When teaching mathematics I like to always mention that the greats like Ramanujan, while it seems like they just knew everything from pure thought, they all actually did a ton of work by hand. Ramanujan in particular is known for his fastidious notebooks calculating thousands of digits numbers like pi. From writing out the calculations for hours and days, he'd come up with simplification formulas and develop new insights. These days, we have a tendency to just look at the formula and go "wow, how the heck did the think of that?" Well, what we would call "busy work".
Do the busy work. Do the calculations. Write it all out. Nobody is better than the busy work: it pays off and it's how you learn.
Agreed 1000%! I think ‘do the busy work’ can even be applied more broadly:
Years ago I ran a small business in my mid-20s, and one of the critical mistakes I made was getting hopelessly behind in our bookkeeping (and by hopelessly behind I mean it - things were going well and the bank account kept going up, so I kinda just piled the sales receipts on top of each other for close to a year).
When the company started to grow up, we had to get properly reconciled financial statements in order for our bank loans to be renewed. I hired what felt like an endless stream of contract bookkeepers and financial consultants who all had their own way of “doing it more simply” to try and avoid what at that point was probably 100 hours of busywork to reconcile all the credit card transactions.
They all failed. We just kept falling more and more behind and lost resolution on how the business was doing.
In the end, the ONLY thing that worked was when I found someone who understood this and just rolled his sleeves up and did the work. There simply was no way around it. No shortcuts. No way to intuit how your business was doing without knowing exactly how much each customer spent. And no way to do that without matching up each credit card transaction.
Do the work. Don’t try to find ways around doing it because it’s hard or rote or mind numbing. Do the work.
This. And it's often not even that much work after all, given the amount of energy that went into procrastination and finding easier solutions. I've know this professionally for a long time now, but only recently "found out" that this applies to my personal/family bookkeeping process too. I've always been looking for easy automated solutions for importing and categorising my transactions until I read an article here on hn about bookkeeping with gnucash. I now enter all transactions by hand, for a few months now, and it has given me more control and insight than ever before.
Quick plug for ledger-cli (and hledger, and beancount). It is a command line tool for double entry bookkeeping in plain text files. All your transactions get recorded in a human readable file, and then you can run pretty complex queries over it. I currently have an envelope budget system set up in it, and even track my mortgage, including compounding the interest.
That's great! By the way, on a similar vein - I finally ditched QuickBooks / Quicken / all that crap and moved everything personally & for my consulting company over to hledger (which is just a slightly fancy version of ledger).
Turns out, everything I hated about QuickBooks for all these years centered around its inability to bulk-edit transactions or categorize/recategorize things en masse, leading to countless hours wasted clicking or, worse, those bulk journal entires to move things from one place to another (which forces you to follow a breadcrumb path of asset movements, which is a nightmare).
But when everything is just a list of things in a text file, you get the power of every great text editor on earth (vi, emacs, or whatever) and can make mass changes trivially. Life's much much much much better this way.
However the kind of work you’re discussing doesn’t match my understanding of “busywork”. Busywork means unnecessary work done to give the appearance of actual work. Busywork doesn’t produce much value beyond appearances.
The work you’re discussing is “the work”. It’s the underpinnings, the research, the practice, the artist’s sketchbook, the exploration, the learning. None of that is “busywork”. If anything, it’s the opposite. Much of it will look like busywork (i.e. bringing little value), yet actually producing the highest value in the long run.
When I think busywork, I think work given to me to occupy my time by someone (probably a teacher or a manager) that has no actual use other than timewasting. Theres this thread of being an externally administered task to my understanding of the word which helps me distinguish the two - im curious if similar connotations exist for others
> When I think busywork, I think work given to me to occupy my time by someone (probably a teacher or a manager) that has no actual use other than timewasting.
That is one source. The time wasting can have several (non-exclusive) motivations, however:
* Punishment
* Important but not urgent work
* Creating the appearance of insufficient resources to prevent allocation of labor elsewhere
That last motivation also applies to self-assigning busywork, of course.
Absolutely this! Another way I express this to my colleagues is to consider that Einstein (and others) took fifteen years to develop the relativity theories that did not require any new theoretical or experimental input. All of that is typically taught in a semester's graduate level course today.
The "genius" perception hides all the hard work, false turns, recoveries, retries, .. busy work as you put it .. that's behind the core insights and discoveries.
