I read an article once about how the amount of work to get into the top tier in a single area is astronomical, but the amount of work to become top tier in a combination of 2-3 fields is attainable by almost anyone.
For example, becoming a top tier statistician is hard. But becoming a top tier statistician/programmer is easier. In other words, if you can get to a state where you know more statistics than your average programmer and more programming than your average statistician, then suddenly you are an above-average programmer/statistician. Keep improving those two skills and you may start to "unlock new forms of extraordinary". Or maybe you are a music teacher, and also pretty good at programming, and so you can make extraordinary music teaching software that is way better than the competition's because you understand the nuances of music teaching intimately enough that you capture them clearly in software requirements. Or maybe you are pretty good at art, pretty good at music composition, pretty good at programming, pretty good at story telling (not necessarily top tier in any one category though)... and you combine all of those skills to single-handedly create a game that by many measures is extraordinary[0][1].
Something like that. Anyway, the point being, you may not be extraordinary in any one field, but it isn't too hard to achieve extraordinary things due to a combination of skills in multiple fields if you work at it.
I’m an average programmer.
I’m an excellent problem solver.
I have an above average work ethic.
I’m an excellent communicator.
Basically, I combined all of these traits and found roles that leveraged these traits to maximize my impact.
Not for nothing, but this is why my liberal arts college was profoundly impactful for me, despite not getting a “top tier” CS education. My writing abilities were given a shot in the arm, because I had to write so many analysis papers for my government minor. My understanding of human behavior was expanded by my psychology courses. My understanding of how I should never design a UI was solidified by how poorly I did during a year of art classes.
Some days I wish I was as strong mathematically as my friends who went to MIT, or as talented with programming languages as my friends who went to Cambridge, but each one of us have been able to have successful careers, despite our differences in breadth/depth.
Don't mean this to be a mean comment but how did you assess this?
I think i am good problem solver but i don't know if i am better than anyone else.
It's really an eye-opening statement for tech roles, and how formally taught and self-taught/transferred folks can work side by side successfully.
The unique thing about tech skills is there's more than one valid way to solve a problem or do something "right". It's hard to measure that.
Not even two CS majors who may be equivalently capable (in different ways) on the outset will be identical, nor will be the outcome of how they grow their strengths and capabilities.
I look forward to HR continuing to evolve better to understand technical roles and contributions as being beyond a binary yes/no measurement.
Current hiring practices continue not to extend well from a bricks and mortar approach to a abstracted online/digital measurement.
In the meantime... knowing how to leverage and communicate your skillet in a transferable way is really what's important. There's no better way to do that than learning to write and communicate well, and better than others.
Yet, I:
- Help with hiring/marketing/leading scrum sessions (when the actual scrum master is ill)
- Conduct pentests
- Do the frontend and backend (what I was hired to do)
If they'd let me, I'd help with the writing efforts as well as my writing ability is better than that of the average developer, if I have to believe my grades on any report in any degree that I did (game studies, psychology and CS).
Being a good communicator is probably what I'd ask new devs to focus on the most - it's going to pay out a lot more than an encyclopedic knowledge of algorithms or creative problem solving and it's the only skill that everyone on the team greatly benefits from.
An iPod
A phone
An internet communicator
Lee Iacocca [0] in his autobiography states that his minor in Psychology in college was the part of his education that was most useful to him as he worked his way up the chain at Ford.
I highly recommend his autobiography as well.
How do you suggest to make good use of this situation/setup?
Many of my coworkers over the years had only 2-year degrees, or in a couple of exceptional cases no degree at all. People my age mostly learned to program on our own, as teenagers, starting with BASIC and then going deeper, so by the time we were in a position to take CS 101 or whatever we balked, because spending time listening to a professor tell you about writing a bubble sort in FORTRAN just isn't interesting or applicable when your hobby project is writing your own text editor or whatever.
So yeah, lots of people my age have liberal arts degrees -- political science, English, foreign languages, history, whatever. The secret advantage of that background is that we can usually write and communicate WAY better than the CS grads, which turns out to be immensely useful.
The tl;dr is really "understanding how software gets built AND being able to describe it to both technical and nontechnical people opens up lucrative career paths."
https://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/07/car...
Scott Adams is definitely not famous because "he is an ok graphic artist and has an ok humor". He's famous because his satire was fairly unique and very sharp. I think he's very talented in the humor department; in addition to his creating invention and sharp wit, very often his strips have two punchlines - in the middle and the last panel - which take twice as much effort as a "standard" comic strip.
His drawing skill didn't/don't really matter, as a matter of fact, he wasn't particularly good at the beginning, and his style is generic and simple anyway.
It's very unlikely that somebody with "he is an ok graphic artist and has an ok humor" will get his success just because of such qualities.
¹=A very ridicolous example of whom was when he was proving that Trump will be successful because, based on his observations, leaders who were great in the long term, typically had a rough start. Can't find the post.
And as patio11 says, combining engineering with good writing skills makes it very easy to be one of the top with your combined skills
I’ve been trying to lean more into that advice the past couple months by publishing on my blog :)
Surprisingly enough, just this morning I woke up to realize someone had shared an article I wrote and it was on the HN front page!
