaire, they're doing it because they need to pay rent. Anyone reading this site is almost by definition in the top 10%.
> Anyone reading this site is almost by definition in the top 10%
That's a pretty wide assumption to make. I'm a young (30) dev, I make just north of 20K euros per year (before taxes), I rent an apartment with my girlfriend and two other people. I wouldn't consider myself poor, but certainly not "top 10%".
You make it sound like only venture capitalists and successful startup founders read this site.
The issue is circular, in this regard. You should't HAVE to work two jobs or perform above average just to make ends meet.
FWIW, I'm 25, working in non-tech at the moment, making 32k a year in the one of the more expensive cities on the east coast. I'm trying to relocate to a cheaper part of the country but between mandatory student loan payments, high rent and general cost of living I can either choose to build an emergency fund, or dump it all on the cost of relocating.
My bigger point is that this attitude of workaholism is way too prevalent in American culture. Cost of living and wage decline has followed the trend of "down on their luck millionaires" who think everyone else is just lazy.
When minimum wage lands you in deep poverty the system is broken.
Speaking for myself, it's not about impressing others. Fun exercise: Find the word "average" in these comments (or any synonym) and replace it with "fragile". That's the issue.
"Essential bills" as you put them can skyrocket at a moment's notice no matter how frugal you are. I watched my mom battle cancer for 10 years before she finally succumbed to it, and if my dad had had a lesser job it would have bankrupted us as a family. Furthermore I've seen said medical bankruptcy in some close friends, and that's just one of many things that can and do inevitably go wrong in life even for the best people. "Average" can turn to "destitute" in a matter of weeks.
My goal is for my fiancée and I to have enough in the bank for our future family to afford the best available solution to any problem we might have. Car gets totaled? I want to walk into a Carmax and come out with a $10-15,000 replacement the same day. We have a kid with special needs? I want to be able to afford the best teachers and schools there are. I get in an accident and have to go on half-pay for a few months? I want rent/mortage, groceries and other necessities taken care of. I'd also like to be able to afford 10+ years of medical care in my senior years and not risk going bankrupt.
Granted I'm only 29 and healthy with a good job, and my fiancée's working on getting her career started so we've got plenty of time and opportunity; but damn straight I'm going for millions, and I'll happily work 60+ hour weeks for decades to get there if that's what it takes. I'm not above taking vacations or breaks or weekends off, and I don't kill myself. I eat well, sleep well, exercise, have date night, etc. But I don't play nearly as many video games as younger me thought I would. :) It's worth it, and I sure as hell won't be squandering the effort on multiple houses or fancy cars.
Aaaaand that's when socialized health-care, good public shcools and good public transportation saves the day. Come to France!
Ideally you should be able to live life without these worries on a singular, average paying job - no?
These events could happen to everyone - why is it required to go "above and beyond" to have some sort of sense of security in life?
Ideally, but we don't live in an ideal world. Stuff costs money, and the best stuff costs more money. That holds true no matter what percentage the taxpayers might cover. Baseline coverage for anything is great until you're hit by something that's not covered. Maybe your college financial aid doesn't cover that extra year that you want to take, or your condition requires experimental surgery that basic insurance won't cover, or your homeowners' insurance doesn't cover fires caused by Galaxy Note 7s because of some bullshit fine print. :) Or you didn't understand your mortgage terms and get screwed out of your house entirely unless you've got some massive financial cushion.
On the public side, I look at our (US) government's spending habits and they're clearly unsustainable long term. I know national debt isn't like personal debt, but at some point there has to be a reckoning, or more likely a series of smaller but no less meaningful reckonings. Combined with advances in technology threatening to take away even white collar jobs (although as an engineer mine's probably safe), one way or another we're in for some very turbulent times. I want my family insulated from that. I want to be the rich guy who gets hit by the great depression... and is moderately less rich. :)
I'm already lucky, if I wanted to I could take my foot off the gas at my current job and probably not have to worry about 80% of life's financial problems, but I know eventually one of the 20% is going to come along and wreck my shit. So I work to close that gap.
In short: Figuratively speaking I'm not satisfied with my own emergency shelter, I want my own protective carrier battlegroup. No matter where I live or what I do, that kind of protection takes money.
So basically you are overworking yourself in the richest country of the world because the society you live in is structured in such a way that every single person is responsible for their own safety regarding emergencies that are completely unpredictable and could be alleviated with a more collectivist worldview where everyone could contribute a bit more to help those in need.
I don't mind my taxes paying for my friend who's on his 4th month of sick leave because of a sudden and deep depression, it's a very small cost for me so society in general can be healthier.
Hyperbole about stress-induced medical problems aside, money is quantifiably good. A man who makes 10x your salary can take 10x more vacations to the south of France, justify taking more time off work to spend with his family, doesn't have to worry as much about monetary concerns like loan payments or health problems, and so on. It's not just "impressing your friends", having a nice car can be a joy in and of itself, but I'm always weirded out by people who say they don't want social status.
I don't understand it either. I can't begin to list the comforts and options that come from being rich. Guess we all know. There's really no alternate reality where it's much better to be average and have little or no options.
I usually take the view that I'd listen more to you if, to prove your point more empirically, you got reasonably rich and then just decided to give away all your wealth and resign to some lonely cabin in Maine.
>I can't begin to list the comforts and options that come from being rich.
I can't either, but for a rather different reason. What exactly does being rich get you these days?
You get to sit in a slightly nicer seat on an aeroplane. You get to drive a car that has vastly more power than any sane person needs, rather than one that merely has substantially more power than any sane person needs. You get to own a house with a lot of surplus rooms to fill up with stuff that has no discernible impact on your standard of living.