> Einstein (and others) took fifteen years to develop the relativity theories that did not require any new theoretical or experimental input.
Further to that, when Einstein worked in the patent office, it's likely that applications related to railroad time synchronization crossed his desk, inspiring his work on relativity.
Hardly. Special relativity was a collaborative effort that was underway before Einstein gave his contribution. It was general relativity which was 100% Einstein's idea.
To improve, busy work is not enough - some kind of quality control is needed to provide feedback, like mentioned in the "Share your Work" paragraph.
I have been playing guitar for 28 years and barely improved in the past 15 years - after a teenage burst of disciplined, daily drills with metronome and recording a lot of music, I still regularly doodle and learn new songs, but it is just not enough to give me escape velocity from the current plateau.
As for guitar playing plateaus, I highly recommend embracing alternate tunings as a shortcut / forcing function for adopting "beginner's mind", re-engaging your ear and your curiosity, and discovering new peaks to ascend.
A few of my favorites:
- DADGAD (Black Mountain Side)
- DADF#AD (Little Martha)
- DGDGBE (Open G6)
- CACGCE (Bron Yr Aur)
- CGCGCD (Rain Song)
I've used EBEEBE before and it's a gorgeous tuning, using for the song 'Gold' from the film/musical Once. Also the variation EADGBF# is super interesting with open cords, though you do have to be very careful with tuning the top E string that high, easy to snap if you're not careful.
Thanks!! Looking fwd to playing w this one for the 1st time tonight! :)
I remember that film; Glen Hansard's absurdly beat-up guitar (with effectively a second, larger soundhole) even featured in Fretboard Journal. "Falling Slowly" is the song that got all the attention (which IMHO it deserved; gorgeous song and harmonies) but I'll go dig up "Gold" and give it a listen... thanks again! :)
Need an accountability partner? I know how it is. While I'm not looking for improving my guitar skills, if you need a strict drill sergeant (that doesn't shout :P), I'm available and for free.
Newton was just incredible. The man polished his own lenses for his experiments. This, although there were already professional lens makers in England at the time, and they were better than him. Today, these antics would be dismissed as "bad practice", "reinventing the wheel", "losing two weeks rewriting a stupid lens" or some other corporate bullshit. But his great insights on the nature of light came from the very act of polishing a glass, using finer and finer sand until it becomes transparent when the grain of the sand is half the wavelength of the light.
> it becomes transparent when the grain of the sand is half the wavelength of the light
That seemed to have intriguing potential as an educational story.
But it felt odd. Briefly googling suggests optical polishing compound grains are almost all 1+ um.[1] But maybe that <1 um tail is key? This[2] shows larger grains, with a tail growing over hours. But lens roughness is already at ~1 nm without the tail, and the growing tail only slightly improves that. On the other hand, perhaps sub-um fragments from the hydrated damaged surface are being entrained by the lap pitch or wax or slurry? Don't know. But it seems a half-lambda grain-size story has difficulties.
Oh well. :) Thank you for this. I wish I could find an online community interested in crafting improved stories for teaching science and engineering. My in-person ones... covided. :/
Sorry, I don't recall the specific details of glass polishing in this story; probably the datum I said does not make sense.
You can find this inspiring story, and many, many others, on Feynman lectures on physics. I'm sure the stories as written by Feynman will be exact and true.
He was the ultimate "do it for somethings own sake" type of guy. He had a ton of curiosity, and just spent most of his life indulging it to the fullest. I mean, we in the modern world are so boxed in with our notions of right and wrong (most of which come from "authority"), newton wasn't like that, the man was equally comfortable studying about the bible, alchemy, as we was studying the natural world, building telescopes and as you said polishing his own lenses.
Newton was the pinnacle of this kind of personality, but frankly this was the common mindset until the 19th century. Science was not a profession, people who did it were on their own dime and their work was basically an expensive hobby. Things change a lot when you have to "publish or perish".
It's the same thing as today, you learn best when you implement systems yourself. For example, I didn't learn web animations until I built my own (internal) library to do it well rather than relying on a third party one.
I would also say that this applies more broadly - that busy work is required in all parts of one's life. Deconstruct everything. Accept nothing. You will still learn, but you will recognise the assumptions and beliefs that you hold, and having recognised them you will also test for their truth.
I see 'busy work' as the root to a more valid personal epistemology; one that is based on personal use of the scientific method.
