It's too late to collect sand
secondbreakfast.co
secondbreakfast.co
> It’s too late to collect sand
> When I was 13, my family went to California. We walked along a beach near Mendocino. I’d never seen black sand before. I wanted to bring some home.
> So I got a ziplock bag from my mom, scooped some sand into it, and put it in my backpack.
> When I got back to Birmingham, I put it in a jar and placed it on my bookshelf. “Cool,” I thought.
> But I only had one jar. It wasn’t going to be “Really Cool” until I had a bunch of jars.
> I was missing the jar of sand from the Gulf of Mexico. I was missing the jar of sand from the Caribbean. I was missing the jar of sand from the Eastern Shore in Virginia.
> “I’ve been to so many beaches already! And I never collected sand before now.”
> So I scrapped the whole idea. What was the point in collecting jars of sand when I hadn’t started from the beginning? I’d never recover from missing the jars I could’ve already had.
> What a ridiculous thought.
> I fall for this trap repeatedly.
> “I haven’t been keeping a journal since childhood, I’m missing so much.”
> “I didn’t blog the first half of my trip, so what’s the point in the second half?”
> “I haven’t been keeping track of contacts in a CRM, I’m missing so many people!”
> “I haven’t been running, I’m so far behind.”
^I host my blog on blot.im - it is an amazing service, and fully recommend it. Thanks David!
What is the theory behind this? If response times are too slow, how is terminating service supposed to help? Who is it supposed to help?
“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now."
"Someone asked me, 'When is the right time to plant a tree?' I responded, '20 years ago.'"...
But it ended there, he never followed up with your second sentence. Odd, because that's way more salient!
However, what surprised me was that some in the audience took it as a defeatist statement, while others took at is motivation. It seemed clear to me that it was intended to be motivational. How could this anecdote be defeatist? I still don't understand that sentiment. Literally every day is ANOTHER chance to start a habit, trend, experiment, set a goal, etc. that you forgot to do yesterday. For me that's a relief because I'm always forgetting shit.
Maybe forgetting that last sentence makes it seem doomed.
The tree quote (ancient Chinese proverb, I do not know more specific origins) is especially salient given that you're not planting the tree to make the planet better today, you're doing it so that future generations can benefit because it's the least you can do. But for most things the timeframe is shorter; I've seen 60 year olds start karate for the first time and 80 year olds go to college.
The important part is to not get in your own way with a defeatist attitude. Not wishful thinking, you'll still have to work hard to get to where you wish you were. And as a disabled person I also know that sometimes it really just isn't practical. But it's important to remember that how you spend your life is for you, not to impress other people.
I still don't quite get this need to show strangers. I've had it explained to me, but I'm pretty sure it is part of a cultural shift, i.e. I'm old.
Like, if stranger's approval is needed, doesn't that mean you're LESS likely to do something since it isn't guaranteed? Or maybe it is easier to start something BECAUSE there are so m any strangers willing to offer support. Either way it seems like putting success/fail in the hands of external forces.
> Not wishful thinking, you'll still have to work hard to get to where you wish you were.
Yeah, exactly. The accomplishments in my life with the most meaning are the hardest ones. But I don't know if that's universal. I read the book "Flow" in 1991 and it changed my life, and your quote is kinda the central thesis.
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Ironically, I planted four trees last year and three haven't started to bud yet (the fourth one is), which means I prolly killed them. Maybe still too wintry. /sigh/
I'm a graybeard, too, and I share your lack of understanding about this.
The only time that I feel it's important to "show people" stuff is when I'm wanting to learn or reinforce my own understanding of it. I've found a lot of truth to the old saw that the best way to learn something is to teach it to someone else.
You might well be right that it has to do with getting the approval of strangers (certainly a phenomena for low energy barrier stuff like posting to twitter), but I think I'd give people who put in enough time to figure out how to solve a weird new problem the benefit of the doubt that they want to share it because they find it cool and you share things you think are cool.
But maybe that part of culture has changed, I've only got a little grey in my beard but I don't remember a time when my friends didn't want to show me something they found cool. Maybe the change is just that people see internet strangers as "friends they don't know yet"? I dunno, I gave up on social media because I don't think this is true on those platforms anymore.
So I'd say that, hopefully, whether a stranger approves at the end of your project is besides the point, and the sharing is because you think people who share interests with you will be interested (or possible collaborators, mentors, or mentees!) and you're proud of the quality of your work. It's also useful as an online portfolio if you ever need to find a job to be able to point people at that has lots of posts of professional quality about projects you've done.
