We overestimate our short-term ability, but underestimate our long-term ability
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I'd like to think this is common knowledge, but I have many times talked with people who hope to learn French to fluency in six months, and people who are convinced they could never learn it no matter what. Both types are terrible with estimating their abilities.
Do these people actually believe that it would be impossible for them, or merely that they would give up before success. i.e. do they think that they would not be able to learn the language in five years if they were offered a billion dollars?
Because personally I doubt I will ever learn a second language, but I'm sure I could given enough time and the right incentive.
Yeah—I know I can do it, and even know that I enjoy learning another language, but also know from experience that I don't have enough natural reasons to use anything but English, that I'll have any hope of keeping it up without committing to permanently spending 10+ hours a week doing nothing but practicing the language for the sake of it, all for the occasional few minutes a year (optimistically) in which it's actually useful, or for the once-a-decade trip I might take to somewhere it's widely spoken.
Au revoir my once-somewhat-decent French.
Europeans sometimes imply Americans are dumb or hopelessly provincial for being so persistently monolingual, but it's hard as fuck to keep up a second language when you can travel 1,000 miles and the locals are all still speaking English (at least, mostly). European learners of other European languages are doing it on easy mode, compared to us. It's hard to find a route anywhere in Europe that long that doesn't pass through at least three different languages, as primarily spoken by the locals, and even finding one with that few takes some effort.
So I'm both aware that I can learn another language, and aware that I in-fact won't short of some huge shake-up in my life circumstances, which may as well be the same thing as "can't".
Nonsense. I live in Latin America and English is a second language for me. I'm not sure if there are even any land routes I could take to reach an English-speaking country, as I believe the Colombian jungle interrupts the road. Learning a language is about four things: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. With the Internet you can do three of those four things right from home. Hell, I've been learning English for 24 years and for the first 20 I had maybe one or two conversations with native speakers.
The question is not how far you need to travel to speak to a native, but whether there's anything in that language that interests you. Language after all is just a tool to move ideas between people's brains. If there's not then yeah, you would have no reason to learn a language. And I'm sorry to say that does make you provincial. Please don't take it the wrong way; I don't mean it as an insult, just as a statement of fact. You were born into your culture and you're satisfied with ignoring everything else. You've never thought "oh, I wish I could read this, but it's not in English" or "I love this book/show/movie/etc.; I wish I could experience it as a native would", or at least not to the point that it inspired you to learn.
I remember at one point, when I was a still trying to keep up my French, I spent a fair amount of time trying to track down some equivalent to what Friends has been (so I gather, anyway) for English-language learners—every option seemed much worse (far shorter, lower quality—which, Friends isn't even that high a bar) and even those were nearly impossible to get ahold of, because the rights holders just didn't care about foreign markets (since no-one who can speak English well is going to care much about a mediocre French sitcom, unless they're like me and trying to learn the language). Music's a little easier, but hell, even there half the time they sing in English. Maybe it's improved since about a decade ago, but at the time, there was just nothing.
Meanwhile there are dozens of shows with many, many episodes that could help provide daily exposure to colloquial, conversational English, that are relatively easy to come by (just don't pick The Wire—even Americans have trouble with that, between the authentic Baltimore accents and slang and the pervasive cop-talk).
I actually think another language that's got a huge advantage here, for foreign learners, is Japanese. It was hard not to be envious of the Japanese resources and media readily available, even back in the '00s (let alone now), compared with even a language as important and heavily-studied as French. Which is really surprising and impressive when you consider that Japanese is probably the most insular of the major world languages—one might expect French, German, and Spanish, at least, to do at least as well on that front, given that they're read and spoken widely on multiple continents by far more people than live in Japan, but no. I think it's in part because they've been able to resist the shift to preferring English media that other countries have experienced—you look at French TV schedules and there's a lot of translated English media on there, for instance, while I don't think the same is so broadly true in Japan, with the result that they have a stronger domestic media market than many other states.
Like I said, language is a tool. I have to wonder why you were learning French if you had no use for it. Can you imagine, say, picking a computer before you know if it will be able to run the software you need?
That said, you don't have to limit yourself to professional productions. I'm sure there are French-speaking YouTubers or streamers out there nowadays. That's even better exposure than high-budget productions because you'll hear a variety of local accents. And again, oral is only part of the story. You can get a lot of grammar practice by talking to people on forums and such.
>I actually think another language that's got a huge advantage here, for foreign learners, is Japanese. [...]
Japanese is actually my next language, and I've been half-seriously considering Korean because some of the artists I've been following lately happen to be Korean. Right now it's probably the best time in history to learn either of the two.
I don't think it's accurate to say that the Japanese have been "able to resist" English-language media. Like you said, Japanese culture is insular; xenophobic, to put it bluntly. It's a combination of Japan being hesitant to embrace culturally foreign media and thus producing more locally, and western cultures being more willing to embrace foreign things.