He said that astronomers figure he must be an exceptional programmer, since he's clearly a mediocre astronomer. While programmers figure he must be an exceptional astronomer, since his programming is strictly middle-of-the-road!
Of course, these days, he's the best dang Klein bottle glass blower in the game. No substitute for finding your niche.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Stoll
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k3mVnRlQLU
P.S. Cliff, we know you're on HN. Please continue being yourself, it seems like a really great person to be!
And of course, he hires out the manufacturing. That's why he has (an awesome, little) warehouse under his hour full of them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k3mVnRlQLU
My undergrad and Master's are in an interdisciplinary field, which had at the time felt needed by Universities offering those degrees, but in the end the professional profile was not of interest. An average knowledge of chemistry, engineering, physics, and other sciences does not make you an interdisciplinary scientist, but someone who can do a little bit of many things, but not at the level that is required in order to get paid for it.
The Dilbert's creator has excellent drawing abilities for the comics he is drawing —- here the lesson is that you need to do excellent relative to the quality that is needed, not that if you combine average talents you get world-class results.
Nobody said being average at both was enough. The parent post specifically said if you know more than average in both areas. You still need to be good, but the combination of good in multiple areas is claimed to be sort of like being extraordinary in one. I think there's some truth in that.
But the argument is being above average in two or more areas can make you as impactful as being top of your field in one area, even though you are nowhere near that talented in any different field.
Even with your example, I would counter that a huge number of people successful in data scientist roles would not be successful (or at least, much less so) either as programmers or statisticians. It seems many of the earliest wave of data scientists (e.g. pre bootcamps etc.) have failed to thrive at at least one of the two before ending up in "data science" (caveat, agree this is poorly defined).
If you have a combination of skills that have synergy then you can have great results.
The concept of dual/multi-classing, and what later became prestige classes/archetypes in later editions was all about highlighting that the sum of the parts was greater than the whole.
There was a trade-off of course, especially in the early/mid levels as other solo-class characters started coming into their stride with higher-tier abilities. If you made it past that stage as you continued developing your other class(s), you really ended up with a unique character.
Going with the videogame focus, if you ever play competitive games you actually see how brutal it can be. In Overwatch for example you have an absolute mountain to climb in ranked because you can't just improve, you have to improve above average to increase your rank. This means a lot of people are getting better at the game over time but are going down in ranking simply because everyone else is getting better faster.
Essentially the internconnectedness of everything is making it hard to find the niches you speak of. There's always someone who loves his job so much and works at it so much that he defines the meta, so to say. This is a problem in computer science, even.
Then, seek out those people and work with them. Computing is collaborative. It's rather difficult (and unnecessary!) to create anything meaningful entirely by yourself.
All that happened pretty much by accident, mainly because I was always interested in all things low level, but it proves really advantageous in my career. Basically if a problem stands at the interface between hardware and software I tend to be massively more productive than a very good software engineer who knows very little of electronics or vice versa. If we have a problem like "we have this driver that seems to lock up because it misses an IRQ, but we're not sure if it's a software race or a hardware problem" I can usually help.
Of course that's all fairly niche, but as long as the niche is big enough that's not an issue. It's all about finding complementary skills. There might be a need somewhere for a good software dev that also very good at Sumo, but that's probably not very common...
But the best of them is the multi-specialists. https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/19/the-dual-phd-problem-of-to...
Diminishing returns on time invested to expertise gained becomes unattractive at the highest expertise levels. A lot of time is required for a small growth in expertise (pushing to expand the frontier of knowledge in physics, for example).
You can be an expert, but not the world class expert, with less time invested (before diminishing returns becomes prohibitive). I like to think of this as catching up to the state of the art, but not actively working to advance it (much, much harder).
Do this in multiple fields and you may have a unique skillset or perspective that's valuable.
I once heard another example of a man who'd washed out of both medical school and art school, lacking the apitude and/or drive to really make it in either field. He wound up finding a very successful career as an illustrator of medical textbooks, as the number of people versed in both medicine and art is extremely small. He's booked up years in advance.
(That man's story was, I believe, part of an NPR news story roughly 15 years ago. I've not been able to find any mention of it since then!)
I've been able to combine good-but-not-elite skills in my own career in order to find success.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erd%C5%91s%E2%80%93Bacon_numbe...
This surprised me. I guess you could star in a tiny indie film completely closed off from the Bacon graph...
Which is the way people have thought about anything for thousands of years. Fitting into domination or skill based hierarchies was optimal when resources where limited.
The Network and its explosion in the last 20-30 (not even one generation old) challenges the reliance on anything Hierarchical. Just one example - I can connect to my boss's boss's boss with a tweet or an email or whatsapp message and establish a connection. A deep one if I am of value. I dont need to go through my boss or through multiple levels anymore. It changes everything. The more networked everything gets the harder and harder its going to get for hierarchies to maintain their stability.
Why are Experts and Famous people's weaknesses so easy to find and pounce on today? Because of the network.
Stop thinking about Hierarchies and how to climb up or what pushes ppl down. Its outdated. Those who climb and pretend there is some safe summit, their weaknesses will be scrutinized by thousands more people than in the past. You can see it from Obama to Gates to Trump to Xi to your favorite scientist or celeb who has fallen from grace.