Rich people don't get access to a super-duper internet, they don't get to watch better movies or listen to better music, they don't really get to make better friends. Most material comforts are perfectly accessible to someone on an ordinary middle-class income.
Never having to work again is cool, but most people are unlikely to reach that point. Your probability of accumulating that level of wealth before retirement age is remote, the hedonic treadmill is a powerful trap and most people find meaning and value in work anyway.
Being average isn't better than being rich, but it isn't much worse either, at least not in a country with a sane government. The stuff that makes a real difference is mostly a matter of public policy - Germans and Scandinavians don't live in fear of a medical bankruptcy or an at-will dismissal, nor do they desperately want to own a home to escape shady landlords and rising rents.
But wealthy people DO have access to better internet (speed and quantity) and have more leisure time to enjoy media. Also you can do other neat things, like pay for your childrens' education. THAT is a list that goes on for a while.
And the statistically average American is barely treading water. I realize that the average European is better off, but that's not relevant to America right now.
Again, it's mostly public policy. I can get unmetered 100Mb/s broadband for $42 a month, because the broadband market in my country is competitive and well-regulated. Paying for your childrens' education is a completely alien concept in many countries, because public primary and secondary education is uniformly excellent and university is state-funded for all.
Financially, the average European is a fair bit worse off than the average American. Gross median household incomes in Germany are about 25% lower than in the US; America has the sixth highest median household income in the world. GDP per capita tells a similar story. This simply isn't a question of money.
Americans don't need to get rich, they need to vote for someone who gives a damn.
People with wealth don't have more leisure time because from my experience all their time is spent working to ensure their wealth doesn't dissipate. Furthermore, once you reach a level a certain level of wealth then you want more power.
Some of the people I knew growing up would call me rich, but nobody I know now would.
I can tell you that there's a huge breakpoint once you are in a situation where you are both 'living below your means' and have a nest egg that is measured fractions of a year of living expenses. It's a safety net. It lets you take risks that you otherwise wouldn't feel safe/sane entertaining.
If you really hate your job, you can job hunt and not be petrified that people at work will find out. You can take a risk on a startup that is doing something you consider good (ethically) or awesome (technologically) and not worry as much about them being out of business in eight months.
You can push back on demands to compromise your ideals. What's the worse they can do, fire you? Your explanation for why you were let go writes itself. You can work reasonable hours. You can spend some of that time doing volunteer work or other social activities that may actually improve your employment options in the future (virtuous cycle, pun intended).
And, you can afford to participate in the technology treadmill that most likely underlies your job skills if you hang out on HN.
[edit] Stresses outside of work show up in how you interact with people. I was much more agreeable at work when I knew my rent was paid even if payroll screwed up my paycheck. (And I was much more agreeable at work once I started taking care of my health, too, which was easier when I had more leisure time).
First, let me say that I sort of agree with you. I say "sort of", because I think that the way you define rich only sounds like slightly higher up the chain of upper middle class to me. If that's the case, then I completely agree.
That said, I personally define rich as being part of the capital class rather than the worker class. My perspective (note that some of these are a bit hand-wavy since the levels of money needed sometimes differ significantly and sometimes the lines are not clearly delineated):
- You don't sit on a commercial airplane. You own your own plane or take charters. Slightly lower on the totem pole is taking commuter jets (something akin to semi-charters).
- You typically/often don't drive a car for the purpose of transportation. Someone drives you. That said, you may own one or more cars. Some of these cars may not even be street legal, but they can be delivered to the track for times that you want to take them out for a spin.
- You do, in fact, listen to better music than most people. This might be in the form of live music. It might be in the form of a very well-designed high end music system in a listening room -- music you thought you knew well will sound completely different.
- You don't actually need to use the internet -- for the most part, you have people do those things for you. That said, if you need fast internet, you will probably live in an area that can accommodate your needs (depending on where you live in the US, access to fast internet is not a given even if you have the money).
- Any "work" that is done is done because it is an interesting problem to work on. Other than that, there is very real unofficial work of building and maintaining social capital. Sometimes this is the ugly kind of social climbing that is dramatized on TV. Other (often?) times, it is cultivating relationships and having experiences with people you like somewhere between a little and a lot (more time with the latter). Since money and (to a lesser extent) time are not limiting factors, incredible experiences can be had.
- Most things that people would consider "chores" are not a necessary part of your everyday life. No grocery shopping. No carpooling. No cooking. No restricted schedule due to child care (nanny almost always available).
Those a just a few things that I think are or can be different/better for people in the capital class. Some things that are worse is that often times folks born into the capital class have existential crises. Avoiding this type of crisis comes down to good parenting (and perhaps good parenting advisers and nannies).
Just my 2 cents...
Being able to afford air travel makes a huge difference to your life. Irish people used to hold wakes for emigrants, because they were effectively saying goodbye forever. Until a few decades ago, the only chance most working people had of travelling internationally was in the armed forces.
How big is the difference between economy, business class and a private jet? You're a bit more comfortable for a few hours, but that's about it. The life-changing part of air travel has been democratised; the expensive add-ons are mostly status signals.
The difference between owning a car and not owning a car is huge; the difference between driving yourself and being driven is a nicety that even a lot of billionaires forgo. Motor racing isn't a particularly expensive hobby if you're willing to do it in a used Neon rather than a race-prepped Porsche.
I trained as an audio engineer and I can tell you that there's nothing in music that you'll hear on a $50,000 custom hifi system that you won't also hear on a $300 pair of Sennheiser or AKG headphones.
I think there's a general principle here, underpinned by economies of scale. If you make a million of just about anything, you can make them really good and really cheap. There's just not a lot of extra value that can be added above and beyond that sweet spot.