Right, that's... how they've been able to resist it. Even the French, probably the most infamously-jealous and protective of their culture and language in Europe (and against whom accusations of xenophobia are leveled pretty regularly!), haven't been anywhere near as successful, because they don't take it nearly as far as the Japanese. For all its other downsides, a strong culture of xenophobia seems to be the only way to resist this aspect of globalization—even top-down heavy-handed laws don't work, historically speaking, even before the Internet. A genuine (if somewhat cultivated) culture of reflexively dismissing the foreign seems to work, and not much else.
I do agree that Youtube has probably closed the gap somewhat, though that became a usefully-well-populated resource long after I gave up. Even with dedicated instructional material on Youtube, it's goddamn hard to maintain motivation when all the media you genuinely want to read/watch are "high" art and come with language/complexity barriers to match (Proust, Racine, Molière, Renoir, Godard, et c.), with little material to provide the sugary-sweet, approachable appeal of sprawling, crappy anime series, or American sitcoms. Best the French language has for that is comic books, and even that's got nowhere near the volume and selection of, say, manga.
About the only media I still consume in French is the occasional French news article, just because their slant on things or selection of what to cover is sometimes interesting—no coincidence that the ability to stumble through reading a French news article is currently where my French tops out, much reduced from where it once was.
I don't think it's a good thing overall, though. They get to maintain a very strong national identity, but when they do end up interacting with people from other places they appear disconnected. For example, if you've ever tried to interoperate with Japanese software, it's like going back to the '90s. They just do their own thing over there.
> For example, if you've ever tried to interoperate with Japanese software, it's like going back to the '90s.
Hey, I thought you wrote that it wasn't a good thing! ;-)
Indeed, and not only because of monolingualism.
During my time abroad, one thing frequently caught my attention: when I first met someone, they'd always said "I'm from country A"... except people from US. They introduced by mentioning their cities instead.
I always wondered why is that so? Do they assume people around the world know their geography? Do they don't learn at least a little about other countries at school?
And on monolingualism: granted, English is currently the de facto international language, so the economic incentive for them to learn a second language might be lower. But don't they generally feel curious about other cultures, reading foreign original works, or simply getting a grasp on how other languages express ideas?
> I always wondered why is that so? Do they assume people around the world know their geography? Do they don't learn at least a little about other countries at school?
It's habit. It's how we talk to one another about where we're from—major city, or nearest major city. Aside from a few states where people like to lead with that (mostly Texas and California—meanwhile, if someone says "New York", they probably mean the city; there's a little easy-to-miss comic jab about this in the show Archer, where Archer a couple times corrects someone who says "New York City" with "you can just say New York", as the latter usage reads "higher" in a social-class sense). It's a consequence of our largely-homogenous culture being spread over such a huge land area, I think.
Recall, again, that we generally have way less experience talking to people who live in other countries, on account of how very far we have to travel to encounter many such people—and even then it's mainly Canadians, who can and do sometimes pass for American pretty well (we're much worse at passing as Canadian) and Mexicans, those being the only two countries that share a land border with us. 99.9% of the time when we're telling someone where we're from, it's someone who is familiar with US geography.
Besides, "American" doesn't narrow things down very much. It'd be like someone from Germany leading with "Europe" when describing where they're from. Right, I guessed that already—but where? Germany? Austria? Switzerland? Belgium? Our nationality is far less specific, geographically, than those in Europe.
> But don't they generally feel curious about other cultures, reading foreign original works, or simply getting a grasp on how other languages express ideas?
Sure, but it's a big commitment to both learn a language and keep up that skill, and it mostly has to be maintained kind-of "artificially", for Americans. Conversational skills and accent in particular can be very difficult to maintain.
Americans remain strong aspirational speakers of second languages, it should be noted—Spanish and sometimes a few other languages (French is common, Chinese increasingly so, others like German or Italian sometimes) are taught, to some degree, to nearly all our kids, but it's hard to even find good teachers because there's just no culture in which to keep up those skills, so a lot of the time those classes are taught by people who aren't good speakers (let alone native) themselves. The kids, for their part, promptly forget everything except a phrase or two, since they never use the language outside class, and even the ones who try to go farther find it both practically difficult and, lacking much extrinsic motivation or a kind of natural need, discouraging.
> reading foreign original works
I mean... very little reading happens these days, period, aside from trash-tier online reading, romance novels, and self-help books. At least in America. We're far removed from a time when "author" could practically be counted a blue-collar profession, there was so much demand for fiction. Among the same groups of people in which reading remains semi-common, you're likely to find folks trying desperately to hold onto their grasp of one or more major literary foreign languages (and mostly failing at it).