Ah. That's a helpful way to frame it. Now that you put it that way, I think can understand it, it just seems distant. I can see that I'm not wired that way. Example: I played music in various bands for about 20 years, and for me it was about that shared experience of flow, locking in with the drummer and the guitar player and feeling like the song was in control, not us. But for other members of the band(s) it was about being on stage and hearing an audience cheer that drew them in. Same experience, totally different perception.
Of course, it appears at this instant that I am sharing with you (a stranger) my thoughts (because I think they are cool). So perhaps I simply literally do understand what you are saying by evidence that I'm doing it. /head explodes/
Provocative response, neltnerb.
So maybe it's just a personal trait that has perhaps gotten more visible lately due to the ease of communicating. People always wanted their five minutes right? But maybe it's more common, I can see people posting low-effort communications simply to get the approval of their in-group. Maybe even high-effort material, though at some point I'd hope the high-effort stuff gets out to the rest of us.
Yes, art is a special case because art really requires an audience. Perhaps the fact that I'm an engineer affects my attitude on this -- engineering is only half art.
> I'd give people who put in enough time to figure out how to solve a weird new problem the benefit of the doubt that they want to share it because they find it cool and you share things you think are cool
Yes, I do this. I wasn't thinking of this aspect, though -- sharing something you discovered is awesome because you're really sharing the thrill of discovery rather than sharing to impress people. Perhaps that a distinction without much difference, though.
> It's also useful as an online portfolio if you ever need to find a job to be able to point people at that has lots of posts of professional quality about projects you've done.
Yeah, I consider that something entirely different -- that's not really sharing as much as it's using your work for sales purposes.
Unless it's analog design, then it's 80% black magic. :)
That's how I read it. Without the last sentence, the statement is reads as totally defeatist to me -- it seems to say "you should have planted the tree 20 years ago, then. Too late now!"
The best time may be only marginally better than the actual second best time. It's main value is that it's a personal Schelling point (see also [1]) for doing the thing.
"Now" is not a good Schelling point because it's the same as "in a minute" or "in an hour".
[1]: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kbm6QnJv9dgWsPHQP/schelling-...
I think the author intended "now" to be vague and dependent on context, and that the flexibility of such terms is part of what gives proverbs longevity. It's assumed the reader can infer the general meaning and adapt it to their situation. Plus it's poetic and succinct which makes it easier to remember.
Consider the list of proverbs on this page from Aesop's Fables: http://aesop.magde.info/
Arguing about whether the unknown ancient author should have said "when optimal" rather than "now" does not improve the ability of the reader to understand the underlying meaning -- that if something should have been started long ago, urgency is appropriate and dwelling on the past is counterproductive.
Or does it simply suggest to pick the best time that is still available?
> "Don't feel behind. ...Compare yourself to yourself yesterday, not to younger people who aren't you. Everyone progresses at a different rate, so don't let anyone else [including you] make you feel behind. You probably don't even know where exactly you're going, so feeling behind doesn't help."
He also notes a number of athletes and musicians who started "late", including Steve Nash and Sviatoslav Richter.
It's never too late.
Don't have regrets, they move the focus away from today and your future. Mostly, live in the now. Things are just things, appreciate the living. All things can be replaced, the living can not.
However, I haven't actually been able to load the page yet.
Most people don't do focused practice over time because when you're actually forcing yourself to learn and get better at the edge of your ability it's hard.
I think people get better in the beginning when they know nothing, but once they know a few things most people just plateau at the level where they can play the couple of things that they know without forcing themselves to get better.
Children mostly are forced to do it, with all the advantages and disadvantages of that process.
All this is to say in the majority of cases you can trivially catch up if you're interested in learning a new skill.
I do have photos of most of my workstation/computer setups since I was in high school. I'm currently drafting a post on all my workstations, and while I was digging through photos and editing the post, I came across photos of my very first two cellphones; photos I had taken so I could put them on eBay in the early 2000s!!!
I still have no idea what the model number of one of them is, but who cares?! I have a photo. I started to make a list of every phone I had since then! I'm glad I'm a data horder, even if I lose a ton of photos in the mess of my disorganization.
Procrastinating because you missed the subjective "optimal time" to begin.
I imagined they took a tiny vial of sand as a memento. This is not that.
P.S. There's an extra ">" at the end of the URL.
Leave no trace.
"Collect sand."