So think about Networks. Think about how they are created, how connections strengthen, how two networks connect, how to grow them etc. Networks change the value of all people. Just as in the Brain. There is no one extraordinary neuron.
Book recos - Niall Ferguson - The Square and the Tower - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07KKYostAJ0
Albert-László Barabási - The Formula
Moises Naim - The end of power
The Hierarchies of Skill and Domination will continue to face major pressure the likes they haven't seen in the past from ever changing network configurations.
And then your 3boss recommends firing you for insubordination regardless of your value.
For a while, in my career, it felt like I was pursuing multiple career paths and in fact, there were many times I wondered if those were wasted years.
Turns out, that being a fairly good jack of a few trades does pay off. A mix of knowledge of analytics, statistics that was honed through a few years in economic research and most importantly, business understanding. I see that all of these skills, together, help me understand and grasp problems much better.
I am not the best cloud ops guy or the one with the best code or in-pace with the latest arxiv paper on machine learning but when faced with the latest business question on how to use data to help drive sales or reduce costs, I know enough to piece the different bits together and build a prototype at the least.
This is hugely empowering. I owe it to luck and fortune of course, but when the opportunity presents I felt these cross-domain skills made me more confident and helped visualise the solution better.
PS: I have not mentioned the most important skill though - how you work with people but I believe that is only gained through experience
However, my experience doing that trick is very varied by now; I can do the trick in a handful of back-end languages, front-end frameworks, even native iOS.
So yeah I'm nowhere near a rockstar developer, but I'm experienced, productive, pragmatic, etc.
It won't make me ridiculously rich but I get by. That said, I could increase my income by going self-employed I guess.
I feel that people who got domain knowledge were always better contributors even if their technical programming knowledge is not that great.
Been contemplating on getting a masters on an interesting field but current economic climate is still uncertain.
1) understand the universe
2) explain it to the three years old
If the combination is valuable enough, in this case programmer/statistician, then we simply create a new field for you to compete in: data science.
I think this is general work advice and in that sense I think it makes sense; it holds even more for {x, programming}.
From my perspective, specificity and personality is an important part of the creative process towards becoming an expert or otherwise accomplished in a field, or at least, a field that has some inventiveness to it. In other words, focusing on even fewer things than a field such as statistics.
To use the statistics example, I view statistics, or at least applied statistics, from the point of view of multivariate statistics. This makes me quite ignorant towards frequentist statistics (no, I am not about to promote Bayesian statistics, which in my opinion is the word that often refers simply to the Bayes Theorem in the context of frequentist statistics) but with very clear reasons:
1. Normality doesn't really come into play in multivariate stats unless we are sampling randomly and without context. In multivariate stats, we actually tend to either use an exhaustive dataset or we sample contextually, or maybe uniformly along a geographical feature such as a riverbed.
2. Dependence of variables is why we resort to multivariate statistics in the first place.
3. Sample size, similar to 1.), is often not applicable. It does apply in the sense that a small matrix gives few insights. However, replicates in an experiment in frequentist statistics are used as a measure of internal variation in relation to between group variation. In multivariate stats you can do the analysis in complete ignorance of whether there are groups at all, or, you can use the groups in a similar way and consider replicates. But there are not hard conventions like having at least three replicates in order to define what variation means in the first place. In multivariate stats variation is a measure of variation between variables, not groups, and the principal components order variation in terms of new, virtual variables via eigenvectors.
4. For a combination of these reasons, the general application of different types of statistics, specifically frequentist statistics as opposed to multivariate statistics tend to change the whole field you are working in to start off with.
Now, the reason for my elaborate story about differences in statistical approaches is that to be an expert in anything, I personally think is a journey towards discovering what makes your interests peculiar, or if you prefer another word, special. (Also, it depends on which experts you happen to be exposed to.) So, yes, of course it should be hard to be one of the best in anything, but I think a reasonable approach is to find the peculiarities of what you could become deeply committed to.
Frequentist statistics is contextually difficult for me to be focused on, and that makes it difficult. However, once the central limit theorem gets introduced, I instead would venture towards it and then once again forget whether I even can ever have enough time to properly study sampling. After all, I wasn't the one to happen to work for Guinness. Beer, now that would be a good reason to study sampling.
Also, most people will know intuitively that it is easier to diversify than it is to specialize.
And by combining skills you aren't going to make it into the history books. However, hard work in one area may actually get you there one day.
I'd say none of these are as useful as reacting with curiosity. There's an endless amount to learn from the extraordinary in any field or sport or hobby. It's easy to write off the extraordinary as naturally talented or lucky or something else surface level. Most of the time it's anything but.
I play golf. It's a game that can be extraordinarily frustrating to beginners. It often takes years of hard work to just be moderately adequate at the game. Going into it with disappointment or jealousy of extraordinary golfers will quickly lead them to quit as they'll be way too stressed out to enjoy the game. Those who go into it with inspiration or admiration of those who are better won't be able to sustain it when the inspiration burns out.
Curiosity is the only emotion I've found that is sustainable. Endless curiosity as you try to figure out and piece together what makes someone good at what they do. It's an emotion that sustains because it's the only emotion that is useful both when you hit a bad shot and when you hit a good shot. It's useful both when you watch someone who is worse than you, and when you watch someone who is better than you.