I'm reasonably sure that it was a pottery class (or study) in which students/study participants were asked to produce either the best piece they could think of or as many as possible. I think it was actually a study that I read about.
It might need some internet sleuthing to find it. I'll try later.
I do not think that it is surprising that practice improves skills though (well, except for people with an exceptionally fixed mindset ;).
> On the first day of the class, the ceramics teacher divided the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the class, he announced, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.
> The works of highest quality, the most beautiful and creative designs, were all produced by the group graded for quantity.
It's an anecdote which could be completely fabricated, I'd expect it is since the source seems to be a book where it is mentioned as story with no names.
If anyone has some kind of study or more concrete example, I'd love to hear about it.
It should be obvious to most people that it's trivially true that practice helps you improve skills that require manual dexterity.
I also think it's highly likely the anecdote is supposed to be illustrative rather than literal. IMO it's meant to be advice to students not to fret about how perfect their work is and that with time it will improve. It's just been distorted by the "one quick hack" culture of self improvement.
I’ve heard this story lots of different ways and assumed it was a fictional allegory. If it’s true, I can’t help imagining some poor student in the “quality” group at the end of the class, after the big reveal, looking down at their inferior ceramic bowl and going, “well, that was a waste of time,” and then maybe there's a sad moment later where they give up their dreams of becoming a ceramicist.
Rather the whole point here is that when learning it's better to focus on quantity over quality AND by doing so that quality will naturally be better. The parent is looking for examples of this latter idea.
I'm mostly interested in the source of the story, it sounds completely fabricated and if it is true, it should be very easy to replicate.
But let's take the idea to the extreme, imagine we are building an system, one team starts building and improving on the design for 6 months. Other team builds and starts anew every 2 weeks. Who would have a better system at the end of 6 months? Tough to tell, the iterative one will probably build it from the ground in a better way with less technical debt but who will have a more complete system or more features.
I don't think it's important for the message if the story is true or made up. It's overthinking things to an extreme.
I also think it's being misapplied when put into a completely different context. Teamwork, not students learning, project that is harder to start again and slower to iterate that way etc. I'm not sure we should consider every piece of advice as being some how completely universal.
We could also overthink it in the other direction. The students themselves could have come to the conclusion that the best way to get quality was lots of practice and made lots of pots or parts of pots until they had perfected pot making and merely presented the final result. Whereas the students that went for quantity merely made a load of crap pots. Same lesson but roles reversed.
Starting simple versus starting complex is different than making the same kind of thing repeatedly to refine the act of making it and the end quality.
Iterating on a project is definitely a great way to learn about it, refine how you make it and accrete complexity. So it can but doesn't necessarily have to encompass both ideas.
I also think that whilst it's tempting to stretch the anecdote to fit all sorts of ideas it's particularly unhelpful when trying to discuss the idea it actually references.
But if you threw away all the code after each version, I doubt you'd get much done. Sure the code might be perfect, but you can do only so much in a short timeframe.
Perhaps it would be best to iterate fast early on in the project, throw away a couple of weeks with PoCs and then go for the big one.
I get your point, but wasn't Linux the simple solution that got improved over time vs GNU Hurd which tried to implement the perfect micro-kernel architecture?
Some thought experiments tell you a useful answer.
But this thought experiment doesn't tell you what works, as either outcome is quite compelling and plausible. So it's not much use as a thought experiment, other than to show that it might be interesting to study it in the real world.
I.e. it might be "obvious" to you that focus on quantity over quality leads to better quality as assessed by another in the thought experiment. But it might be equally "obvious" to someone else the other way.
A real study would be interesting, because there might be a real world consistent pattern. It might actually be useful to know which one works best for real.
But we can reason theoretically about what could be the outcome of the thought experiment, and if that is compelling enough, that I think is sufficient insight, that carrying out a real experiment wouldn't give any additional knowledge.
Also since this human behaviour we talking about here. Experimental Psychology is a field known for its credibility crisis, its inconsistent and possible non-reproduceable results, that I have not much faith in it to give us useful insights, and I would be more interested in hearing many of those matters addressed from a purely theoretic point of view, than through conclusions from dubious experimental data.
In this case, when I do the thought experiment, my mind runs both possibilities and concludes they are both plausible and compelling.
