Think more about what to focus on | Hacker News Reader

Think more about what to focus on

henrikkarlsson.xyz

273 pointsjger1555 comments

I don't believe that you can only be good at a couple things. You can be _great_ at only a couple things. And you can only be the _best_ at a single thing. As it happens, I think you can actually be fairly good at _many_ things, which is something I am trying to achieve for myself.

Of course, you need not to be too competitive or perfectionist, but you can then enjoy lots of great things on this planet, while benefiting from the compounding interests of transferring what you learn in one discipline to another.

I play the trumpet at a fairly good level, I am a decent road and mountain biker, I have enough knowledge of mountaineering to plan and lead simple ascents in the alps, I have a PhD in computer science and I consider myself a decent software developper, I have a baby and a beautiful wife, I have enough depth in physics and philosophy to have an interesting chat with majors of these disciplines.

However, I had to give up on being truly great at any of these things. Yet, I found that you can then draw some fascinating parallels between brass playing and biking, physics and computer science, mountaineering and having a family.

So, yes, you need to know what to focus on, but your focus can definitely be on striking the very delicate balance that allows you to be 'just good' at lots of things.

Agreed. I'm reminded of a great blog I read (no bookmark, sorry) about "skill stacking" -- if you're top 10% in one thing and top 25% in another, you might be top 1% or better in their combination.

This post isn't the one I was remembering, but it describes the same concept: https://www.theladders.com/career-advice/skill-stacking-inst...

This is also the message of this old blog post from Dilbert.

1: https://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/07/car...

I agree and have a somewhat similar diversity of interests. I've found that a source of dissatisfaction for me is spreading myself thin in a way that means I'm not truly present when doing any of these things. So I find it's better to focus on a couple of things in the short term but switch out the hobbies in focus over the medium term. Family and work always need to happen, so really I can only pursue one hobby at any given O(months) time

Highly related: https://danluu.com/p95-skill/

Also relevant: the concept of skill stacking.

I first ran across it here: https://forge.medium.com/how-to-become-the-best-in-the-world...

That post is unfortunately now members only, but I summarized it here: https://letterstoanewdeveloper.com/2019/11/28/skill-stacking...

> That post is unfortunately now members only

I found an old snapshot at https://archive.is/Y8pX4

One good test to see if you're doing it right, by the way: do these things with people who devote most of their time and energy to it, and see if you can still enjoy yourself. If so, you're doing it right ;-)

Range by David Epstein makes this argument well, and even argues that you don't have to give up being great, but rather the breadth of experience can make you great once you find the right opportunity.

I've enjoyed Ali Abdaal's new book he just launched. A couple similar points really stood out along these lines even if they sounds pretty common sense.

Treat your priorities like any investment. Keep a wish list of all the things you want to do, but the second column is just the current things you are actually investing time in. You know there can only be 1-3 things in that column.

Have 3 things (quests) you do each day. One short task you can complete each day in each of these three categories: Work, Health, Relationships. Not 1, not 5. These 3. They can be as simple as "Relationship: call Grandma". IMO, doesn't even have to be a successful call. At least you made the attempt at the task. That means it's done and you made progress.

Is it worth buying? I've stopped being a fan since his channel turned into a content and money machine but he's definitely had some useful videos.

That's a tough but great question. I spend a lot of money on books very loosely. It's one of the areas of my life where I don't really think about a budget. I just want to consume more and more if I can. And I leverage my local library, local bookstore and Amazon to the hilt.

I don't remember who said it but I take the advice of "if there's even a single thing in the book that you make note of, it was worth buying". And there's a lot more than a single thing. I actually skimmed through the book a second time and jotted down notes from each chapter I want to dig deeper in (e.g. another author mentioned, a research paper, one of the exercises).

So for sure I think it's worth buying.

I remember hearing a similar thing from a guy that was sitting in for Tim Ferris on the podcast. He said in anything you read, try to take away one important thing.

I've been listening to the audiobook and have enjoyed it a great deal thus far (about 1/4 in). Helped me think about work in a new / fun way that has helped me start of the year right.

I find "Work" to be a bit of an odd inclusion here. Presumably most people have a job and necessarily complete many work tasks each day?

Ah, great call out. So these probably shouldn't be thought of as your todo list or jira backlog for the day. They're more like optional "side quests" (another term from the book) that you could also just not do and nothing bad will happen, but if you did them you'll move your work/relationships/health in a positive direction. Like the difference between:

Relationship with my kid => task: feed them; side quest: ask if they want to make a fort after dinner.