The other one I know is gratitude.
When I'm in the right headspace, instead of being intimidated or jealous of the accomplishments of others, I'm grateful that they shared those accomplishments with us all, and that I'm able to learn from them.
Half the time when I watch Jacques Pepin, I think that I'll never make an omelet that good. But the other half the time, I'm so thankful that he's shown me how to make mine better than they ever were before.
I don't play golf, but I imagine there are so many minutiae, from driving, choosing which iron to use, putting, stance, hand positions, comparing clubs of the same type from different manufacturers, and same for golf balls. Each has a breadth and depth to explore as you get more and more into that topic.
I'm willing to bet the people that rise to the top are the people who love to tinker with all those parameters, not necessarily because they know it will make then X% better, but because they just want to see the effect.
> Curiosity is the only emotion I've found that's sustainable.
It jumped out at me that curiosity technically isn't an emotion, but might be better labeled a state of mind. So the natural follow-up question for me is: What are some ways to help oneself get in that state of mind?
The professor that taught my "logic" class in college would say that feelings and actions come about as a result of _beliefs_. So what kinds of beliefs lead to feeling inspired/disappointed/jealous? And in contrast, what kinds of beliefs tend to lead one to curiosity?
As for how to get into the curiosity mindset, and how to push away the other states of mind, I don't have a full answer for you. My personal strategies stem from a somewhat related area of study: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. I'm able to push away the negative thoughts like disappointment/jealousy/anger and substitute it with curiosity. I don't necessarily find inspiration or other "positive" states of mind something I need to push away, I'm just aware that it's fleeting.
I'm envious because often these high achieving people had amazing opportunities, which enabled them to reach the level they're at.
I'm curious because of exactly what you said.
Unfortunately it seems like the journey people take to achieve these amazing feats is often never documented and everyone only focuses on the outcome. It's quite disappointing because I love to read about how people went from A -> B.
Somewhat unexpectedly, discovering some parts of Stoic philosophy has definitely helped to rediscover the joy of curiosity that can be found almost anywhere.
“Comparison is the thief of joy.” - Teddy Roosevelt
To me, "extraordinary" is a state of being rather than doing. Don't worry about what you want to be, but just what you want to do. Do things and be alive in the experience, and stop worrying so much about how you stack up against others. You're all going to die, live while you can.
For instance, I love painting and woodworking, but I suffer no illusions that I would do "well" in those fields, as even far more talented and experienced individuals that I know in those fields are struggling mightily and envy my hobbyist status.
It's a nice idea, but this "do what you love" doesn't scale.
I mean, did it too, there was a day where I was super excited to be working as a developer or a sysadmin with tech I loved but after a while if you want to actually get anywhere that thing that you loved doing turns out to be a very small subset of what it takes to be great at something, or be senior enough to have responsability enough to steer things towards your interests..
So yeah. Do what you love at first; but what you love won't be enough in the long term and you're going to have to spend months of 12 hour shifts to migrate some horrible app or other at some point, or many points, and without doing some things that go against 'what you want to do' you'll never be able to do more of what you actually want to do...
Not sure if that makes sense..
But it doesn't hurt to have a "find something to do for money that you don't hate and maybe even enjoy some parts of, and then find some other stuff to do on the side that makes you feel like your life has meaning" plan B in your back pocket.
Beyond Passion: The Science of Loving What You Do https://www.calnewport.com/blog/2010/01/23/beyond-passion-th...
I would agree, as long as we differentiate between "'what' you want to be" and "'how' you want to be." I'd say that "what" is a function of other people and their evaluation of you---in the "what" category are "famous," "respected," "talented," "recognized," etc. Chasing these is vain.
But "'how' I want to be" is completely internal, and I don't rely on the approval of others for them: I want to be "disciplined," "thoughtful," "kind," "honest," etc. These are worth chasing, even though technically they do not deal what "what you want to 'do'" and could be construed to conflict with Feynman's thoughts (though I think they don't really).
1. There aren't as many uber successful people out there as the internet makes it seem. It's far fewer than you think. Lets take a simple example of dudes who go to the gym and are strong. Instagram makes it seem like all dudes bench press 400 lbs and have a 6 pack. In my 15 years of going to the gym (ive been to several dozen all across the world) there are less than 5 people I've personally seen who've bench pressed even 300 lbs. Apply this to any field and it's going to be true.If you take programming for instance I'm yet to meet a person who's performing at the standard I had set for myself (become a 10x programmer).
2. Lots of people are really good at marketing themselves, which inflates the number of people you think are extraordinary.
There aren't that many people at the world class level, the internet makes it seem there are more of these than there are. Just relax and do the things you enjoy.
3. The people you hear about most are heard about most because they're newsworthy in some way. That tends to mean someone who's extraordinary good at something, or at least has the marketing skill to make it seem that way.
They'll also be the types who'll get a lot of attention on social media, since people are more likely to share extraordinary stories than ordinary ones.
So you get an unrealistic picture, simply because you're seeing all the outliers.
