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Comment by corporateslave5 | Hacker News Reader

You never become exceptional this way. And if you run into situations you’ve never seen before, it’s harder to react competently. With coding, if you only ever use a style you copy, then everything looks like it could be solved in that way. This works and may help you up the corporate ladder. But it will never produce massively positive results

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If you copy enough styles then you will eventually see the connections between the styles and come up with your own. This is exactly how you become exceptional, by copying the best over and over again in as many styles as possible until you 'get it'. You have to think about it and understand it too but that comes naturally to anyone who is capable of becoming exceptional, that's the seeing the connections part.

Counterpoint: the better you get at copying, the faster you accelerate your ascent towards being exceptional. Copying is generally the beginning, not the end. By this anti-copying logic, practicing scales on an instrument shouldn't have any bearing on playing a complicated piece of music, only playing that piece, right? And yet, practicing scales until they're perfect and mastered pays dividends because the closer they get to second nature the more firmly they can serve as a foundation for second order skills.

Learning how to copy things is an art in and of itself. A lot of engineers (myself included) got into the craft by taking things apart and putting them back together again. It's true that you cannot become a good engineer /only/ by doing this, as at some point, you must learn how to create things from scratch that you've never taken apart and never put together before. It's true that teaches you a lot, but I think it's a little bit of a stretch to imply that it's the only thing that can teach you.

This method won’t get you exceptional on its own. That’s for sure.

I’m not saying to pick one person and blindly follow them forever. It’s just a really fast way to get competent. I used the same technique to learn programming, scuba diving and sales. After you get the super basics down, find more teachers to copy and start even thinking for yourself a bit more.

It will take you surprisingly far, though. One thing I didn’t mention is it’s good for getting the most out of people who are master practitioners but not great teachers. Rather than ask them to take their skills and package them up for you, you just look over and make a copy for yourself.

As a description of the limits of this strategy, your assessment is probably accurate. This is a reasonable strategy for developing common competence. Whether that means you should adopt it probably depends on where on the relevant competency curves you are -- or how uncommon the competence around you is.

That may or may not be the case, but note that there are many (most?) domains where the positive payoff is bounded, but the negative payoff is not. This method seems particularly useful for those scenarios -- if you have "adequate" performers to copy from.

Instrument flying is actually a great example of this. There are no instrument flying competitions. Well, I guess there’s one every flight. First place, you make it there. Second place, you diverted. Third place, you crash and probably die.

I wonder if the OP post has more to do with nerves/confidence than learning. By imagining he was Sean, he felt confident and the naturally performed better at the job at hand.

To answer your point, there are times in the "learning curve" you need to get used to doing something, and then times to become exceptional. Compare learning to drive to formula 1. And commongcog has an article for that: https://commoncog.com/blog/get-numb-get-good/

Yeah, I think there are issues that fall away when you stop trying to be good and just embrace pretending to be good. Confidence is one of those. I also think a lot about evaluative mindsets versus learning mindsets. Copying puts me in learning mode.

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