When I do the thought meta-experiment of imagining other people doing the thought experiment, it sees some people imagining one outcome is compelling and likely, and other people imagining the other outcome is compelling and likely.
I'm not sure what useful theoretical point of view you would draw from that, with regard to this particular experiment.
A study or concrete example is necessary to know whether it is truth or a just-so fantasy. I don't think thinking about it is enough; even though we know people improve with the right kind of practice, if you're judged purely by quantity, there is no guarantee of improvement.
I have never seen a reliable source for this anecdote. I strongly believe it's fictional. Most of the sources either don't cite anything, or go back to Art and Fear, and the presentation there doesn't say anything about where this happened.
Of course, the idea that you need practice to be good at things is obvious. But first, that's not quite the claim in the anecdote, which is about being told to aim for high quality. In any case, the vivid anecdote would be better off if people were clear that it's a hypothetical.
I found this "study" mentioned in the slides of a university course and contacted the lecturer to find out if they have a source for that. I will reply to my top comment if I get an answer. You might want to check in a few days.
> I'm reasonably sure that it was a pottery class (or study) in which students/study participants were asked to produce either the best piece they could think of or as many as possible. I think it was actually a study that I read about.
> It might need some internet sleuthing to find it. I'll try later.
The earliest reference I am aware of is the 1985 book "Art and Fear", at the beginning of the section on perfection:
The book doesn't have footnotes or a bibliography, unfortunately.
I think people take away only part of the lesson from this anecdote, and miss the implication that, since getting an "A" was trivial for the "grade by quantity" group, students were not just encouraged to practice, but were also free to experiment without fear of failure (after all, they could easily make up any shortfall by firing a few unworked lumps of clay to get to 50 lbs).
But I wish we had data on the number of students, distribution of grades, number of pieces each student made, etc. because it should be obvious that we can't extrapolate too much from the fact that some data points on the "high quality" end of the distribution were all from one group. The three best? Ten best? The best half? What was the size of the class anyway? Did anyone try to game the system by just firing 50 one-pound lumps?
In some sense, this is a bit like evaluating software based on SLOC, and we all know how that ends up.
It should also be obvious that none of the students had any particular incentive to explore the "delicate" end of the possible artistic design space, although at least the "quantity" group wasn't penalized for doing so. So, if no students cottoned on to the "50 1-pound lumps" hack, I would expect to see coffee mugs rather than teacups in their work.
UPDATE: the lecturer responded and as it turns out, they were also referring to the story from the book Art & Fear by Bayles and Orland.
Searching Google Scholar for older publications on the topic of quantity vs. quality did not turn up anything useful either. Looks like we are out of luck here.
I believe the ceramics bit is fabricated, and it was actually a photography class. But it hardly matters. It's an interesting perspective, details aside.
If you learn classical methods of drawing techniques you often do poses in different time frames - 1 minutes, then 2 minute, then 5 and 15 minute poses.
The shorter poses don't let you put in any detail but you learn how to quickly express gesture and delineate important masses and shadow.
For 5 minutes poses you're essentially practicing the first 5 minutes of a drawing intentionally without intending to finish it.
Adam Smith observed something similar. In his case it was about nail manufacturing or something, but he noted that the boys who made a thousand nails per day were not only more efficient than an unrelated craftsman who might try it, but also their quality was likely higher.
There's various versions of this anecdote/experiment. There was also a photography class experiment that has made the rounds: https://jamesclear.com/repetitions
The analogy of being graded on quantity in an art class tends to make me imagine I'd just line up a ton of canvases and slop paint on them all at once to be the top of the class, or create pots in only their crudest acceptable form.
That is, quantity does not lead to quality by itself. The student must be trying to learn something new with each new piece. Quantity iterates the feedback loop. The student still must be able to identify mistakes or areas where improvement is needed. Doing that means paying attention to quality.
So it's not really about ignoring quantity or quality for the sake of the other, but finding a good balance.
As a creative person (UX designer, cartoonist, painter), I have experienced this throughout my life, especially in drawing. As a kid I drew constantly, in school, at home, everywhere. All through my life I drew and drew. If quantity was all it took, I would be a master. But I am not. I still can't draw bodies and poses and Im not consistent at all.
Quantity gets you to learn quickly to a point where you platou. I've seen this in my painting, games, and even work.