Career => task: get the 3 devops tickets my boss told me to fix today; site quest: buy a new book on training LLMs

If you don't get these daily quests done, child protective services won't show up tomorrow and you won't get fired. :)

Yes but there has to be 1 MIT (most important task) for work

Your comment made me read the intro. Good book, I read a lot of self help books and this seems to be a quality one.

Easy to read, dynamic but not story dense. I'll keep reading it. Thank you for recommending it.

I used to have the ability to facilitate and maintain the unconscious processing loops the author talks about. It was fantastic to wake up in the morning with a solution for a problem my brain was subconsciously working on during the night.

Alas, I can’t seem to do that anymore — the fucking war is sucking up all my unconscious processing resources (I live in Russia). My idle processing inevitably defaults to fruitless thinking about the war.

It’s blocking me, hindering me, draining me — and I have no idea what to do about it.

Your subconscious clearly has different priorities, try listening to it. If it's concerned about your safety, then maybe your daily activities aren't bringing you closer to safety as quickly as they could. If it's concerned about injustice then you may try more directly contributing to bringing about justice.

It seems that your subconscious is telling you that it wants you transform those cycles into some kind of action. I don't know what your circumstances are. If it were me, in my circumstances, I would be looking for groups of similarly-minded people that I could join, or projects I could donate to. I would definitely try to be safe, I would be very concerned by being "disappeared". Good luck and I hope you find something.

This is exactly what I’m thinking. These cycles must be converted into action or dropped entirely as useless waste of energy.

Same here - it was almost like magic for me in my 20 and 30's, goto sleep with some hard technical problem I was stuck on (I am a developer) and wake up the next morning already knowing the complete solution.

I don't think I have the ability anymore - and actually forgot I used to have it.

This was a great perspective to add onto my own vague ideas as I enter the new year.

Late last year I quit my job and left my apartment, placed all my junk in storage and for the next few months will be travelling around Europe to dance tango until my budget runs out. The goal is to find out where in the world I want to move and work, to meet new friends, to make art, and to dance as much as I can.

At this stage, in the jargon of the blog post, you might say that I am rather explorative. I made this plan after my old job became unbearable, and at the same time a lot of my friends started to leave town, and also my apartment's contract was coming to an end. Seemed like an opportune moment to do something so crazy.

While packing my stuff I took the time to organize all the old papers I'd shoved away in a closet, including old notebooks and drawings all the way back to kindergarten. In the process, it became clear to me how far I had strayed from the strengths, passions, and hopes of that small boy I used to be.

Tango totally blindsided me a-year-and-a-half ago. I always dreaded dancing, feared it, but decided to join some friends attending a beginners class. The payout on that unlikely arm of the bandit has been absolutely staggaring. So, while quite exploratory, my journey will be exploitative as well.

I still have left room for more kinds of discoveries. I have vague plans of drawing, writing poetry, writing a blog and publishing videos, learning new programming languages, and more. I definitely will be bringing my guitar, but after reading this blog post I am asking myself whether the smart thing to do would be to narrow down my options at some early stage of the journey, and even throughout it, honing in on just a couple of the things I want to do, if not just one.

The idea of limiting myself is both unsettling and yet also relieving. I already feel like I know the order in which I will cut off the arms of the bandit. And if I'm lucky, it won't simply turn into a Hydra!

good on yer. i am envious. but don't limit yourself to Evropa (hint hint). World is.. wide.

https://www.hofstede-insights.com/country-comparison-tool

This article really resonates with me. I’ve spent the last two months creating a personal/portfolio website, developing an interactive resume ai, creating an open source web scraping utility, and researching tech non stop.

I would say I’ve been 80% exploring and 20% exploiting/doing. Everyday I come across tech that could help me build something even more efficiently. Examples include plasmic.app, directus.io, and tools for SEO combined with ideas of automation.

But I also am left with the feeling that I need to switch gears and do 80% doing and focus on just that one project. It’s just hard finding an ideal project/saas idea to commit to because it’s a common theme that we fail much more than we succeed. But as the author pointed out, that’s just another person’s mental model. I really need to find out myself.

Is the resume ai published somewhere? It sounds like something I would wanna try

IMHO the best essay on this, at least for scientists and entrepreneurs, is Richard Hamming's "You and Your Research". Certainly it caused me to work on things that were worth my time.

It's been discussed a lot on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=hamming+you+and+your+research

What was your experience before and after that essay ?

Well, I heard hamming give this talk at NASA Ames in 1984. By the end of the year I’d quit my job (doing research on very obscure properties of programming language semantics), partially because I realized there were only a dozen or so people who even understood our work — what’s the point. Until then really I was just working on things that looked like fun — nothing really wrong with that.