When our economy was mostly driven by labour, the rich got access to an array of luxuries that were completely unaffordable to the majority. Now that the economy is driven mostly by innovation and automation, you don't have to be that far above the poverty line to reap most of the benefits of our civilization.
It seems like your thesis has changed slightly from "being rich doesn't get you much" to "the jump from limited means to middle class is a bigger QoL jump than middle class to extremely rich". Again, I think we agree on the latter point, although it may be a faulty comparison. My post was largely about things that being extremely rich gets a person, and I think that this can have tremendous value depending on priorities (e.g., valuing time or experiences very highly).
Some specific additional responses:
- private jet: With a private jet, time from car door to taxiing the runway adds about 5-10 extra minutes total on each side of the trip. On a commercial jet, that's more like 30-120 minutes extra on each side depending on the airport.
- audio: My most memorable listening experience was on a $100k+ system with B&W Nautilus speakers. I don't remember all of the peripherals, so I can't cost it out exactly. Anyway, we played some CDs (heathens!) of some baroque performances that I thought I knew well. When we started listening, I heard things that I had never heard before. It completely blew my mind. The music sounded totally different, and the subtle expressions of the performers via their instruments were far more obvious. I've listened to the same music on $300 Sennheiser headphones (which I love and recommend) -- totally not the same.
In general, extremely rich people are able to buy A LOT of time and very high quality experiences. Is this as much of a quality of life jump from upper middle class as a jump from limited means to middle class? I think it's a faulty comparison as the needs and wants (both practical and aspirational) of each of these starting groups is very different.
That said, ymmv.
A person that thinks compromising his/her own time is not worth the money is already making a choice by not working as hard as you would. You should not discard that. And such a person will not choose to work hard for money in the first place, so you are asking for impossible (or very unlikely) data points.
Also, why would someone give up money they already had? They either worked hard for it or obtained it by some luck. In both cases, throwing it away is not earning that person more time for hobbies or to spend with family.
Well, you can be rich and depressed. It doesn't necessarily buy happiness though it is a good foundation to work on other problems.
It takes work and skill to get rich, and the reward may not be worth it to some, or it may be antithetical to their goals.
A man earning 10x as much as I do cannot take 10x more holidays because days are still made of 24 hours and weeks of 7 days. Even more so if said man is working longer hours for the extra money.
No one is saying being richer is bad. Just that for many people the compromise is not worth it.
Social status in my circle has more to do with your songwriting chops and finger picking skills than driving a German luxury car.
Townes Van Zandt is one of our heroes and he died basically broke and unknown.
Maybe your problem is you're not hanging out with enough poets.
Funny enough, here's a verse from my latest:
Driving in his Mercedes-Benz,
Talking on his Bluetooth headset,
About the national debt.
With his hand-picked best friends,
A past he better damn forget,
That's the winning mindset.
Chorus:
Cuz he knows what to do,
He's just better than you,
He goes to all the right places,
Knows all the right faces,
He only gets what he chases,
He's just better than you.
---
Good luck in the rat race!
People don't mind money and riches, they mind the over-achiever attitude and workaholic lifestyle.
I can work more and make more money, but I make enough for my lifestyle and I have lots of time left over for my family. I don't want all the money in the world if I won't have the free time to spend the money.
That's the point that's being made here. If I were to suddenly get 10% more money for exactly the same amount of work it's not like I'd turn it down, and if I won the lottery I wouldn't give it away.
>>money is quantifiably good
'money' is quantifiable, however 'good' is not
To each his own - personally I don't get validation from material goods, vacations, or social status.
If that's what makes you tick, then by all means work your fingers to the bone trying to achieve those things. But this shouldn't be the golden standard for a life well lived.
I believe that as a society we should focus more on building happiness through mental health instead of buying into the "buy more be more happy" way of life. Again, if that's what you truly want then go for it - but it shouldn't be assumed.
I'd be happy with average if average in America meant I could afford healthcare, a mediocre home, and a mediocre car. I almost make the average salary in my city (after 2 STEM degrees) and I can't afford 2/3 of the things I just listed and I'm almost 30.
Most people, not me, would also want to be able to afford a family/children.
This is what average-wage people can get in Scandinavia.
These same people will also vote against their own best interests because they think they'll be one of those well off people eventually.
> I also think that there should be more emphasis on separating personal/professional ambition from how much you earn.
Absolutely. I'm probably on the prolific end of the spectrum, but not with the end-goal to make money (although extra money would free me up to be even more prolific).
I think the end goal is to make the most out of this brief existence for whatever that's worth (and for whatever you take "most" to mean).
I create, therefore I am.
At least that seems to be the way I turned out.
My goals have been shifting over the last couple years from saving/changing/making a positive impact on the world to just helping people out when I can and enjoying my life. It's certainly freeing and honestly I'm probably doing more good in the world because I'm able to do more little things that actually help people.
Why do you feel the need to come to Hacker News (which is -- wait for it -- the aggregator associated with a _startup incubator_) nominally about startup news and spread the gospel of laziness?
Like, I get that HN is "whatever hackers find interesting". But to come here and fill the comment section with discussion about how we'd all be better off not trying particularly hard is just obnoxious. Literally everywhere else on the internet is the right place for that.
Do you not think there's value in trying to understand what makes oneself happy? If being "lazy" makes a person happy, then so be it. They can live that way.
I'm sure some blue collar workers would think that startup people are lazy without producing much perceived value to society but still getting rich.
I think it's good to know what you want in life, and know what makes you happy and then follow that, whatever it may be (assuming it's not harming others etc.). Or at the very least, know what makes you miserable and stop doing that.
It's not laziness. It's working smarter not harder [towards the target of well-being]. Efficiency is definitely a hacker thing.
This is really a great comment and should be at the top of so many fluffy hacker news posts.
