from Hacker News

Everything Is a Practice

by gtzi on 4/4/23, 9:20 AM with 78 comments

• by dswalter on 4/6/23, 3:20 PM

  Something about not being young anymore is that I am much more comfortable leveraging small changes consistently over time. When I was 16, the idea of doing a little bit of practicing vocal exercises each day in order to improve over time would have seemed an insurmountable challenge. I needed things to improve over the course of days or hours. (In this, I was terribly short-sighted).

  But now that I'm considerably older than that, I can mentally afford to allocate a little bit of time over the next six months toward achieving a goal like improving my typing, or getting better at vocal onsets. Being better at something a year or two from now feels very worthwhile, and I know I'll be at that future me fairly quickly.

  It would have been better for me, of course, to have gained this ability back when I had lots of time at my disposal. But I can still have an impact because I can be the drop of water shaping the stone over time.

• by bogrollben on 4/6/23, 5:46 PM

  I'm at the point where I feel fed up with too much talk about self-improvement. It's ok to not be productive and just enjoy things. Enjoy relationships, the sunshine, even video games or something that is literally a waste of time.

  Maybe I got burned out by goal-setting and productivity talk. It also might be some remnants of some mild depression I had lately. I guess I just don't like feeling pressured to constantly improve, otherwise I'm not "living 100%" like I should be.

  So when I read things like this, it grates my nerves: >> "In this process though you will become a better human being. You will get better at living. You will have less pain down the road. Your path will be smoother."

  It suggests the inverse: that if you're not improving, you're less of a human being. I'm not sure if the author meant it that way, but that's definitely the way I took it.

• by adversaryIdiot on 4/6/23, 4:43 PM

  I've become a 'handyman' in the way that this article alludes to. A big problem that I come across when saying "yes" to every problem that peaks my curiosity is that Ive become mentally drained.

  I end up spending a lot of time and energy hacking away at problems. The problem is, it seems like my mind isn't resilient enough to keep up with it. After a certain point there comes an onset of fatigue, frustration, and just general feelings of discomfort that drones on in the back of my conscious.

  I guess this is to be expected. The muscles of my mind have been overexerted and need rest. A remedy to this is to "go with the flow" of my mood/feelings. Which sometimes contradicts my undying feeling of curiosity. It becomes a balancing act between the two.

  I dunno ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

• by carbonx on 4/6/23, 5:03 PM

  I used to play pool a fair amount and it reminds me of a quote an older player shared with me one time: "Every shot is a practice shot". His point was that every time you shot you were building up either good or bad habits, so every time you shoot you were to shoot the same way. Don't ever just "fuck around" because that contributes to bad habits or at least not building good habits.

• by iamdbtoo on 4/6/23, 4:44 PM

  My perspective on programming shifted heavily when I adopted this idea for myself. Fully accepting the idea that there is no end to my learning and growth freed my mind so much and has actually made it easier to learn and grow.

• by brw12 on 4/6/23, 3:18 PM

  I really liked this -- it's so true about my road to programming (pseudo-) expertise. Almost everything I've been paid to do, I first did on a hobby level, just messing around with my own projects and ideas.

• by itsmemattchung on 4/6/23, 4:17 PM

  > There is no finish line. There is no winning, no losing.

  There is a finish line, but I think the goal post moves over and over and over again. Historically, every time I set a goal, I would think to myself, "once I do/get/achieve X, I'll be happy." In retrospective, I care less about the goal and find myself most joyful throughout the process of achieving said goal.

• by w10-1 on 4/7/23, 4:36 PM

  Let's not forget some of the origins of this wisdom:

  - Aristotle's distinction between activities/beings that are an end in themselves vs. activities that end with the achievement of their goals, and the realization that one activity can be both

  - Buddhist practice of focusing on the activity of mind

  Both address directly what this article does indirectly: the brain's reward system prunes reality and self-expression as necessary to get things done, so often improvement comes only after deconstructing those blinders. And that in turn is super, super difficult, and virtually never happens unless it has to, because someone is traumatized by reward-system-induced failures like addiction, violence, social ostracism, personal shame, etc. In the "best" case, one's compassion for others' suffering sensitizes one to sniff and shun reward-system fast-paths.

  It's ALWAYS better to avoid reward-system hysteresis, since it's almost never fixable. And remember, the more capable and well-funded you are, the less the environment will offer any guardrails. It's all on you.

• by DotaFan on 4/6/23, 6:53 PM

  For me habit is everything, in a sense that, creating a good habits relieves me the majority of the effort of trying to do it. I just do it without an effort, as I am used to it. Often, while I was getting into this field I was asked how am I able to put so much effort into learning, but it was just a habit that fed my self-worth and curiosity. With habit comes a practice imo.

• by 1vuio0pswjnm7 on 4/6/23, 10:13 PM

  https://web.archive.org/web/20230404094639if_/https://luxagr...

  (luxagraf.net is redirecting to www.google.com at the moment)

• by ChrisMarshallNY on 4/7/23, 12:23 AM

  I really liked that!

  This has been my experience.

  I've done a lot of things, in my life. Taken a number of paths, but I've found designing end-user applications and device control programming to be most gratifying.

  But one aspect of my Practice, is finishing stuff. It has to have an exit.

  It's my Practice, and I do it every day.

• by an_aparallel on 4/7/23, 11:46 AM

  i gifted my old man a drum kit a few years ago. He was shocked, and surprised and flattered - but said "there's no band anymore, i cant play this!"

  So - of i went - set it up...im into production so i thought "cool...i'll sample this every now and then"...turns out - futzing around on the kit - ended up with me selling it and replacing it with a top shelf kit, with top line cymbals...i play around 15 minutes twice/thrice a week....

  i went from nothing - to - playing the tastiest funk grooves, with barely any effort...just savoring the fun while i was playing...literally no expectations...i wish more things were like that :)

• by shironononon on 4/7/23, 12:36 AM

  agree with this article very much. I came to the same conclusion after years of.. not programming .. but yoga.

  My practice of yoga extended to everything else in my life and has helped me accept that I am a human be-ing. Every day in your human body will be different, new versions and push requests are happening RIGHT NOW to your favorite tools and repositories that you're not aware of so how can you possibly expect yourself to be an expert?

  Release your labels and expectations to practice your art:

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satori

• by nico on 4/6/23, 6:37 PM

  Yes

• by Zetice on 4/6/23, 7:14 PM

  Super duper no, could not more strongly disagree. Practice is not the same as performance, as in practice you ignore the outcome and focus on specific aspects of your skill.

  If you practice with the full outcome in mind all the time, you severely hinder your ability to narrowly improve, which is critical to growth.

  I understand this is written to speak more about “practice” in the trade sense, but even there I think that’s wrong.

• by paulpauper on 4/6/23, 8:26 PM

  'Practice' seems like yet another overused buzzword. Same for the expression 'doing the work'. I am not sure who popularized it...maybe Seth Godin or Ryan Holiday. I think too many people waste too much time with practice when what they need is to learn better execution and cut losses sooner. Sometimes practice is not good enough. Doing more is not better. Persistence does not always pay off.