[EDIT] Actually, now that I think about it, you may also be seeing some class bias—Americans who can travel abroad are more likely to have at least some of their culture and norms influenced by the set of people who think in cities (if not more specific!) everywhere—they don't visit France, they visit Nice, they don't visit Italy, they visit Milan, they don't have a modest apartment in America or even New York (City) but Manhattan, and so on.
Why? And how you do that? I believe it's not from the looks, right? I met a guy in Berlin who was from New York. When I first saw him I even thought he was Brazilian, because his hair and skin color were exactly like mine.
> It's habit. It's how we talk to one another about where we're from—major city, or nearest major city
I believe this is everybody's habit, as long as they are in their own country.
I live in a large country too, and we don't have a lot of contact with people from neighboring countries (so the fact we share borders with many countries is irrelevant), but I don't know, when I go abroad something just switches in my mind, it feel just too obvious that I'm talking to people with perspectives other than what I find in my own country. And I notice the same behavior in people from other nations too. That's why this habit from US nationals calls my attention.
> Besides, "American" doesn't narrow things down very much. It'd be like someone from Germany leading with "Europe" when describing where they're from. Right, I guessed that already—but where? Germany? Austria? Switzerland? Belgium? Our nationality is far less specific, geographically, than those in Europe.
"American" really don't narrow things down to the city level. Not even to the country level. But this is what I find strange: why would you narrow things down to people who are not aware of your geography? When you visit another state and introduce yourself, would it make sense to tell them your street name, number and apartment instead of your state or city, to narrow things down?
Mostly because of Europeans constantly telling us that we stick out like a sore thumb, when traveling—it seems to feature in most every discussion of Americans and international travel. It makes some of us really self-conscious about not "seeming American" abroad, which I guess maybe we do semi-successfully if you're in-fact having trouble picking us out, more often than not. Hell, what is leading with a city when asked "where are you from" if not exactly one of those boorish (they always are boorish, aren't they—that's why some of us are self-conscious about it) tells? This current exchange is about, exactly, one of these things!
> "American" really don't narrow things down to the city level. Not even to the country level. But this is what I find strange: why would you narrow things down to people who are not aware of your geography? When you visit another state and introduce yourself, would it make sense to tell them your street name, number and apartment instead of your state or city, to narrow things down?
This is not a great application of reductio.
> I live in a large country too, and we don't have a lot of contact with people from neighboring countries (so the fact we share borders with many countries is irrelevant), but I don't know, when I go abroad something just switches in my mind, it feel just too obvious that I'm talking to people with perspectives other than what I find in my own country. And I notice the same behavior in people from other nations too. That's why this habit from US nationals calls my attention.
The US is really isolated. An American who travels outside the US, Canada (where the people largely are semi-familiar with our geography, on account of most of them living very close to the US and the strong media ties between the two countries) and (maybe) Mexico more than a countable-on-one-hand number of times in their whole lives is a major outlier. A very high proportion of our population never, ever does. Mexico might manage to counter our cultural isolation a bit, but it's regarded as unsafe, so travel there outside of well-tended resorts isn't common (see e.g. Wikipedia's list of global military conflicts for why we might have that perception—yes, yes, I know, our own drug war policies probably contribute, et c., but the why hardly matters for someone who's just trying to plan a family vacation)
Reasons Americans rarely travel abroad include:
1) Long flights are necessary to reach almost anywhere else. 6+ hours (best likely case) on a plane is really unpleasant, bordering on impossible for people with health issues (this will matter in another point).
2) Most Americans don't get much time off in a year, and often struggle to take even what they have as a large block of time. Short trips overseas suck (see: point 1 about how long the flights are)
3) We do have time off in retirement, for those of us who manage to retire—but by then, the difficulty of long flights is much-amplified (see point #1 re: health) for many.
4) The cost of flights makes such travel way more expensive than a road trip—and we're not short of interesting places to drive (especially natural attractions). It becomes hard to justify several hundred dollars per person for a flight when you still have a list of dozens of great places in the US you've yet to visit... so, travel abroad competes with some very-good, cheaper alternatives.
The result is you see basically two types of American abroad: seasoned, usually pretty-rich travelers (if not committed ex-pats), and people for whom this is one of maybe two or three trips beyond North America they'll ever take. Those latter aren't likely to develop much in the way of overseas-travel habits. And, see my edit on the prior comment for why some of those richer travelers might tend to lead with a city—it's a class-cultural thing, they also tend to name cities when talking about other countries (they don't even go to "the Alps", or Switzerland, it's always somewhere more specific like "St. Moritz"; the same set don't go to Colorado, like the rest of us would tend to say in the US when visiting Colorado, they go to Vale or whatever)
It is a question of intensity. If all you do is speaking french and learning grammar and are surrounded by french people, you could reach some level of fluency in 6 months. But not while learning it on the side (unless you are very talented).
I have a guitar at home and one at work so I’m often picking it up and messing around when I need a break from work.