I mean, if you were trying to be ambitious only to serve your own happiness, then I'd say you were doing it for the wrong reasons in the first place. If that isn't you goal, a promise of tranquility and joy is hardly a sufficient reason to give up your ambitions.
Isn't tranquility and joy only serving your own happiness, too? I mean, it's literally less involved with others' social and financial positivity than pursuing business, even if you're only in business for your own success.
Sorry, I don't see how your comment applies to what I said.
Why else would somebody be ambitious other than the pursuit of happiness? Survival? Genuinely curious.
Wanting to make a contribution to something larger then themselves. Wanting to accomplish something meaningful. Wanting to test themselves. There are a lot of different reasons completely unrelated to happiness that someone might have for being ambitious.
On the whole, being ambitious and being happy are likely going to be in opposition to each other before the ambition is accomplished. A lot of things worthy of being described as ambitious are extremely hard by definition. There are likely to be many failures on the way. Perhaps years worth of failure. Perhaps someone's ambition will leave them crying themselves to sleep at night because they may never accomplish the goal and they hate that. Or perhaps their entire body is a mass of bruises or every muscle is sore because of how hard they are pushing their body.
Yes, ambition usually requires sacrifice. I think the odds of really making it are vanishingly small though. It could be like daytrading, where 1% actually succeed and 99% lose a lot of money and sleep. Most people would find those odds insane, yet articles like this promote chasing that far-off, remote chance of a payoff. Accepting an average life is for the sane and reasonable, just as investing in index funds means accepting average returns.
But if they derive happiness from contributing to something larger than themselves, they are still working for their own happiness. No?
To help people / the world.
Thank God we had ambitious people working to create vaccines, help feed the world, etc.
We are reaching border of philosophy.
Helping people / the world survive better?
For example, because they believe in a cause -- this might still be pursuit of happiness in an abstract sense, but it's not pursuit of happiness in the immediate "I want fame/money to be happy" sense.
All these peer responses actually agree with you.
Why would people pursue noble, philosophical causes? Because it makes them happy to see those pursued. Why would somebody want the world around them to be better? Because it makes them happy to see the world be a better place. Why would somebody sacrifice of themselves to see a loved one better off? That's kind of the definition of love, that they're happy that their loved one is better off.
This gets more tautological than philosophical.
You're trivializing people's motivations. People don't do things simply because it makes them happy. They also do them because they feel compelled to, even if it would not make them happy. People are even sometimes forced to do things because they don't have any other option, or because they don't know of anything better to do. Reducing all of this to varying degrees of happiness is sloppy and usually inaccurate.
Like I said, it gets tautological. What is the difference between a compulsion, a desire, and a want? All could be defined as "that which would make me happy". And as fully acknowledged in some of my descriptions above, it's not that one ends up better off, but that one appreciates something happening for its own sake. All of these seem to be equivalent. None of it is trivialization, it's simply a cloud of motivation in which there aren't easy-to-draw lines of distinction.
Somebody would be ambitious because they're told to be ambitious, and because they see everybody else telling everybody else to be ambitious. Primates imprint from their environment.
To make sure you can help the people you love. It is horrible to watch someone else suffer from something that a little bit of inconsequential money could solve.
You say "the pursuit of happiness", but I said "the pursuit of your own happiness." I can pursue the happiness of others.
ambition in the context of self sacrifice can be quite powerful
Can you provide me an example of this? I like the idea but don't want to misunderstand it
Sure, I think this will probably just be reaffirming what you already interpreted the idea as but basically I think that the notion of humans being able to perceive self sacrifice in an abstract manner (as opposed to traditionally killing other humans as a means of sacrifice and whatnot) gave us the ability to perceive 'the future' in a sense.
An example would be the parents in poor family working very hard day in and day out to ensure that their children go to college and secure future prosperity. That's just one example but you can think of countless different scenarios where people sacrifice a bit of their present to capture an ambitious future - or to make that present sacrifice in the name of ambition and future success.
I actually heard all of this in a video but I can't for the life of me remember who said it, and it was put infinitely better than my explanation. If I remember I will let you know!
There was an interesting study I remember reading along these lines.
They took two equivalent classes of pottery students. Group A was told that they'd be graded based on the number of pieces made, while group B was based off the quality of a single submitted piece. Following the given incentives involved, group A made a bunch of pottery, while group B tried really hard at making good pottery.
What's interesting is at the end of the class, group A's pottery was better than group B's. Making a lot of pottery without caring about the quality of any individual piece is better at making high quality pottery.
The key takeaway I got is that you're generally able to magically become better at things you do a lot of. So if you want to get good at something, just do it more, and results will generally follow.
There was no such study.
The story you're repeating is a parable, published in a book called "Art & Fear" (as sibling commenters have noted).
There is no evidence in that book that it's anything other than a fabrication, argumentation from "just-so story".
I happen to believe the theory, personally. But the ceramics story is not evidence at all that the theory is correct. It's just a bald-faced assertion.
I investigated this story a while ago and concluded it was a parable, based on how it was presented in Art and Fear. However, I checked with the book's author and found that it is a true story. Strangely, the class was actually a university-level photography class, but they changed it to ceramics in the book.
425 days ago you wrote that you were highly suspicious the event ever happened: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11439565 (I was also active in that thread because I have researched the story.) The same happened 324 days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12108514 but then you updated one day later that you checked with one of the authors of the book! And here you relate the information again. I'm excited to learn more about this history.
Which author did you contact? Can you relate any details about the class? Where was it (which university)? When was it? Who was the instructor?
Thanks!
I like to get to the bottom of things :-) I emailed author David Bayles last July to ask him about the story. He didn't give a lot of details but said it was a university level photography class taught by "a very experienced and sophisticated teacher", and apart from changing the medium to ceramics the story was the literal truth. I asked for more details, but didn't hear back and didn't want to keep bothering him.