You need to pause and start thinking about what you are doing, what each part means, how it works together, coming up with what you are doing wrong, what is right, and practice that. You still need to put in more work but its a dance of pause, think, do, repeat.
I would rephrase the last part of it as "Only mindful practice makes perfect." Sure, it makes the quote less catchy, but imo it makes it more accurate.
I observed it myself with a lot of things, esp. when it comes to learning an instrument over the course of almost 2 decades (piano specifically, in my scenario). Sure, you can pick a few notesheets and keep practicing the entirety of them from start to finish at full speed over and over. However, the process will be extremely non-efficient and will make you take much longer to learn the song, and it won't make you take away as many lessons from it that are unrelated to that song specifically (i.e., those "unrelated" things that make you a better piano player overall).
Instead, you need to be mindful of what specifically goes wrong, what goes right, and target practice those problem points specifically. Let's say you have a few bars with a syncopated rhythm in a song you are learning, and you are struggling with that section specifically, you nailed the entirety of the song otherwise. Instead of just keeping playing that entire song over and over, you should practice just those few syncopated bars by themselves at a very very slow pace with a metronome. It will feel very awkward at first and give you a feeling that you aren't progressing much. Then you start incorporating that small problematic section into the entirety of the song. Then you speed up the tempo on that specific section and practice it at that tempo over and over. If the problem is in your left hand, you practice the left hand by itself first, then graduate to both hands. Then you try to incorporate it at a higher tempo into the rest of the song.
The whole process of that sounds very tedious and painful, but mostly because it actually is. However, it will lead to much better results. Not only you will learn this specific piece much quicker using such a methodical approach, you will perform it much better and way more consistently at the end. You end up dissecting that problematic point so much, whenever you see syncopated bars in the future in completely different music pieces, you will have much less problem with them. Which will allow you to spend more time improving other aspects of your play or learn other techniques. All of that learned knowledge ends up snowballing and compounding so much, over the course of a few years you end up massively outperforming someone who just blindly kept practicing pieces over and over from start to finish until they got them right.
I think that’s a nice take and I think it applies very well with piano. I am not the GP but I think perfect practice is more of an umbrella term. I think sometimes the perfect practice session would be a mindful practice other times or in other situations (besides piano) it may not be. I think perfect practice is probably easily tied with perfectionism. Perfectionism does not have a good connotation, because it usually means one is either too self-inflated or too self-defeating. When I think of perfect though I think of the right thing in the right situation. It acts almost like a liquid it fills the very shape it needs to be in for it’s helpful use case. I may be arguing with loaded terms though that’s the problem with words they can be conflated and misinterpreted, and sometimes their connotations change from what some might say is a more pure/exact definition.
Thanks for your reply. I fully agree with you about non-existence of a "perfect" practice, but in general, not just in cases outside of piano.
I don't believe there is such a thing in real life as "perfect" piano practice either. Everyone has different needs in different areas of piano that they would need different approaches to overcome. That original post of mine just described a basic core idea that should be a solid guideline for getting more efficient at it, but without specific details and choices each one would make. If this was all there is to it, then piano instructors would be obsolete, and they are far from. Even top tier pianists occasionally take lessons from others.
Compared to other skill-learning experiences that require practice that I had, I don't think piano is in its own separate category, it is very similar to pretty much everything else. I simply picked it because piano makes it easier to illustrate that principle to the general audience. Same thing can be said about sports, visual arts, etc., anything that requires work through repetition, heavy knowledge/experience, and is heavily-reliable on manual execution with a very high (nearly infinite) skill-ceiling (i.e., not something like writing software where knowledge is about 95% of the work, execution is about 5%, since execution is literally just typing and knowing your IDE shortcuts, both of which have a fairly low skill ceiling).
I’ve heard a similar quote and I think I read it while I was playing Call Of Duty Modern Warfare about ten years ago, and for some reason it has stuck with me for all this time (probably because I see it as Truth.) I’m somewhat paraphrasing but it goes:
“A novice practices until he gets it right. A professional practices until he can’t get it wrong.”
It reminded me, at the time, of the great drummer Neil Peart who has since passed away. I saw a video of him practicing and possibly performing doing a solo and as he was doing a fill down the drums I barely noticed he had broken a stick in the middle of his drum fill and replaced the stick with a missing one. I was so in awe I had to rewatch that part. To him even something as rare as breaking a stick was prepared for and second nature for him to react to. It just amazed me the practice he had had to make that possible. They call this man the human metronome for a reason he would almost quite literally never miss a beat.