4. People who aren't very good at something tend not to share that, whereas those who do will share it. If you're a fitness buff who can bench press 400 lbs, you're the type of person most likely to post to a fitness subreddit, or Discord server, or on relevant hashtags on Twitter/Facebook/Instagram. The many others who are out of shape? Not so much.
Either way, it all leads to a situation where success/skill is drastically overrepresented online compared to its commonness in the population as a whole.
I always thought that was crazy Gossip Girl shit, yet I got into a good university and was in certain clubs and social circles where I met a ton of people with trust funds (1M-30M).
That's when I decided to change the approach to my career. I'm not even a social person, so the number of people I was meeting wasn't astronomical, and I wasn't at an elite university, just a very good one.
I still see it today living in a large city. The number of people who have trust funds or parents willing to give them 200k-1M to put down on a house absolutely astounds me! I know it's a small % of people, but a small % of people is still a ton of people!
I live in a city with two elite universities (guess which one). They're literally all around me.
Getting into either of those is my definition of "uber successful", with many of them being more successful at 17 than I'll ever be in my life!
Yes, but at the same time I just look at some of my past collegues. Some people are pretty useless and are kept in often well paying jobs for years. Also Reddit is a good place to find out how dumb a lot of people are, or Facebooks' programming groups if you find Reddit's level too high.
Yes, and then those people get all of the promotions, so now even just being good at pretending to be extraordinary is sufficient, which is even more frustrating.
It’s easy to focus on the next promotion or the completion of a big project that will elevate your career.
By succumbing to the natural instinct of mimicry, we rarely ask ourselves the question: are we climbing the right hill?
In this analogy, the hills represent any long-term goal: career, fulfillment, financial security. Our natural instinct is to walk upward, chasing the next promotion or job opportunity. However, we lose the virtue of randomness by doing this. If your only benchmark is the hill you’ve always known, you have no way to gauge its relative steepness. It’s a good way to reach a local maxima, but not necessarily the best long-term option.
Instead, I allow myself to explore other options, even if it seems “downhill”. For naturally ambitious people, it can seem downright impossible to avoid this instinct. It’s hard, and often feels unnatural. However, the perspective gained from these excursions improves my mental map and I’m able to learn what lies on other hills. Taking this mindset means letting go of the mimetic behavior that leads to jealousy or comparison.
After all, why should it matter if someone else is higher? Your peak is somewhere else entirely.
https://sundayscaries.substack.com/p/climbing-the-right-hill...
You gotta step back, relax, and live your life. That's why all the social media etc is poison.
I let me ego go.
It's ok to be normal. And it's ok to get to learn from the masters.
I once read a O Henry short story where the three main characters are at different places in society financially and in terms of power. But they still found some meaning when they accidentally meet each other during the course of the story.
Their relative stature and standing in the world didn't affect what they thought of each other when they met.
It was kind of an uncanny, uplifting little story. Don't remember its name though.
Later I observed that there were people dumber than I was with better jobs than I had, and I took that as a positive sign. It meant that just by working hard, I could get those jobs too.
And one thing reading all those biographies told me was that many of these ultra-accomplished people paid a heavy price, usually in their personal lives. I decided I would rather be a happy millionaire with a family than an unhappy billionaire with two or three ex-wives.
I taught myself how to program, took some writing classes in a junior college, and taught myself business and investing by doing dry runs on paper. The kinds of programming I did were fairly challenging, because as a person without a degree I knew I would have to work harder than people who had one. I also stuck to programming that I liked, but that also had a likely long commercial future.
Eventually I was able to parlay all of this into what this website calls a “lifestyle business“, one that has let me stay home and raise children while still earning a great living over the last few decades. I have hit a fair number of singles and doubles, plus a triple or two. At my age now I’m not going to make a billion, But I own a couple of houses outright, have a retirement fund that can help support very high medical bills for medically fragile family members, and I can take care of my handicapped kid until I die.
All of this came from keeping my expectations lower than the author’s. I was thinking not in terms of what I “should“ be able to accomplish, but what I could accomplish if I worked hard and smart.
https://np.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3gbx78/til_th...
https://np.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3gbx78/til_th...
Great point though underdeveloped in the article. Clocking out at 5 so you can spend time with a healthy, happy, well-adjusted, loving family is pretty extraordinary these days.
The right mix for me is working like a daemon about 9 months a year then having 3 months off, but YMMV..
One thing that has helped me a lot to find peace here has been becoming a father. Culturally, it comes with a kind of license to finally just accept mediocrity which I find freeing. Bills are paid, I can watch my son grow up, doesn't matter than I'm not the best at anything.
"In an interview with Paul Desmond, Parker said that he spent three to four years practicing up to 15 hours a day."
"If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful at all." ~ Michelangelo
I argue that one is more employable, more accomplished and has more opportunities if one is average, or above average, in five separate disciplines. Has more diverse friendships too.
Strong resonance here. I recently became more prolific about blogging, and this was the mindset that helps me stay consistent. I find that the mere act of writing an essay helps me clarify my own thoughts, and the essay often changes in the process.
As a recent example, I started writing out about how I struggled and got over impostor syndrome. But while writing it I realized: wait, I never actually get over it. Rather, I learned how to use it to my advantage [1]
How to do that became the message of the article.