Thank you for your service, and for your updates. :)
A few observations, I think, flow from this:
1) Still not a study (as I note you have noted elsewhere, but I'm drawing that to the attention of anyone else who reads this), but rather an anecdote. Interesting one, though.
2) Art and Fear was published in '93, so that means chemical photography. That means that even the students who were being marked on quantity would have some lower bound for quality (in a digital photography regime, you'd just hold down the shutter for an hour and submit 3000 photos and be done for the semester). By-hand developing also has a lower bound on how much work you can do and still produce a photo. It just seems a lot less game-able than the pottery version, which makes the story seem more believable. So that makes it pretty weird to change for Bayles and Orland to change the story.
For myself, I think it's true that if you want to be good at anything worthwhile, you need to do a lot of work. But it's also true that if you want to be good, you need to struggle with perfecting your craft, rather than merely churning out whatever. I highly doubt that either is adequate alone. Of course, if you merely want to be tolerable, in many fields some people can get by on talent (however talent works).
Thank you very much for your response! I encourage you to keep getting to the bottom of things.
For what it's worth, I will go on record that I still do not believe the event occurred. :)
This makes me wonder how many times, when people say 'I read/remember a study...', they actually read the study itself, and not some second-hand analysis (or, a story which masquerades as second-hand analysis). I think 'I remember a study' should be an anti-pattern for careful conversation.
It happens all the time. After being burned dozens of times by urban legends and grossly misdescribed studies, I started just always reading fulltext instead of relying on summaries or citations. And even then, you'll run into misleading to the point of lying summaries of past research throughout the literature. Life is hard.
Yeah, I definitely wasn't careful with my wording there. I remembered reading about a study, not "reading a study". And even then, it was less a study and more "hey, a funny thing happened in my pottery class".
No worries! I didn't mean to call you out or anything - I've used the phrase frequently myself, and was mostly just thinking out loud for how I can communicate with more care.
My 2 moneys.
I worked in construction a while ago. I was always slow, pedantic, and the work i did usually reflected that (usually, some things benefit from being done fast). Everybody kept telling me that i was slow so one day i said "f it" and started working faster. The quality of work went down, for obvious reasons, and never got to the quality that was before (for most of it, some work like cutting things to size stayed precise). But if you, for example, paint a hundred windows really fast, you will probably not find many windows painted nicely. (mind you that nobody notices the little imperfections in construction, like, for example, a drop of white wall paint on the white radiator pipe)
Of course doing more means learning more, but so does thinking and experimenting.
Pottery, i never tried, but i assume it is more about the "feel" then anything else. While programming benefits a lot more from learning random stuff. It's easier to write a huge mess of code that works fine then it is to make a huge pot that doesn't fall apart.
All in all, why not bout ? Hack some 100 programs quickly, and write a couple programs with lots of preparation and research.
The heart of craftsmanship is understanding tolerances. Making something practically perfect is often remarkably easy if you throw enough time and effort at it. The hard part is making something just good enough. A master craftsman knows exactly what constitutes "good enough" for any given task and knows exactly how to achieve that goal with a minimum of time and expense.
Do you think there was any change in quality from the first window you painted after you decided to start going fast, versus the last one? Like, did you get better at painting windows quickly, even if they weren't up to the quality of the pedantic, slow one?
It was a long time ago and i did do more of the heavier construction then stuff like painting.
Biggest thing i learned from doing things quickly is where precision matters and where not. For example if i'm painting the ceiling it doesn't matter if i touch a wall as i will paint that wall later (unless i splat a bunch of it, ofc), but it does matter if i touch the ceiling when i'm paining the wall. Of course painting things quickly brings the risk of spraying paint around, especially when using a roller. Painting things too slowly can also be bad if the paint is highly viscous, like with the paint for outside metal surfaces (railings) as it ends up being obvious where you stopped to detail something else. Or wall paint if you cba to do it in two layers so you mix thicker paint and do it in one.
With windows specifically (and doors and such) you would put the.. paper tape (idk how to translate it) (edit: masking tape) some 2 or more cm wide on the edges so you would have a nice margin of error. With paining fast there is a bigger risk of going over it, and that can be bad (oil based window paint on a wall is really bad, wall paint on a window easily goes away with a wet rag).
In most construction it doesn't matter if you are little off, it was just me being anal.
TL;DR I learned where it matters to go a bit slower and where i can go fast without consequences.
edit: Forgot to answer the question. Yes, i did get better. Mostly because i learned where i can go fast and where i need to pay more attention. Learning to not wave brushes full of paint around like a figure skater also had a bit to do with it. I did also learn that some things come out better by default if you do them fast.
As someone who spent ~10 years in construction (log homes mostly), only newbies and weekend warriors seem to have this mentality. Yeah, always do quality work, but unless you are an artist, you've gotta get shit done quickly.
I've tried to paint my own house and my professional painter friends can absolutely destroy me in both speed & skill. A major problem I have is smooth caulking. It takes me forever to shittily caulk a window while a pro can make a few quick swipes and be done.
Learning when you can go fast and when you should go slower, with more care, seems like a valuable thing to learn (not just in construction, I'd think)
The word you're looking for is masking tape.
I think this is the best answer. There is no silver bullet to learning, and we need to get away from thinking there is.
On the other hand, coming from construction too, I would assume your coworkers were teasing you, rather than really fuss over the speed of the new kid. ;)
I'd be interested to know if this is true generally, or just for people learning a new skill.
I.e., Making a lot of pottery without caring about the individual quality leads to more learning (possibly because you can try lots of new stuff without fear of failure, possibly because when you find something that works you can keep practicing it, etc, etc).