I still don’t know a single song from start to finish (other than nursery rhyme songs that are just a few bars long). I’m pretty close though on Nirvana’s About a Girl.
I’m also essentially tone deaf but my kids, on the other hand, both have perfect pitch somehow. They can hear a microwave beep and tell you it’s a b-flat the same way I can say a car is red. I am going to see an audiologist soon because I’m wondering if the crazy squealing I hear non-stop is related to my difficulties.
It’s hard for me to describe, but I can do one thing at a time pretty well. I can tap my foot to a metronome. I can strum muted strings (so it’s just a percussive sound) in time to a metronome. But I struggle with tapping my foot and strumming in time to a metronome even when all I’m doing with my fretting hand is muting the strings.
I can play parts of some songs and some riffs but if I try to play it along with the original track, I lose the rhythm after a bar or two. I don’t seem to be able to extend that length. I end up strumming with the rhythm of the lyrics (syllables) rather than the drum beat.
Right now, I’m mostly working on trying to establish some sense of rhythm. The Justin Sandercoe’s course on this is probably the best resource I’ve found. He has some exercises that are almost meditative.
Why would you both tap your foot and use a metronome at the same time while playing a piece? I play piano, not a guitar, but foot tapping is usually for when you don't have a metronome.
Sure, tapping and using a metronome at the same time is good, if you are trying to get your foot tapping to be more consistent. But actually practicing a music piece and using a metronome+tapping your foot feels weird, I cannot do it well either. For me, it is either tapping foot or using a metronome.
My metronome app has a timer. I set a 5 to 15 minute timer and then repeat the same strumming pattern for that entire time (usually down, down-up, up, down which corresponds to the count 1, 2-and, -and, 4 and I play it between 60 and 100 bpm). The strum is just a percussive strum on muted strings. I’m not playing chords or any kind of melody. The goal is to get the strumming and foot tapping to be automatic so that I can add the next step.
That’s why I bought a banjo. If these year are going to fly by then I might as well insert 10 years of banjo practice into the blur. I might be bad now, but by the time my kid is 12 I’ll be 10 years in.
Practically speaking, I don't think I made huge, noticeable progress in my guitar skills over the last 4-5 days, at least I couldn't really point out anything that has been a huge jump. And in fact, many if not most weeks are like that. And focusing on this part tends to be a bad idea.
On the other hand, 4 months ago, after I got my guitar adjusted and fixed, I was just a mediocre bass player with some object with way too many, way too tiny, way too sharp strings. Just 1 or 2 weeks ago, something in my head suddenly went "Jo, this actually sounds like a slow and terrible version of the rythm section that song you're working on covering at the moment". And these are the more important insights to look at.
And sure, I'm also starting to realize how long the road might be to good, own original songs, but at the same time, the progress over some 2-3 years plus half a year on the guitar is a lot, looking at it over a longer time.
This is also something healthy we do at work every 6 - 12 months too. Stop wondering about the daily grind of incidents and service requests and smaller scale improvements for a moment and consider where we were a year ago.
Something that was formative in my understanding of language was visiting Glasgow years past, and realizing that just an "accent" could easily knock me back to understanding only 20-30% of words. Still, based on context it was possible to get around and after a week I was up to 70-80% comprehension with locals.
In North England and Scotland, we pronounce words using short vowel sounds (bath, castle) whereas in the South, they use long vowel sounds (b-are-th, c-are-stle).
Not being able to easily pick out the vowel sounds makes it much harder for a non-native speaker to understand.
The so called "BBC English" that you probably learnt is based on a Southern England 'home counties' pronunciation.
You've got this. Try to remember to record yourself speaking periodically with others so that you can see how much you are improving.
> visiting Glasgow years past
I remember being in Gatwick airport and hearing my first heavily-accented English. Maybe it was a Scottish brogue. I could not really understand anything.
Obviously a tutor is great, but the cost and time of a tutor isn’t worth it at the beginning stages for me personally.
Key insight, people should set the realistic goal of being at most as good as their native language.
I can confidently say, in my native language, there are many times throughout daily life where I have way less than 80/90% comprehension. The other key insight though is that I can remove that ambiguity with follow up questions and elaboration if I want.
And that's what people should strive for when learning a second language. Once you get to the point where you can learn in and with the language, then you're golden. That requires far far less effort than most people estimate.
Yes, learning new content with the language is key. Laddering is a term used when you are learning a new 3rd language through your 2nd language. For example, learning French through French for Spanish speakers-type material.
The 80/90% comprehension ballpark figure was more about how much you can understand without looking it up. For example, when I watch a reality TV show like Gran Hermano (Big Brother reality TV series) where there is a lot of regional accents, rapid-fire repartee, idioms, street talk, I can struggle to figure out what was just said. The same goes for a standup comedy show in Spanish with the cultural contexts, inside jokes. On the opposite end of comprehension would be an evening news program where everything is said in a structured manner and the diction is as close to neutral/perfect for the greater region of the news broadcast.