If my writing never brings fame, I won’t care. It helped me understand myself and it will help me better advise the people I care about
I don't publish it because I don't know anyone cares but I feel like it helps myself regardless, and keeping them searchable seems like it should pay off at some point.
What I mean is that I think people are barking up the wrong tree when they talk about "working towards being the best." We can all work harder, and I think we should all consider doing so, but no amount of working harder will let you see every experience as a lesson in physics. Those kinds of holistic engagement in a subject come from someplace other than exercises of self control and are, I think, probably pretty harmful to the overall well being of the person involved.
I'm happy that I can put work down at the end of the day, and the people in my life are happy that I can too.
Before we talked, I was jealous of such people. Now, I consider myself lucky to be free from that burden. Life is all about tradeoffs, nothing is given without taking something else away.
When you see someone doing something you do or want to do, and they are exceptional at it, it either becomes inspirational or discouraging based on just how extraordinary it is and how emotionally attached you are to the subject. If you are emotionally committed to it, seeing someone else doing it well will likely be inspirational. If not, you're more likely to give up before you even start.
I discovered at a young age that I am a parrot - that I find it fairly straightforward to repeat back complex sound patterns to people. There are a couple families of language in SE Asia and Africa that trip me up, but other than that my coordination is unusual. It made parts of music and foreign language classes a non-event, which made more time to perfect other parts.
What I didn't know until much later is that my brother also has this trait, but he got tired of being "hinkley's younger brother", and he completely burnt out on music (although that was due to pressure from our parents) and foreign language by high school. I had a sense of this by the time he was picking a foreign language in HS, and I gently encouraged him to try a different language. He didn't. Our teacher always found the parrot trait highly fascinating, to the point of bringing it up in class. It turned out this had only happened a couple times in his career and here were two brothers back to back. I kind of laughed it off, while my brother found it pretty cringe-worthy and he eventually dropped the class.
Complete opposite for me. The things I get discouraged at doing because there is already an extraordinary talent pool are the ones I keep saying are the most interesting to me. To me, those things are too important to me to get wrong.
As a result I shut myself off from most books that are fiction, because regardless of what the content is, if I find the style of writing or content too engaging, it will plunge me into abject misery. So much so that sometimes I just can't being myself to do anything else for the day. Knowing myself, I figure that getting away with working on things that are not truly what I believe I exist on this Earth to do, but am already competent enough at this point in my life (programming) is a more productive use of my time if it means I don't catastophize at every turn. So in a sense I'm just locking myself into my current skillset in a vain attempt at self-preservation.
Statements like "just do it" have become dogma to me at this point and I seem to just shut off my mind at amy mention of them. I can't seem to legitimately enjoy doing anything unless I'm being productive and my expectations match up with reality, and you can't realistically expect to achieve this if you haven't already yet put years into a hobby.
Being as good as someone else isn't even what I wanted, it's merely being recognized at all as a somebody who does X. I don't get this recognition from anyone I know, so it feels like there is nothing at all to carry you forward except your shitty art and a vague notion that you'll eventually improve in two years, and it is the most empty feeling imaginable. There are a lot of unique ideas I carry, which none of the artists I know have ever had, but it still takes enough competence to depict those ideas according to a set standard.
Conversely, no one else will be able to do it exactly like you. So figure out what it is about how you do it that's uniquely you and try to develop that.
Even a person with outsize presence in your field, they can't be everywhere at once. So their rates climb and climb and the size of their projects increases to try accomplish more in the time available. They also literally don't have time for people arguing with their vision.
There are a lot of people that could never be their customers, but could easily be yours, and nobody's perfect. Trying to get skilled at things they overlook will make you your own person.
You are not 1 in a billion. You may very well be 1 in 100, though. And that's still pretty incredible. Take, for example the author of this article. She might think that she's not extraordinary because she's not an Einstein, or whatever. However, she works somewhere called "the Quantum Matter Institute" -- that's something that 99% of people probably could not accomplish. So honestly I would be surprised if most people who knew her didn't think that she was extraordinary.
Is it though? There are 7 billion people on the planet, 1/100 is means you're 1 of 70,000,000 people in that group.
It's odd. Being 1/100 in your day to day life means people probably think you're quite smart, but on a global scale it's quite depressing.
What impact has this had on me? It opened a lot of doors for me early on. Ultimately I faced a decision, do I pursue a single thing to its sharpest point, or do I widen my range and create my own category to become sharp in?
There is something deeply rewarding in being a master of one trade. But becoming a jack of all trades offers a different kind of reward which I feel is more sustainable (at least in my case).
I have a deep affinity towards people who have pushed the boundaries in some area of their life, and feel very lucky to have experienced the same.
Which path would I pick? Jack of all.
It seems to me that like you said, dedicating yourself to something can open a lot of doors. More than if you had become above average at multiple things.
To beat a dead analogy, if you're climbing to reach the top 'ledge' you started out looking for, you might not start...or you might climb with such a singular focus that you miss another path that would take you off to the side and up another, higher route.
Edited for formatting.
Strangely, in the middle of these two comments, I was told that people should not take anything from Simon Sinek. Why?
Like this article, he's not the end-all-be-all but certainly worthy of consideration as part of forming a grander perspective in life.
