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Comment by rquantz | Hacker News Reader

The problem with this kind of advice is that it is based on conscious goals and requires staying focused on one goal for an entire year. In my experience (and I believe research tends to support this) humans have a hard time giving conscious goals priority over unconscious needs.

As far as I can tell, the best way to work toward being the person you want to be is to trick yourself into making a habit of it before it becomes too onerous to the lizard brain. It's only things that you do without thinking that will be able to override the desire to sit on the couch and consume calories.

Not that I think reducing distraction and cutting out that which is not necessary is bad, but when putting it into practice involves making all these lists day after day it starts to sound like New Year's resolutions -- ready to be abandoned by February.

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On the other hand, in the "Talent is Overrated" by Geoff Colvin it says, that any task thats gotten automated (on subconscious level) is not getting you better or even bringing you one step down.

Simply putting, if you are coding without stretching yourself, if you don't put much thought in it and do it almost subconsciously you are not learning anything.

He suggest to avoid acquiring habits for the things you want get better at. He supports his words with real life examples. I could relate it to myself, and found his techniques useful in my life. Overall it is a nice read.

I haven't read Colvin, and I don't know what he bases that assertion on -- it may be well supported, but on its face it sounds absurd. You can't get better at anything as long as you still have to think about the things on which it is based.

For example, when playing a stringed instrument, if every note you play gets bogged down in what you have to do to make that note happen (place the finger down quickly, with a pop, then relax it instantly, move the bow arm in the opposite direction, allowing the fingers to cushion the crunch that would otherwise occur -- and that's a ridiculously simplified version) you would be literally unable to play.

Likewise, if you're constantly having to be super conscious of syntax, or thinking hard about how to split a string, you'll have a hard time writing code that does anything.

In fact, I think a lot of getting better at any complex task is the process of making the lower-level parts of the task subconscious, and being able to think at increasing levels of abstraction. The only way this can bog you down is if you refuse to revisit lower-level skills if their implementation is causing you problems.

From the standpoint of productivity, since that's what we're talking about here, if you have to list a bunch of long terms goals, and split them into tasks and whatnot in order to get yourself to start working, you've already lost. There's no way this will win out, in the long run, over the things that you do and want without thinking. Working has to be something that you just do. Once you've started then you can be conscious of what you're doing.

Thank you for sharing your opinion. I do agree with you, and maybe what I was trying to say and what you are saying are different things.

I couldn't find the exact citation from the book, but I will try to write down what I remember.

Colvin explains that with an example of Tiger Woods. He says that Tiger never subconsciously hit the ball. When he starts the movement of the arm to hit the ball and someone from the background screams, he can stop his arm halfway, and then after he is no longer distracted, he hits again.

Normally, when a mediocre player starts moving his arm in order to hit the ball, he no longer able to stop halfway through the action of arm swinging. And usually he would miss, because of concentration loss. He addresses that kind of behavior due to automation of some actions. He says that after some action has gotten automated, person performing it has almost no control over it. He also gives example of the professional car drivers and average drivers. Average driver will not be able to control the dangerous situation on the road due to the fact that his actions are almost automated. While professional drivers are able to see the situation much earlier, and steer and break more efficiently, because they are in better control of situation due to less automation of driving action (Less habit more conscious control).

I hope I could convey his words clearly, because I am not a native English speaker

Edit: Regarding programming, I noticed, the more code I write subconsciously, the more stupid bugs I get. Sometimes I write mysql_real_escape_string() instead of mysql_fetch_array() and then wonder whats gone wrong. I even look at the line with this bug for several minutes, until I stop, look away for a bit, and try to switch from autopilot to manual mode. After I fire up my real brain, I spot the bug in seconds, and have a stupid smile for a half second or so :)

I am reminded of a basketball player to was practicing before an away game. He missed the first few shot's, paused made an adjustment and then made the next several shots. A reporter asked what he changed and he said "I noticed the basket was 2 inches to low." It's not that he is constantly aware of all the individual stages of every shot, it's just that he can make conscious adjustments to those subconscious processes.

The secret is not being aware of all the minor details, it's the ability to pay attention at the correct level of abstraction when there is a problem. I once had a horrible bug that after several rounds of testing seemed vary odd, until I got the ram swapped out on the test box and everything worked just fine. I don't assume RAM is faulty every day, but it's something to consider when no other option seems reasonable.

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