Additionally, the environment matters. A crowded noisy bar can rapidly beat up your confidence of being able to communicate. The Foreign Service foreign language ability scales do account for this.
Curious about this. Presumably you've given it plenty of effort after more than 3 years of Spanish study. Where do you feel that you're stuck, and what have you tried?
A few of my friends who know will tease me now and then by trilling their r's in conversation. It always simultaneously makes me jealous and in awe. I know that Spanish elementary schools have young students practice tongue twisters as maybe it is not a natural skill for all kids. "Un perro rompe la rama del árbol"
Perhaps related, I am struggle with unassisted lip trills [1] which is a key technique to improve your breath control/singing. Unassisted is when you don't press your fingers to your cheeks. I really struggle with unassisted lip trills and run out of oxygen quickly (5 seconds). The idea with unassisted lip trills is you can trill a song phrase on a single breath (15-20 sec, sometimes longer).
[1] How to do the lip trill https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwNPp-RS4IY
If it helps at all, in my experience of learning to do alveolar trills, the key was finding the precise amount of resistance to apply with my tongue. That is, the muscles hold still and the flow of air is what moves it. I think that means that the base position for the tongue is forming a light seal against the alveolar ridge and upper gums. If you get the pressure right, when you vocalise, the flow of air will briefly push your tongue out of the way then allow it to snap back, and if you get the pressure exactly right, you'll get a pleasing trill sound.
Some people define themselves as someone who "can't draw", but drawing is literally just making a mark, comparing it to what you see, adjusting the mark or making another
It's not easy, but it's very simple
I'm sure I could fix that, but the focused practice on just making straight lines or circles or re-learning how to hold a pencil or whatever would be boring as fuck, so I'm never going to.
Look at the paintings of David Hockney (or even his iPad doodles), there's not a straight line or neat circle in sight. But he's a relentless doodler. As Hockney says himself, art is just seeing. The more you practice, the more you see, the better you are at knowing which marks to make. I'd recommend this doc if you're interested https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cdqch3-D94A
If all you can muster is 20 minutes per day, that still adds up hugely. No patience required. Although of course, you improve faster if you can actively practice for longer periods. But nevertheless, it is just about showing up every day. In the case of drawing, it's about drawing every day, and wanting to improve some aspect of it. Simply doing the same thing over and over again won't get you anywhere.
Hence, patience is irrelevant, if anything a wrongful framing of the situation that doesn't help anybody. Show up as much as you can every day for yourself and you won't need a single drop of "patience".
Even among children, where the difference in experience is negligible, some people are able to analyze the input they receive from their eyes or ears in a way that others can’t. My friends who are artists amaze me by reducing a 3D object to a series of deformed polygons, or drawing a perfectly straight line with a pencil, and I amaze them by mimicking accents or memorizing song lyrics on one listen. For both of us, these are things that we’ve always been able to do.
I don’t propose that this barrier is insuperable, but there’s only so many hours in the day. There is also likely to be a hard limit on how good I can get compared to someone with natural ability. Spending 10 years going from 0/10 to 7/10 is a particular kind of commitment to make.
"Think of yourself as a door. The wider you open [training], the more easily the Force flows through you [learning something]. Some people just start with their door a bit more open [talent]. But any door can open wide"
For myself, and, as some folks here have pointed out, I am possibly developmentally challenged, I've found that I can learn the basics of a language in a short time (maybe two weeks? I've never clocked it).
Becoming good with the language, on the other hand, takes years.
I've been writing Swift, every day (and learning new stuff, just about every day), since it was announced, in 2014, and there's still a ton that I don't know. The language is still evolving, so I'll never know it all.
Also, in my experience, the difficulties are really with learning frameworks and SDKs. I've been learning the ins and outs of the various native Apple SDKs, along with Swift, all that time, and I still have a ways to go.
I know 2 languages and learning English has been an incredible painful process started in my childhood and peaked in my adulthood. That's like 30 years of pain and I still make extensive mistakes.
Your description fits and really explain why i never even considered learning another language, despite all people saying "it gets easier"
Not even 2 years in, I've already read the Bible, the Elements of Euclid, Zeldovich's Intro to Higher Math, and am in the middle of Das Kapital. The Great Books canon never looked more approachable.
Just 4 pages a day. It really adds up.
I would say, maybe DON'T stop if you get in the flow but don't feel bad if you can ONLY manage the 4 pages/ten minutes.
The point being we all interact with fecal matter way more than anyone would like to know - even just by smelling.
It's been a topic for climbing gyms [1] and have heard the same for hand shakes but no link provided
[1] https://www.climbing.com/news/study-finds-fecal-veneer-on-gy...