On top of this - I am wary of being singly great at something. Living in Silicon Valley has reinforced this hard. I'm obviously comparing myself (unfairly) to people who are incredibly well compensated, maybe with some bullshit job title, and so forth. I've learned that - usually - those people are fucking terrible at everything else but that one thing they do. (Sometimes I'm not even sure what that one they do good at is - kiss ass?) I'm talking really bad at everything else. They might be an excellent programmer and think up some fancy architecture or whatever - but they don't know how to install an app and follow some directions of their phone without some hand holding. Could they even build a computer from parts? Nah. Change oil in their car? It ain't happening in a million years. COOK!? Sorry - I only order out, my nanny cooks for the family, eat company food, or put pizza rolls in the oven. Take care of my kids and be an inspiring role model?! No - no, sorry, I didn't sign up for that... I had kids because I was bored after my second startup. Children aren't my passion!
Extraordinary usually requires compromise and I'm not one to compromise. I tend to look at things a bit like: I could be first place in one thing or 2nd in everything.
Basic social dancing: I took the classes, but they didn't stick.
Bushcrafting. Haskell. Fixing wiring in a house. Leveling ground. Driving a standard transmission. (I did it once twenty years ago, but presumably I could not do it again without instruction.)
Sharpening knives? I use my kitchen knives every day, but the guy at the farmer's market does a perfect job for practically no money.
Playing bridge: I don't even know why my brain thinks this is a fundamental skill. I don't know anybody who plays bridge. But, irrationally, it feels like one of the more important things separating me from being James Bond.
Ultimately you have to pick a small subset even of the basics, and I have a hard time seeing that big a difference between the realistic approach of learning a few things that are particularly important to you and not learning anything at all outside your profession. Sure, it makes sense to put effort into the things that are important to you. I know plenty about cooking, for example. But I still lack the skills to produce or maintain 97% of the things that are essential for my complicated daily life. Is there a big difference between 99% and 97%? Or even between 97% and 90%?
But now I'm thinking about sewing again. Someday....
Robert A. Heinlein
This is why I'm often envious of successful people, especially in the tech world. They just don't seem to get how privileged they were _from birth_.
Many people search for years for “the one” and an amazing connection, then settle for someone they can tolerate, and it turns out they have a good marriage and children and a lot of shared adventures. Looking back on it... would you say it’s better to have spent decades searching for Mr/Ms Right, or married the one right now you can make a life with?
I've got to have something big in the pipeline in order to feel a purpose in life. Otherwise it is just a bunch of work with no point.
Maybe that's not the point that this article is trying to make. Maybe it's saying to be okay with not having already achieved greatness, or to be okay with the potential of never achieving greatness. Both of these are fine. Or to base your metric of greatness on someone else's who is unequivocally better at that measure than you are. You definitely don't want to do that. But I think it's a mistake to pigeonhole yourself as a person who absolutely cannot achieve greatness. You have to try.
In my experience, a lot of what we perceive as "extraordinary," is actually marketing. Some people are extraordinary self-promoters. It seems that every other person I see on LinkedIn announces that they are a "polymath."
Many of these folks are, in fact, really brilliant/creative/hard-working/whatever, but I have known folks that no one notices, that absolutely blow me away in their products and skills. No one notices them, because they don't stand around with megaphones.
They're too busy being extraordinary.
For me, I'm pretty good at what I do. Am I "extraordinary"? I don't really care. There's always some kid in a Hanoi Internet cafe that can shred my best, so I need to be happy with what I can do.
The one point I appreciate about this article is how it points out that there are physical constraints that come with being extraordinary. With the example of drawing, reaching a higher level of understanding could be possible with more time dedication, though I personally may want to use my time for other purposes.
When I think of extraordinary people i think of names like DaVinci. I'm perfectly happy not being on that level, i would be forever miserable otherwise.
Maybe i lack the intelligence to see my own short comings but at 44 i'm pretty sure I am who I'm going to be. I feel pretty ok about it. I don't have a Porsche GT3 in the garage and my name isn't on/in any books but it turned out not having those things aren't that big of a problem.
To be fair, I'm sure there are more than a few people who feel like this.
Terry Toa almost failed the general exams at Princeton due to slacking off, and it was a valuable lesson for him. I don't care how gifted you are, you won't reach the top without working harder than others.
Or, if you can't win, move the finish line.
This tweet bubbled up this weekend and it touched me: https://twitter.com/ambernoelle/status/1297191195584663554
This word brings about three thoughts...
1. What is beyond ordinary? Who sets the direction? If it's more technical work, more creating, or more money... who sets that as a good or useful direction?
For example, a software developer who is ordinary as a developer but guides their children well could be extraordinary in that aspect. It may not make a list on the Internet but it is extremely valuable to people that (I assume) the software developer cares about.
Who is setting the direction for extraordinary we should care about?
2. Ordinary is normal. If everyone becomes extraordinary that because the new normal. The target is constantly moving.
3. Why does being extraordinary matter? Consider it for a moment. Should the goal to be contentment, happiness, or something else? Who is even setting the goal of being extraordinary anyway? Why would it make your (or my) life a good life?
Being extraordinary is a public label, and with that comes a target on your back.
If your measures of success are internal you can be happy with your achievements as well as maintain some privacy.