Once you know what you're doing I can't imagine that blasting through something in a half-assed fashion produces better results than carefully doing a thoughtful job.
Definitely the latter, sorry if the story wasn't clear about that. Spending more time on an individual piece means that within the band of results your current skill is capable of delivering, you get a better result. Repetition, on the other hand, does a much better job of improving your skill.
While a nice story, I have been unable to find any citations that would indicate that this was ever an actual study.
it looks like it was a class https://blog.codinghorror.com/quantity-always-trumps-quality...
It appears in the book "Art & Fear: Observations On the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking" by David Bayles and Ted Orland.
PROTIP: Google will often tell you these things!
And where in that book are the references to an actual study?
PROTIP: Books are often filled with creative writing.
Fine, OK. I checked it out and there are no citations in the book at all (1993 edition), so yes it's a just-so story.
I may be mis-remembering the level of rigor, it may have just been a thing a professor tried because they were curious.
I'm curious what would happen if they took Group A just before they started their last piece and said there was a change and the quality of this piece would count. They have now learned a lot about making pottery and one would presume just need a little more effort to perfect it.
I'm co-founder of Prolifiko and wrote the article you kindly commented on - thank you. Whilst the story you refer to might or might not be a parable - the thrust is correct. Check out this post about prolific nobel laureates - http://prolifiko.com/limitless/
I love how often this comment gets upvoted because it's the perfect opportunity to point out usually 1% or so of any given cohort will have inherent talent that can be recognized as "Above Average" or maybe even "Exceptional." Throw a bunch of practice in, and yup, this is inherently a reasonable consideration.
Point being, most people don't have what it takes to cut it, so might as well aim for a really high investment of time and effort, and eventually plenty of walls will arise. For me, it took somewhere in the neighborhood of "5 Walls" before I could become cross-genre competent, and I've still got Wall #6 I'm kind of reluctantly ignoring (sweep picking, FWIW).
Most people give up around Wall #3, playing through extremely painful finger tips to the point of growing useful callouses (the kind you can stick a safety pin through and not draw blood).
A lot of this discussion tends to have trouble differentiating between "Imaginative Genius" and "Craft Expertise" and basically what we call "Success" is a labor of love, passion, or lunacy somewhere in the middle.
It seems that the test was 'average' value in 1 x B against 'maximum' value in 50 x A. Different measures (and not totally fair game). There is a bigger probability of doing something well just by chance if you repeat the test more times.
Not exactly comparable; the 1xB group had (took) a lot more time for their pot, and consciously spent more effort on making it look good. They actively went for max, while the 50x group didn't even go for it.
Making it look good is not the time that counts really here. Extra time is useful only in some parts of the process. Cooking time would be similar in both cases for each piece and this is the critical part.
"went for max" would mean here more ornamentation and bigger pieces. Is easy to cook perfectly a small pot, but the challenge is hugely increased if you are expected to produce bigger, more fragile pieces, with more parts that can fall off, and a structure that needs to carry more weight. 'A' can afford to play safe and small in this game, 'B' can't. You would need to be 'good' to be sucessful playing the A game, but would have to be 'a master' to be successful in B group.
No only they are different levels of challenge. Is a different level of learning. Even if A can do small and simple pieces, we can't say that are better than B in this sense (nobody had evaluated B doing small pieces). The opposite is also true. There is not guarantee that A are ready for the bigger pieces at the end of the course and wouldn't fall for the same errors than B.
> There was an interesting study
Source please.
Where is the data for that story?
My wife is a 3D print-designer, who takes her prints to craft shows. We've quickly learned that the best way to increase sales is to have a large variety of designs rather than a smaller selection of high-quality designs. She can make $30 selling one high-quality replica of a historic landmark that took her weeks of painstaking modeling time, but she has to find the one person who wants that print. Alternatively, she can mass-produce refrigerator magnets of birds, flowers, and animals that take just a few hours of modeling time and output them in such a variety that she can easily sell dozens in a day at $5 each.
It's what makes Amazon so profitable and AliBaba such a threat. It's the "longtail" business model, but for ideas. Like Linus Pauling said, "The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas."
I've seen this advice repeated elsewhere, with more academic analysis. And also repeated in terms of startup advice.
patio11 has a phrase: "increase the luck surface", and it is kin to this as well. If % of Making It is 1 in 500, then it's much more straightforward to increase the number of dice rolls than to attempt the perfection of your roll.
This also ties into the findings about grit, or perseverance through rough patches. Grit and trying over and over, learning each time, is a pretty good predictor of some decent success.
In my own career, I've found that being aggressively prolific is key to getting better. Careful tweaking so as not doing the same thing over and over is hugely important as well: searching the learning hillclimb for improvement.
That phrase comes from the TechZing podcast ("increase one's luck surface area") and is a really valuable insight (surface area = depth of value created times breadth of people who see it), so all the credit to them.
Can you share which podcast it was?
Nvm. Reference : http://www.codusoperandi.com/posts/increasing-your-luck-surf...
Winston Churchill produced 51 volumes of history and is generally regarded, in this pursuit, as having drank a cup and pissed an Ocean. I doubt they will continue to be read much once his personal historical aura has sufficiently faded.
Gibbon on the other hand in 6 volumes wrote a work that will probably be in print until Western Civilisation sinks into the dust.
So - kinda depends I would say.
I'm not sure if your counter example holds up. Wikipedia indicates that Edward Gibbon wrote way more than just The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire [1]. And those are the works we know about that he didn't just burn immediately (or whatever). The successful stuff sticks around and holds up, but that can create inaccurate views for how many failures came before (and after) the success.