I spent a few years working on common sense reasoning (AI) but began to feel it was making no progress. One thing that had shocked 20 yo me in Hamming’s talk was his criticism of Einstein for working on unified field theory: the fundamental mathematics and theory weren’t there yet so the effort was a waste of time. I was partially wrong but it didn’t seem like that was the right time for such work to be a productive effort, so after a few years I quit.

Since then I’ve mostly worked on problems where I could make a difference. At the end of the 80s and in the 90s that was enabling work on Free Software/open source and end user Internet access; first decade of this century pharmaceuticals (trying to reduce drugs in the water supply), then solar and renewable power (in the long run it’s hard for any one person to have significant impact for the good reason that lots of others are all pushing it forward), and lately climate repair.

I’m still old school enough that I non-cynically do work on projects that make the world a better place, and I think the world is a better place in ways large and small due to my efforts (and those of so many more).

I am disappointed that when the gold rush hordes flooded into the Bay Area in the late 90s they said they were “making the world a better place” because that seemed to be just a thing people around here said.

Good post I'm quite certain this is correct:

> Meaning that if you go from 4 priorities to 3, you can get, say, 10 percent more done; but if you go from 4 to 1, you get 400 percent more done.

But unless you can afford a butler or work at a company that gives you a very high level of institutional support, mono-focus seems impossible in our current world. I'd love to completely deprioritize the following roles, but they don't seem to want to detach themselves from me: tech support geek for wifi and computer issues, bookkeeper and tax preparer working hand-in-hand with my accountant, occasionally car expert for buying and maintaining vehicles, real estate expert for evaluating house purchases based on market conditions and my families needs, health care plan decider, and on and on and on. Each one of these areas if filled with multi-armed bandit problems (How much research should you put into evaluating a new home purchase where you live, or looking for a better city to live in?). It's a lot.

For a 'mono-focus' lifestyle or even a very pared down focus, you don't need to eschew everything else, in my opinion, where all you know is breathing and fine dining. You can still do those things and the author says as much as well.

You can, in my opinion, pick the reasonably best option because the payoff of squeezing another 2 - 5% out of the decision isn't worth the multiple weeks or worse you will spend. Could you get the absolutely best house for the best price? Yeah. Is it worth the trade-off of your other focus? Probably not.

There's no need for you to be a master mechanic, you just need to be good enough. So rather than trying to be "pretty good" at 10 things, you should strive to be world class / "extraordinarily good" at 1 or maybe 2 things and leave the rest between "not a clue" and "passable".

The author's call isn't to cloister yourself away but to choose not to pursue things at length that aren't what you want to focus on. You can learn to fix a specific problem, you just shouldn't spend your time going down the rabbit hole learning how to fix every problem of every car unless that is your chosen focus.

I use to do all my own car repairs and oil changes when I was younger and had more time.

Now I am more partial to Naval’s saying about how you value your time and picking an absurdly high hourly number.

I have felt very much like this in the past, but no so much any more. .. my thinking is:

Some things are just part of the responsibility of being a grown up. Home maintenance, driver for children, doing taxes, etc. These are your baseline priorities that you don't get to choose.

Some of these sound like they occupy a rotating priority slot. House and car purchases do take a big commitment and require prioritization (especially if you build) but they are temporarily a priority. It is usually your choice to make these a priority, and they are rare.

Keeping a smaller priority list means saying 'no' to more things too, like being 'tech support geek for wifi and computer issues' or vehicle maintenance. These priorities are fully under your control.

Not to mention that some of these things get easier once you have the skills for them. E.g. I've been buying my own health insurance on the open market since I was 22 - now in my early 40s, it takes me maybe an hour or two to fully compare a handful of policies and choose the best one for me and my family (even doing calculations, etc). This is vs having to immerse myself in it for a whole evening (4-5 hrs) and then agonize about it for the next week or so like I used to do back in the day (and only for myself)

There's also the risk management aspect if the projects are likely to fail. Aka "don't put all your eggs in one basket". Or, at least, consider the risks carefully.

This is most certainly true when it comes to investments. Yes, you could put 100% of your savings in an index fund and forget about it, but that seems extreme, and also you have to live somewhere, so instead of paying rent and living in a non-ideal place you can't customize, you might as well buy a home that's a better fit for your family and has upside potential (and yes, no matter what people say, buying a house is most certainly an investment, a large one and potentially a bad one, but an investment nonetheless).

So now you have at least two big investment baskets that you really should watch carefully, on top of your job, and all those other life things that, as mentioned by another commenter, do get easier once you've done them a few times (like picking a health plan or knowing the basics about car maintenance), but each one has a learning curve and change with technology or policy. And it's a very long list.