Reminds me of a line attributed to Bruce Lee:
"I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times."
You can see this difference in the the films produced by him and his studio versus the american-produced ones. Every Frame a Painting has a good video on this. [0]
Typically for films the shooting portion takes only a few weeks to finish, so lots of retakes = money lost. Jackie Chan does a lot of random flourishes in his films that end up with him needing a lot of takes. For example, how he scales fences. [1]
The way he scales the castle wall in Wheels on Meals (1984) is probably my favorite example.
That’s a big driver for process maturity. Mature organizations are constantly iterating their process, not just their product.
The obvious issue here, is that the process becomes so important, that people forget about the output; which is really the only thing that customers care about.
High quantity being "better" than low quantity is a wrong way of framing the problem. A more practical framing would be – avoid boredom, stay in flow and be fascinated with the work you do, review your work constantly and look for improvements.
It's the same with software I imagine, because of several reasons.
1. Writing more code (and being conscious of it) makes you a better engineer. You'll run into more issues that you will fix and, hopefully, remember.
2. If you'd take the art example and say "Paint 20 cubist pieces", and then transfer that to "Write 20 authentication servers", each iteration you'll benefit from what you learned and be able to 'clean up' the code. It's essentially writing 20 PoCs where each PoC improves on the last one.
EDIT: Writing more versions also allows you to explore more ideas without fear. If you have to write "one good version" you'll be less prone to exploring 'exotic' ideas. So you'd benefit from that as well.
One software concept where it's applicable is game programming. Lots of people have their dream/pet project they spend years on tweaking and making all these features for, but the underlying game mechanic just isn't... fun enough, I guess? But making lots of small games (at game jams or so) one can discover great concepts, and then nail those.
I’ve worked in the games industry and this is pretty much my advice for people who are interested in it: Just make as many games as you can.
Don’t get hung up on some big new MMORPG game you’ve got in your head. Just start by making Pong, then Space Invaders, then Pac-Man. Then make a dozen small prototypes of your own ideas, each time based on what you’ve learned.
You get practical development experience but more importantly, you learn that iterating and experimenting is where good ideas come from and where bad ideas are discarded.
Ad1. In my opinion it's the variety of problems an engineer has solved that matters. There are plenty of crud developers that are helpless whenever a more complex problem occurs, even though they did hundreds of crud pages in their life.
This applies only if they’re learning. Learning devs who do 100s of CRUD pages will have a DSL and metaprogramming toolkit by the time they’re done. Those who don’t learn will do the same thing, like an artist making 100 copies of their own first painting, each copy more faithful than the last. Better to make a 100 versions of the same subject, each one better than the last.
I realize this is a silly criticism, but it's strange that the author would write about how it's valuable to make a lot of stuff but then to only write 11 sentences about the topic. It seems like it would be much better way to demonstrate the point if the author wrote 100 pages about producing more work/art/code, without any rhyme or reason or editing. After all, the thesis is "Quantity leads to quality", why not just do that?
Of course, I appreciate concise writing and if it were 100 unedited rambling pages it would never be posted on HN or read by anyone. But admitting that seems to be antithetical to the entire point of the blogpost. It just seems like the article doesn't even believe in the idea. It also feels like there wasn't a whole lot of thought put into the post, and I guess that's evidenced by the fact that the art class anecdote doesn't have a source.
The blogpost also ignores all of the issues related to being prolific. Imagine a would-be-weightlifter who has awful form, but does a ton of reps. Not only is their exercise near worthless, it could be potentially dangerous. Or in music, where you could accidentally continually practice a bad habit instead of taking the time to find a mentor and learn how to practice correctly. In software, you could potentially produce something that is buggy and insecure by default. If the code were then included as a dependency in larger projects it could be a cause for a security disaster. I think there's more to high-quality work/practice than just doing it more often, even if that ends up being the most important part of getting good at something.
There's a big difference between quantity in each completed piece of work and quantity of pieces of completed work. I think his theory favours the latter by far. Instead of increase quantity by writing bigger articles, write lots of articles.