As a side note, I also find it amusing that you expect Churchill's "aura" to fade. If current trends are any indication, he's moving toward folk tale hero status rather than the slow march toward obscurity (with multiple appearances in Doctor Who and other fictional media). In my opinion, the only thing that potentially stands in the way is a possible upheaval of the Western power base or an Alexandria style purge of knowledge. I say this as a US citizen who is much too young to remember the fall out of the war, much less the war itself.
> having drank a cup and pissed an Ocean
I've never heard this figure of speech and Google isn't turning anything up. What does it mean?
From the context, I think it means that the 51 volumes (the ocean) contains very little content (the cup). I also don't think the grandparent comment reflects the intent of the original post -- prolificness is the number of attempted works, not the length of any single work.
Churchill didn't write 51 volumes as one work; he was very prolific in the sense of many attempted works. Gibbon's six volumes were in a single work, and he wrote a few other shorter works. By the standard of number of attempted works, Churchill and Gibbon are good examples.
I've never seen this either but judging purely from the wording it sounds like someone has produced an excessive amount of output from very little input, aka bullshitting
Judging from context, it's the act of relentlessly and consummately bullshitting.
One of my favorite HN posts [1] relates directly to this. It was called "Prolific Engineers Take Small Bites". The big idea was to 1. take small bites, 2. make meaningful change, and 3. commit often. In the original article commit refers to committing to a repo. However, I treat it as commitment in a general sense. This mindset has considerably helped me keep on track with all my projects from game development, aerospace engineering day job, software contracting, learning to play music instruments, learning to draw, physical fitness, etc.
YES YES YES!! More support for this!
That said, be prolific and deep...try not to repeat yourself depending on what you're doing but go deeper...
Aaron Levie of box.com I believe started 10 different websites and box.com was the one that took off.
A friend of mine in Japan started 3 companies...and only 1 took off...initially all 3 looked equally promising. Imagine if he took 2 years per experiment and gave up after 2 of the 3.
The hit rate of Beethoven between masterpiece and so-so piece was relatively steady in his middle and late periods.
Often works that are pre-planned "masterpieces" slaved over fail to engage, while some things made quickly live forever...think of Leonardo's drawing the Vitruvian Man, a quick sketch that's one of the most famous drawings in the world vs. his destroyed or not-made (I forget) statue of a horse (it is being re-built by someone and the world is still not taking much notice).
Google, Amazon, etc...how many failures do they have, if you look at that list they'd look like giant failures...remember Google Knol? The wikipedia killer. Or Amazon Fire Phone? Really embarrassing...do they care? Not at all! They simply don't care...but it's a little bit because despite a hundred failures, two of the more experimental things they did become $100 billion dollar businesses namely Android and AWS.
I find the polarization of this debate a bit bizarre. While the article may have a point, I don't think anyone believes in pushing it to the absurdity of its logical extreme which would be to write terabytes of output using a pseudo random algorithm (plus a little learning from audience feedback).
So we see there should be a minimal acceptable quality for whatever you're doing, and if this is exceeded then by all means push out the volume.
The question then becomes, how to tell whether you're meeting the quality threshold?
I do agree that trying to be original is a red herring though. In a sea of mediocrity, being good is an original outcome in its own right.
I think this article is being somewhat selective in it's evidence. Several great mathematicians were highly selective in what they published, e.g., Gauss and Riemann. I don't think Einstein published that many papers. Though it might be the case that gauging quality is easier in math and physics, so being prolific is less important.
Gauss and Riemann may have been selective publishers, but they produced and thought about topics constantly. We can see this in their correspondence and private notes.
They probably weren't making lists of topics they wanted to study one day and getting stuck not even starting.
>They probably weren't making lists of topics they wanted to study one day and getting stuck not even starting.
Is that common? I have this problem of making lists of things that I want to do, but typically it doesn't get much further than that. I feel like a constantly plan, but never do anything.
Also, I agree regarding those that may have selectively published, it doesn't mean that they weren't incredibly prolific.
Alexander Dumas wrote a total of 277 novels over his lifetime – six every year of his working life
Woah, that is insane.
It's also stretching the truth a little bit. Dumas had 45 employees who worked with him to write the novels. So, he was more running a studio with a process to create great novels rather than actually writing each novel.
Ah. So James Patterson didn't invent the fiction sweatshops?
Are all Dumas novels written this way? Even the 'big' ones like Count of MC and Three musketeers?
Hi, sorry, didn't see your comment before. Yes, even the big ones. A big part of the research and writing of the Count of Monte Cristo was done by Auguste Maquet who was one of his main ghostwriter. August Maquet also worked on all the sequels from the Three Musketeers but not the first novel.
Isaac Asimov wrote 500 books in his 72 years of life. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Asimov#cite_note-3)
True...but while his ideas were great, his writing hasn't aged well. I picked up a Foundation novel in a thrift store a few months ago in a moment of nostalgia and found myself cringing so much that it was a relief to reach the end.
Television soap operas are also impressive in purely quantitative terms, but that doesn't make them good, does it?
TV presents an interesting example of quantity versus quality. British networks tend to commission very short compared to American networks. For example, the British version of The Office had a total of 14 episodes, versus 201 episodes for the American version.
Quantity is clearly more directly profitable, but quality seems to be disproportionately influential. British broadcasters have remarkable success in exporting programmes and formats internationally.
> I picked up a Foundation novel in a thrift store a few months ago in a moment of nostalgia and found myself cringing so much that it was a relief to reach the end.
Leaving out the tacky technology (nuclear-powered kitchen knives? really?) and society seemingly in a 1950s stasis, what did you find cringeworthy, if you don't mind me asking? I re-read Foundation last year and nothing else obviously bad popped out.
The dialog. The pacing, The...just everything. It's not just the age; I can laugh out loud at the jokes in 18th century French literature because the characters and dialog feel truthful.