This is a great post. The author bridges together multiple loosely related, well understood concepts into a coherent whole with a simple conclusion; focus on just a few (1-3) things and do them well. It presents reasoning for concepts we understand so well; first and second systems, contextual boundaries, tight scope.

Highly recommended read.

I liked this post, although I didn't quite agree with all of it. I find that the explore/exploit model is a variation of what I tend to do automatically. I've discovered that I live in phases. I will go 6 months of playing a game in my spare time, then seem to lose interest (organically) and take interest in one of my other hobbies. Motorcycles, robotics, programming. Maybe I'll get bored and reinstall everything in my home lab. Maybe I'll get bored and check the valves on my motorcycle. And during those adventures I'll usually learn something new, or hone some existing skills. For me this is organic. I'm aware of it, I've studied it to understand it, and now I just let it guide me. I've found that letting go of the anxiety of missed opportunity is much more valuable to me than trying to prioritize everything in my life. You cannot be the actor, the producer, and the director of your own play, else the play will undoubtedly be terrible.

I recommend reading "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck" by Mark Manson. It explores the concepts of this blog post thoroughly and gives a great perspective. One of the biggest takeaways, for me, was "if everything is sacred, then nothing can be sacred."

The most valuable minute I've ever watched on this topic via Jony Ive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VV7cZB7xqks

This "algorithmically deciding what to focus on (exploration/exploitation)" idea is also discussed in the following book:

Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions (2016)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25666050-algorithms-to-l...

I love being a novice at things though. I am fairly bad at a large variety of things, but I let myself explore those, or at least try and fail. When my son kept coming home with holes in his pants I bought a basic sewing kit, leveraged some old knowledge from home economic class, and just assumed the process of poorly fixing his pants was not magical and went for it. I have run into similar things countless times. Dropped a laptop, learned to fix a screen. Had a problem requiring CV, learned how to use some basic openCV to solve my problem. Got invited to play Pickleball, learned me some basic Pickleball.

I have always heard if you want to slow life down, experience new things. Maybe I am just not a 1-2 focus thing kind of guy, but I feel like life inherently pulls us in many places and with so much to learn and do it is OK to be a novice at many things too.

It's interesting when he talks about compounding focus. Feels like you could compare focus compounding to investment compounding. Isn't investment compounding best when you diversify? In other words, isn't unfocused compounding better than focused compounding? Maybe just do a bunch of things with intensity and stop pretending you know what's best to focus on? He talks about that with the 2/3 and 1/3 approaches, but I'm not sure I would know when to switch and start focusing. Maybe that is my life challenge.

I enjoyed this post

> Find people who understand things better than you and read what they have to say.

How though? As author points out where hopelessly blind to our own wrong mental models & perceived reality

Books. I know that at the age of internet, books might sound "slow" but for many a topic, specially core and fundamentals of it, books are great.

> How though? As author points out where hopelessly blind to our own wrong mental models & perceived reality

I think it's difficult, but mentorship comes to mind. For me, a really good tutor when I was at university helped me see the flaws in my mental models.

This is great but what about people older than university age? Why should anybody bother with me, a nobody? Do I need to offer them monetary compensation to get advice? If so, why not just buy books?

Mentorship is not typically paid for, and books can't interact with you.

Our society is so fractured and individualized. We think we have to offer money for everything. We used to have academic societies, social clubs, and many more communal spaces that are all a shell of their former self or just filled with the older generation that valued things like that. Our generations mantra is "I hate people". We live in large congested cities and don't truly know our neighbors. Problem stems from here. You are only a "nobody" (you're not btw, that's a lie) because you haven't bothered to become a somebody to someone.

Difficult problem to solve, for sure.

This reminds me of the book Little Bets.

It mentions cities being hubs of creativity.

I think of Wendel Berry. He writes on the decline of and importance of community and mutual shared understandings. Need to Be Whole is his latest gem.

> Do I need to offer them monetary compensation to get advice? If so, why not just buy books?

A person is likely to be far more interactive than a book. ;)

I have realised that when the ratio of the upvotes to the number of comments for a post on HN is high, the probability of the post being good is high.

This one is a good example.

The most pervasive VR headset is that of money and abuse. You can tell Henrik also has that one firmly pulled down over his head when he mentions the cake story. The reason she could not eat cake is that the cake was violent. The reason Elon can do more is because he pays very hard working people fake money that he receives for free. Privilege is violence. Money is war.

"Every day, deep into winter, I’d walk down to the water and dive from the cliffs."

I'm way more interested in this. Is it dangerous? How cold we talking? How fit is this author? This sounds pretty serious!

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