But, I mean, most people bring their phones into the bathroom with them and then hold that sucker up to their face, use it while eating, etc.
https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/constipation/
I eat mostly veggies and whole grains. I barely have time to post a comment on HN before I'm done.
Also, I advertise that site any chance I get, and judging by your reaction I may have overstepped, so I apologize.
Hopefully someone else seeing it will gain something useful from it, still.
"Infinite Text" or "War 'n Pieces"
Guide: https://www.myharvardclassics.com/categories/20120612_1
.pdf downloads: https://www.myharvardclassics.com/categories/20120212
Note that the page numbers are for the book pages, not the .pdf pages.
I did it over the pandemic, and yeah, it's really really good. But you do have to get used to older writing styles. The mid 1700s to early 1800s authors really like run-on sentences. Also, Shakespeare takes some getting used to, so pull up a YT video and read along as you listen.
BJJ: After one year, all but the newest people still make you feel like you don't know anything, they can submit you pretty easily. Train for 10 years and you are at or close to "black belt" (Which takes on average 10-12 years in BJJ, it is not easy to get at all) and you can fold people up on instinct. The funny thing about the 1 year mark, you FEEL like you haven't learned anything, but you can gently fold the average human up now if it comes down to it.
Business: We built a business over 8 years. It was hard. The first year we were negative in profit, paying ourselves out of our bank accounts. Overnight success in 8 years. Just keep learning everything that wasn't tech, marketing, people management skills, etc. Eventually we did well got up to like 20 person head count purely with organic growth and were acquired.
Skills in general: https://gist.github.com/gtallen1187/e83ed02eac6cc8d7e185 "A little slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept".
So now when people ask me anything. Career advice. How do I lose weight. How do I get in shape. "Let me tell you about my 10 year plan for you. you can't even imagine how long and hard 10 years is, I know, but that is what it is going to take to make a life long change. do you still want my advice?" Of course many good things happen sooner, but I only talk to people that can at least accept it is going to be hard and I don't hold any secrets about anything other than you have to work really hard and apply effort.
A big turning point for me was when I would lose and could walk backwards the whole roll in my head and see the root error. BJJ is a lot like chess in this way. When you start you just get beat and see the move that beat you. As you get better you see the chain of events that lead to the finish.
They won’t know many submissions, and initially are more susceptible to exposing their back (in wrestling being on your back is the worst possible outcome where in jiu jitsu it’s an offensive position), but at the end of the day grappling is grappling.
In the case of my business i wasn’t thinking long term, i just was obsessively focused on it and never gave up. I think the human mind is just really poorly equipped to think long term and there are many many opportunities out there for people who can.
"After one year, all but the newest people still make you feel like you don't know anything, they can submit you pretty easily": this is not true in general, only with context. Athletic people in general would not be hopeless after one year at the local club level. I have athletic kids who show up and immediately give me problems because, despite still poor technique, their speed, power, cardio, flexibility, etc. make them dangerously competitive.
The fact is that the vast majority of adults who start jiu jitsu today are not athletic. Jiu jitsu attracts a population of mostly nerds who, because of the cerebral nature of jiu jitsu, can do very well over the years, but for the first year or two their still poor or average technique does not allow them to overcome athletic limitations.
Moreover, except for a few clubs, there is no pedagogy to speak of around jiu jitsu. If trained properly, many hobbyists will improve much faster, but jiu jitsu clubs are for-profit businesses that need first to make money and then to make people better.
Also, it is common to hear "it's been a while since I've seen Jack on the mat" with a disappointing tone, without realizing that doing any activity, especially one that is psychically demanding and involves being "beaten up," for more than 2 or 3 years requires uncommon dedication. "Keep doing it for 10 years and see how good you will become" sounds much sweeter in print than when you live it.
"Study or practice for enough years and you will get good enough/competent" at the population level sounds good, but it is simply not true.
For example, you see the world records in factorio aren't held by kids. Kids has better reflexes which is crucial for some games, but their ability to learn isn't much higher than a young adults.
And a recent 'wear away the stone' project was to earn X$ per month writing about AI, which took five years, beginning from some very humble pay checks.
But these are not 'vanity' projects: the latter was obviously pivotal to my survival, as I'm not independently wealthy, and had no job when I migrated; my motivation for the gym is that I have suffered from depression for forty years, and pushing myself physically and engaging with my body is the most effective treatment (albeit found late in life) I have ever come across to massively alleviate this (hence looking better, muscles, etc. is just collateral benefit); and the need to speak the language of my adopted country is obvious.
Sure, there are other things I have persisted in and improved in because they massively accord with my interests and enthusiasm, but those three projects are my demonstration to myself that persistence, while not a magic bullet (some people are never going to make it in Hollywood, for instance), is as near to a magic bullet for personal transformation as most of us are ever likely to have access to.