I do agree with your latter points about bad practise. I think this works best for forms of output where bad work has relatively little downside for the individual. It's harder to get bad habits that dampen your growth in things like writing, art etc and so this system works great for those types of activity. Maybe a good way to think about it is that you need a base level of skill to then improve. In writing most folk will have the base skills from school (spelling, grammar etc), whereas in software you first need to learn the basics (syntax, high level incepts like classes and functions, debugging etc) and then this theory will work for you.
When you realize it's silly, take another minute to think about why it's silly.
The author's point is about developing a skill, not about creating a specific piece of work.
Even if it were about creating a specific item, there may be 100 pages that the author wrote but didn't publish. The point wasn't to share all of one's work, but to do a substantial amount of work and also to share work that can garner good feedback.
Being prolific isn't the same thing as doing a lot of repetitions. "Prolific" refers to a quantity of creative works. The weightlifting and musician examples aren't apt, any more than saying "don't be a prolific author because there's a high risk you'll slouch in your computer chair when you're doing all that writing." Ergonomics are orthogonal to exercising one's creativity.
"Practice doesn't make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect."
But we're probably splitting hairs that a reasonable person would understand don't need splitting by looking at the whole piece, which can be boiled down to: "Make lots and seek feedback more."
I think the subtle point is as long as it’s safe, practicing a lot will make you better than being a beginner trying to be an expert.
In the blog analogy he could write 100k words and throw them away. They were for getting good. Then write 200 words for a blog post that gets published. Don’t publish the first 100k.
Or poker for example, play 100k hands at tiny stakes before moving up to higher stakes.
The weightlifter example is a good point. Some disciplines need education in addition to just practicing.
Maybe the author, rather than writing 1 good article describing it, is planning on writing several articles on the same topic in the hopes of getting better at writing about it over time?
What's the point of these posts? It's an opinion based on nothing else than a hypothetical anecdote. Is it motivational posts for HN readers--is this what "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" these days?
It feeds the hustle mindset getting you all pumped up so you can be prolific by writing about it, saving it to your bookmarks, sharing to your social media, and assuring yourself that you, too, can be prolific. You're not a total failure! It's a great feeling.
It could also be some sort of operation where artificially generated content and comments are put out to try to train an AI further or try to probe reactionary sentiment over specific key issues.
But that's as much intellectual gratification I'll self-administer momentarily.
A friend of mine is a sculptor. He once said something to me along the lines of "if you want to make the perfect sculpture, don't try to make the perfect sculpture. Instead make lots of sculptures, until you make the perfect sculpture." - which I tend to agree with.
His advice had more to do with enjoying the process instead of stressing about the end goal, which I quite liked.
In the context of software, I think that being prolific is certainly key, but it also helps to study the masters. I've learnt some pretty cool lessons reading the source code of popular OSS applications for example.
When a junior colleague tells me a paper has been rejected, I respond that it's good they're getting the rejections out of the way so they can get to the publications. I'm sure they think I'm an idiot, but I'm completely serious. You can't learn what it takes to get a good publication until you've had some rejections. It's all part of the learning process.
I think that's the real message here. Be prolific in activities that can teach you something useful. Just pumping out a load of garbage won't help you any more than practicing bad shooting form will make you a good basketball player.
Nobody has ever just suddenly become good at something with 0 practice. Usually, there's a strong correlation between time spent on something and expertise.
If the discussion is about quality vs. quantity, then this is a strawman. You can make a 100 shallow todo list apps, and they'll all be worse than one you focus on and polish over time. That story about the art class is most likely not true and most likely not applicable to other examples. But maybe part of that polish is experimenting with smaller prototypes.
The point is to always use advice like this as a principle and not a singular source of truth.
It's funny this should some up, as I'm about 3/4ths through Inktober. The idea is that you make an art piece (traditionally an ink illustration but I've been using water color and the community is surprisingly not super gate-keeping about it) everyday and share it on social media. There's a prompt list the guy who made the idea popular puts out each year that's optional.
I've painted more this month than I have the rest of my life combined and I've learned so much.
Also self-promotion say what? instagram.com/amtunlimited
Maybe the thing I would add is that you need to have reached a level of competence where you can critique your own work.
It's hard to describe it, but in many areas you will find there's a level where you know where you're going wrong, or where you need external help, and generally whether you are on the right path.
Before you reach that level you will just fumble around forever. I'm pretty sure I could play a lot of silly piano tunes without getting anywhere, since I have no experience at all in that field.