It's like a movie with a great plot but really bad acting, you know?
Asimov's poor dialog, writing style, and character development were recognized from the beginning. His writings stood out because of the ideas they contained, which admittedly are not as impressive 50 years later because they are not new anymore. Similarly, William Shatner's bad acting does not change the fact that Star Trek caught the imagination of a generation.
Well, that's basically what I said in the first place :-/
This is basically an ad for their course. I'm not very impresseed with the article.
Writing comes really easily to me (many of you would say a bit too easily, considering my tendency to drop 1000 word comments on HN). I really don't think the route to quality is just churning out as much as possible; if anything, you run the risk of getting some small success and then churning out that lowish-level of quality for as long as the money keeps flowing. It's very obvious from a day reading blogs or magazines that there is a flourishing market for bad writing. In my view, the best way to improve your writing is to read. Read a lot, be snobbish about the quality of what you read, invest effort in reading stuff you find difficult to understand. Many people pursue style at the expense of learning how to write substantively; this is the literary equivalent of painting pictures with glitter. You might produce a masterpiece after a while, but more likely whatever you do is going to look really tacky.
It's easier to get paid if you're prolific and can churn out lots of material on demand. But you're also putting a ceiling on the quality of your output and probably your earning power. If you want to go good work, learn to work slowly and without the validation (and dopamine hit) that comes from a quick turnaround. I paint now and have a mix of simple things that I know out quickly and large difficult pieces that I labor over for months at a time and that are likely not that interesting or easy to appreciate to the casual glance. I like both kinds, but guess which ones have priority if the house catches fire.
If you get really really good at something, original is automatic. And if you practice really really hard at something, getting good is automatic.
Passion is a simple advantage because it gives you the focus, the persistence, and the satisfaction needed to keep practicing efficiently.
Maybe it'll take 10 years to do what a genius could accomplish in 1, but if the genius is working on something else, it's all you. But even if not, your body of work will be different.
Depth-first search through a concept space doesn't lead to originality as quickly as performing a breadth-first search at each new level of depth.
The shortest path to an idea may require disparate ideas.
I know I'm only rephrasing the headline, but the article's point follows easily from this model of how thoughts are structured in Memory Evolutive Neural Systems.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pbiomolbio.2015.07.004
(to read for free, go to https://sci-hub.bz and search for 10.1016/j.pbiomolbio.2015.07.004)
EDIT: To be clear, the point follows easily from the model, which says nothing about what's required to understand the model.
I wonder if this has something to do with why certain comedians are so good (e.g., Carlin and Louis CK).
"...[Louis] wished he could be like Carlin and do new albums and specials every year — all of them brilliant. It wasn’t until much later in his career that C.K. would get the important advice from Carlin to throw out all of his material every year and start fresh..."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/06/louis-ck-honors-geo...
Quantity trumps quality.
https://blog.codinghorror.com/quantity-always-trumps-quality...
Adam Grant whose book "Originals" is a main topic in this this article gave a great Ted Talk on "Originals" here:
"The surprising habits of original thinkers"
https://www.ted.com/talks/adam_grant_the_surprising_habits_o...
Yeah, I have to say I agree with this article for the most part.
For example, I've spent most of my time recently as a writer, and found that it's been almost impossible to tell what works will become popular and what won't. You can throw something out in minutes and have tons of people sharing it and liking it, or spend months researching a piece and find that no one gives a toss.
But (somewhat sadly), I'm not sure I'd agree with the article that:
> being prolific doesn’t give you an excuse to get sloppy and start blurting out half formed ideas – that’s just going to piss off everyone apart from your mum. Your work still needs to be the very best you can do.
Because somewhat unfortunately, that's exactly what search engines and social networks kind of want now. They want quick responses to breaking news and trends, not well thought out pieces that take all the facts and views into consideration.
Look at YouTube for example. Many popular channels there basically cash in on whatever the latest controversy or drama is, usually within about a day of it occurring. A lot of popular games and apps are ones that literally just cash in on a recent trend, quality be kind of damned (see that Mega Man Xover 'fan game' which showed you could copy Capcom's product by spending 5 minutes in Flash or various game mods and stuff which stick Donald Trump into existing games). And when news is concerned... well, the most successful papers and sites (as far as traffic is concerned) are those that rush out stories as quickly as possible. Someone who watched yesterday's Pokemon themed Nintendo Direct would get a lot more clicks if they capitalised on the typo that said it'd released for the Switch rather than if they waited for more facts before proceeding.
So being prolific definitely helps more than trying to be 'original' and focusing too much on any one piece. But I'd also say the setup on a lot of modern internet sites actually goes further and kind of advantages people who can just get stuff done quickly in general, quality be damned.
Well, being prolific OR a genius would be fine by me.
In the absence of either I do think it's valuable to try more things in parallel to see what works, and not get put off by 'failures' (experience you gained just after you needed it), or not being 'perfect' (since there rarely is such a thing, objectively).
Exploiting a power law. Search it with content marketing. The article, like others on that site, also has a listicle, which you might also search with content marketing.
When you are making rough drafts I agree. However once a rough draft has promise you need to spend a lot of time on it to make it good.
I have observed that authors tend to go downhill once they are known. The pressure to publish (more money I guess), along with name recognition meaning they don't have to put out quality work is my theory.
Songwriters have realized this a long time ago. Most successful bands write between 80-100 songs per album release.
Hard work and practice pretty much always makes one better.
Appreciate the simple distillation of a useful analysis.
I was an intellectual whore for 25 years. Personally there is more joy and satisfaction in being original than there is in the money that results in being prolific.
I would rather make less and be happy.
Easy to say after 25 years of making money ;)
Would you rather find that out in 20 more years or now?