The gym is the one that fascinates me most at the moment; I look around me, as a relative newcomer, and wonder at the motivation behind the incredible bodies you see there. Are they all sprouting out from some deep psychological need? Even if it's 'just' vanity, it would have to qualify as pathological - as my own reason for being there is.
So I am interested in people who will go through these kind of pain and boredom barriers for less intense reasons, if indeed they exist.
If your goal is fitness and the gym isn't interesting, you will find some other way to obtain fitness. Maybe martial arts, maybe a physical team sport, maybe an individual sport. Then at some point you'll plateau at your sport, or the offseason hits, or you need more strength or endurance, and there's your reason to get back in the gym. Rinse and repeat for as long as you want to stay fit.
It's hard to say "I don't like lifting weights" when people start complimenting your body and looking at your biceps, pecs, glutes, etc.
I'll be writing a post about it once I hit the two or three-month mark for a little bit more of street cred when talking about the experience, but if anyone's interested I can give you a few preview points here.
- I do it before work, right after my normal wake-up routine (get dressed, meditate, coffee). No excuses on this one. Been waking up 30min / 1 hour earlier.
- It has to be programming. Can't be reading books, watching videos, anything that's consumption and not creation. Naturally, reading my own code and reflecting on design count as production.
- On the latter, while reflection may be about 80% of coding, I'm trying to cultivate a working style where I write more instinctively and faster, and edit later.
- It cannot be HTML or CSS. I enjoy front-end work but it's not what I'm looking to improve.
- Likewise, for the moment, and as much as I love these activities, initial architecture and project planning don't count. I've found free time for that elsewhere thus far.
- If I don't have a project (work or hobby) that's interesting, immediately resort to Leetcode, Advent of Code, or anything and everything that gets me coding.
- Python is helping. I like many languages, but I know I can pick Python up at any time without too much ceremony. Good standard lib (including testing), good ecosystem, easy syntax, decent type system. Occasional hiccups with dependency and environment management make me want to throw the computer out of the window, but the positives far outweigh this, and such is programming.
- Kept a simple to-do file at the root of the project with an ordered product backlog. Keeping it more or less groomed has helped me jump immediately back into the action every morning.
- Liberal use of ChatGPT and Copilot. They're far from perfect and I see them derail often, but they've helped somewhat to keep motivation high by removing some of the grunt work.
Clicking up top on the dark mode to get "night own" or type the Konami Code to get Konami the other 2 cases seem to be disabled
(Video games often do change your cursor of course, and part of that is because they're indeed trying to be immersive, and you're here for that experience. But such is not the case on a website.)
It changes based on a few things (e.g. dark mode) + I wanted it to change when you entered a password (for my design portfolio) too but realised it was too complex.
Put differently, consecutive short-term investment payoffs do not add up to the same value as long-term investment over the same period. The long play is harder with greater rewards accordingly. So you balance "keeping the lights on" with "where do I wanna be in 10 years?"
That's why monopoly, or monothlic architecture eventually failed. They can't scale.
Could you provide some examples? One counterexample: Linux, the world's biggest monolithic kernel, seems to be going pretty strong.
Interestingly, I find this only happens with personal projects. At work I just overestimate everything to protect myself. So, it may also be that for things outside of work I simply underestimate how many of my life resources (time, energy, willpower) are eaten up by work and that confounds my estimates. I'm honestly not sure which thing is the bigger factor.
Rather just do a 30 min routine 3-4 days a week and look at yourself after 1/3/6 months.
You will have built a habit and achieved a lot more.
A psychotherapist? Denying reality and dooming myself?
become good at learning from your mistakes quickly
Short term I feel like this article is still useful advice as it helps to avoid the trap of working on something for a small amount of time and feeling like it was a waste when it was really stacking bricks to make a larger effort.
It feels like shit vs more shit
It's far from the only path though. There's many possible causes of depression and even more possible solutions. Find one that works for you. You deserve more than shit. As someone who's been deep in that shit more than once, you can claw your way out and once you do, the world is a beautiful place that's worth growing old in. Then you'll end up in the shit again but each time climbing out gets easier.
Personally it took me moving country, changing career more than once until I found one that gave me a sense of purpose, finding a beautiful and totally surprising partner, and lots more to find my present stability.
That's what worked for me. What will work for you? You need to find that out. You only have one life, if it's shitty now them what have you got to lose by making every possible effort to change that? I mean, what could possibly be more important than making that effort? Certainly not a shitty career or a shitty relationship or a shitty family. Leave them if you need to. Nothing controls you except you. And physics, and the law and immigration officers and so on. But there's always room to maneuver.
This is incredibly meaningful and if someone can get their mind working this way, they appreciate every minute of life.