There truly is an unfathomable amount of things you can do wrong and you literally could spend your entire life trying something and still suck. It wasn’t until I understood the basics well enough that I could meaningful make progress towards getting better (at cooking but also coding) or even understand what getting better meant.
Trying to get better at something by just doing it a lot is like brute forcing RSA encryption: talent, intuition, or inspiration about how to get better acts as a quantum computer speed up.
Or to put it more plainly: practice only makes perfect if you know what perfect is.
The definition of "creating more" is the elephant in the room. Do you stay focused on one subject, iterating multiple times over the result, in order to achieve incremental improvements? Do you explore a wide breadth of problems, giving you new perspectives on thinking about the problem at hand? Do you churn out mindless crap just for the sake of it?
It's a rather fuzzy and abstract philosophical notion and any attempts for an absolute framing of "the one single truth" are flawed.
I can accept those terms and must be as flawed as anybody else.
>Do you stay focused on one subject, iterating multiple times over the result, in order to achieve incremental improvements?
Yes.
>Do you explore a wide breadth of problems, giving you new perspectives on thinking about the problem at hand?
Yes.
>Do you churn out mindless crap just for the sake of it?
No.
I just like to churn out mindless crap when it's absolutely required.
This is what takes up most of many people's time.
You're going to have to churn out some mindless crap anyway, so when you do things for the sake of it try your very best to make it non-mindless for a change.
Sometimes the mindless, or the crap, or the stuff for the sake of it can be the glue that binds all efforts in a way that they are always moving forward together though.
There’s a story about an art teacher that split their class
in half. They told one half of the students that they’d be
graded based on a single piece of work, and the other half
that they would be graded on the quantity of work produced.
Does anyone know of an actual event where this happened, or is it apocryphal?
(I don't disagree with the premise, I'm just curious about its basis)
There are a lot of ways to put it, like "no success without failures". He's making the additional point that it's hard to know if you have failed unless you shared your work. I needed to hear it again also.
The down side is your peer community then has to sift through an enormous amount of mediocrity...this idea of quantity leading to quality is beneficial for the creator's development, but as seen say in electronic music today. There is a proliferation of mediocre music in such abundance no one would ever be able to listen to it all. Sure it'll lead to eventual gems as skills increase but will we ever find them in the mountainous waves of creation being churned out in increasing amounts? As far as coding should developers produce more and more code for the public as a learning tool for themselves or wait and develop adequate skills that don't require extra work to fix later?
As a developer there's no penalty to publishing bad code that you wrote to learn something. As you said yourself, mediocrity is largely ignored. You also can't be your own judge in deciding if your work is progressing from mediocre to good, so don't wait to publish until you know your work is "adequate" because you won't know it's adequate until it's been published and judged by the community.
The iteration definitely helps me to be a better engineer. Also, pretty much every day, I start off with an issue ahead of me that I’m afraid of, and am not sure how to solve.
When presented with this kind of “simple advice”, I always like to think the counter examples.
Quantity is great, unless you are trying to change a paradigm. Iterative learning gets you trapped in local minima, so be sure to aim for quality once in a while.
I would also not take that “experiment” that seriously, because the requirements where obviously different, each class optimized as needed. “Quality” is an abstract concept, and most of the time you are better of saving the time than spending it on “Quality”.
Anecdotal: I’ve been helping people a bit recently on the free code camp forum and I believe in quantity. The more I help the more I learn. Half the time I learn why someone gets stuck, the other half I’m actually wrong and I learn where I got stuck!
Writing is a great example of this. It's almost impossible to create a perfect piece of writing on the first attempt; there's always room for improvement. Although, you can publish your first draft and may get the job done, following an iterative process of writing and revising multiple drafts that leads to more polished results.
Meanwhile in academy everyone is complaining on the pressure to publish fast on expense of quality.... Maybe this judging on quantity isn't totally bad?
I don't see that it really applies in this way. No-one is suggesting that scientists change the amount of time and effort they spend immersed in their research.
If the system of incentives is preventing researchers from promising-but-still-risky lines of research, that's still a problem.
If it's steering researchers away from meaningful research that won't produce anything publishable for a while, in favour of uninteresting variations on a common theme that reliably result in publications, that's still a problem too.
It also incentivises salami slicing, [0] which may result in scientific busywork.
Do the busy work. Do the calculations. Write it all out. Nobody is better than the busy work: it pays off and it's how you learn.