Then I realized that even being willing to take those steps is extraordinary -- because it's not that common. Being willing to try and fail is extraordinary. Doing hard work without a guaranteed outcome is extraordinary. Realizing that you've been doing something ineffective and you need to change is extraordinary.
And if you consistently do at least some of those, then one day you may hit those extraordinary results when you least expect it. Even if you don't, you have had extraordinary experiences along the way. That's worth something.
Worst day (well, days) of the year. Even worse this year with the weird situation we're all in.
Anyone can develop the former qualities, bit the latter qualities are more difficult and rare, in the sense that the amount of work required to reach a genius level in any field is tremendous.
Perhaps its the fault of todays startup culture, where everyone is expected to have a breakthrough workaholic temperment.
Also worth reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Man_theory
I don't see the full picture, and looking at the picture wouldn't make me happier anyway.
https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/09/why-generation-y-yuppies-are-...
Being a true jack of all trades can mean you're mediocre at everything, it's better IMO to specialize on certain skills within different fields - ideally ones that synergize.
I wish more companies were ok with just being really good at what they do and focused on that instead of how to get the big pay day and the fuck you money.
Huh? I challenge you to remove from that list of overachievers all the people who had rich, smart, supportive parents. I think you will find it considerably shrunken.
Having an ego is just wasted energy, try to be happy with what you can achieve because you cannot control talent, just hours.
Having a goal that’s only “being better than someone else” is silly unless you are in a formally competitive situation. Doesn’t make much sense as a life goal.
Chose a concrete goal that doesn’t shift arbitrarily on what other people have done.
- Norman Vincent Peale
Being "extraordinary" often means you're just making somebody else richer. There are some objectively extraordinary folks working at e.g. Facebook, but what does that really gain them? What has that given the world? It's a mixed bag, to put it mildly.
Probably the only real reason to strive for being "extraordinary" at your career so that you can stop working for other people, or if the craft itself brings you more joy than anything else in life.
Reproduced here, as it's just as relevant, or moreso, today:
I fear that what you're feeling is a dark side of the net's otherwise positive aspects. (It's not just HN.)
The net lets us see all the great output from the most talented writers, thinkers, doers of their fields -- including people who we could imagine to be our peer group. But what we see is not an accurate sample -- it's dominated by the most remarkable, outliers by both skill and luck. (That is, there's massive survivorship bias; see Taleb's Fooled by Randomness.) Still, if we choose to look, it's in our face every hour of every day, in our news feeds, our Twitter streams, our Facebook statuses.
(Compare also: the quality of social networks whereby for almost everyone, your friends will have more friends than you [1]; the Matthew Effect, whereby small changes in initial endowment of power/fame/success can compound [2]; and how viewing top athletes can actually decrease someone's coordination in following challenges [3].)
In the plant and insect world, sometimes as one organism thrives, it sends off chemical signals that suppress the growth of its siblings/peers/neighbors, in an effect called allelopathy.
Information about others' great works and successes, transmitted by the net, may sometimes serve as a sort of memetic negative allelopathy. The message is: this territory is taken; you can't reach the sunshine here; try another place/strategy (or even just wither so your distant relatives can thrive). This can be be the subtext even if that's not the conscious intent of those relaying the information. Indeed, the reports may be intended as motivational, and sometimes be, while at other times being discouraging.
What to do? Not yet certain, but awareness that this mechanism is in play may help. You can recognize that what you're reading is not representative, and that comparing yourself against prominent outliers -- or even worse, vague composites of outliers who are each the best in one dimension -- is unrealistic and mentally unhealthy.
Actual progress for yourself may require detaching from the firehose a bit, picking a narrower focus. (HN's eclectic topic matter can be inherently defocusing.)
And remind yourself that despite various reptilian-hindbrain impulses, most interesting creative activity today is far from zero-sum. The outliers can win, and you can win too (even if you don't achieve outlier-sized success). Their success can expand your options, and they may wind up being your collaborators (formally or informally by simply participating in a mutual superstructure) moreso than your 'competitors'.
[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-scientific-funda...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect
[3] Can't find the reference at the moment, but the study I recall showed people video of a top soccer player, and subsequently they performed worse on tasks requiring physical coordination.
I’ll settle for being considered more than just a mental defective just because I work at Amazon.
Conversely, even the greatest minds of today (Hawking, Einstein, etc) will be below high-school kids of the future.
"evolution" means "adaptation". It does not mean "progress".
A doctor of the 18th century would bleed their patients to balance humours, but would, at least, not shove an icepick into their frontal lobe as a form of exorcism. A doctor of the early 20th century wouldn't do the former, but might well do the latter.
Which is not to say that progress doesn't exist, only that it's a fraught concept, with many caveats, regressions, and no firm ground to judge its status at any given point. You will have a more productive engagement with history, and with the ancients, if you consider them as your equals, just situated differently in time and place.
We're standing on the shoulders of giants, that's for sure. We begin our adult lives with knowledge they could have only dreamed about.
But I really don't see anything to suggest our brightest minds are brighter than the brightest minds of those times.
On average, at least, I think we outshine the average human from 2000 years ago, just thanks to more common childhood education and better nutrition...