Religion aside (don't go against whatever religion you choose says), you need to compromise between short term and long term. You might die tonight, you might live to 120, and odds are you don't have any better idea. You also don't know how you will age. There are people climbing mountains at 90. There are people at 65 who need to help get out of bed. If you are lucky to be healthy enough climb mountains at 90, then it makes sense to save a little now so you have enough money to afford to do what you want. If you lose your health by 65 then there is no point in savings as you can't enjoy life anyway.
You have to accept and enjoy not being great at anything, but in turn you can do anything. It is a different mindset. You will never be the star of whatever you do, but you will often be the guy in the background at all events who jumps in to take care of something unrelated to the event in question that needs to be done.
I'm currently looking at jobs and definitely harbor a lot of self-doubt because I don't have specialized skills that match desired skills, but have so much other experience outside of any one domain.
One of my aims is certainly to sit down and master something in the domain of work that can make things smoother / more sustainable, but at least going into jobs assigning proper value to my suite of skills is a helpful thing to keep in mind.
Jack of all trades would be in all of the above, plus woodworking, playing violin, learning a foreign language. .. thing that are all fine alone, but too different to master them all.
So it really comes down to your own decision - are you satisfied with your life or not?
Finding that precise time horizon is an exercise left for the reader.
In a short timeframe, this guy started a whole bunch of projects that he didn't finish. In the short term, he overestimates his long term ability. And perhaps he underestimated his short term ability because he's impressed with starting so many projects, more than he could finish with his overestimated long term abilities.
but don't listen to me, glass half empty sounds optimistic ("I've identified the problem, I can see room for improvement! I know how to fix this!") and glass half full sounds like you're trying to convince yourself you don't need to do anything, that everything is going to be OK.
That overestimating your short term is limiting given people have wonder years through their personal development where they get more done in a single year than a decade. Etc. That people like the author might be doing too much and could benefit from doing less making them more efficient in both the short and long term.
If you're getting more done with the limited time you have each day, you are in the productivity camp.
If you're getting more done with less time each day, you are in the efficiency camp.
If you're getting the right things done with less time each day, you're in the effectiveness camp.
I am just pointing out that this author talks about all the stuff(productivity) they accomplished in a short period of time to then talk about overestimating their ability?
If anything they are underestimating it. Imagine what they could do if they did one thing fully(efficiency) and not a handful of things partially? That's the productivity trap in my opinion.
Take it one step further, if they knew the one thing they were doing is the right thing to be doing(i.e. YouTube), they would be especially effective.
Indeed, I'd argue that cumulative effects are unintuitive because (if done right! … or badly wrong, I suppose) they're exponential.
Some reasons for that:
- Conjunction of events is less than the probability of its individual constituents and unless the events were certain to occur is always less than the probability that they occurred given that they occurred.
- Making an estimate out of multiple different approximations with unknown error bounds you should have decreasing confidence in your approximation because you have increasing confidence of error in your approximation.
- Modeling with the bellman equations such that overestimation of true utilities in short term and bad underestimation of true utilities in the long term can produce superhuman cognitive abilities in many decision making contexts.
- We ought to see overestimation and underestimation: given a coin that is biased, it does not follow that you bet on that coin with probability proportional to the bias, but rather to the rounding. So we should see actions that correspond with rounding up in the short term which is more likely to be less conjuncted and therefore higher probability and we should see rounding down in the long term wherein there is more conjunction and therefore lower probability.
This all leads me to suspect that a framing around faith being justified, not around whether we overestimate or underestimate, might be a more correct framing. This is actually exceedingly true in the cooperative regime wherein other agents force underestimation of probabilities due to the potential for competition, but in which a cooperative environment supports overestimation.
To get at what I mean by that, consider that no one must teach you proper form such that you do not injure yourself at a gym, so your probability of injury is actually pretty high if you are estimating using only the things you can control, yet in practice you will probably get high quality advice to avoid injury if someone cooperative notices you are likely to hurt yourself - it is not sufficient to point at the ability to learn this information yourself to refute this, because all the information available to you is a function of a cooperative society. So the going to the gym and avoiding injury while doing so should use a non-cooperative creature like an octopus going to an open location and doing exercise there in sight of predators: they don't have access to books to help them, they have access to sharks. As an aside, lots of people are so surrounded by the waters of cooperation they can hardly notice they are swimming, which is kind of interesting to contrast with the octopus with adaptive camouflage that is more prone to death the moment it become visible.
But now we are getting into a defense for bad estimation - because we are starting to get into estimates that are predicated on self-reference: agent one observes agent two and makes a decision based on their policy, but agent one is also making observations of agent two and deciding policy based on that! This is a regime wherein we start getting paradoxes like the halting problem, godel's incompleteness proof, or the linguistic paradox of heterological classification. In other words, we find strong evidence for the need for some other concept than yes or no, something more like the idea of mu or the idea of undecidability.
So here we reach another reason to disagree with the idea: how can an answer which isn't even well defined because it is undedicable be an overestimate or an underestimate?