An Unreasonable Amount of Time | Hacker News Reader

An Unreasonable Amount of Time

allenpike.com

545 pointsmemalign89 comments

This was a pleasant surprise and a pleasant read. Its message reminds me of the words of Shunryu Suzuki:

> As to progress -- we don’t know how much progress we made, actually, but if you practice it you will realize -- some day you will realize that our progress is not -- it is not possible to make rapid, extraordinary progress. Even though you try very hard, you cannot actually make progress. The progress you make is always little by little. It is like -- to go through fog. You don’t know when you get wet, but if you just walk through fog you will be wet, little by little, even though you don’t know -- it is not like a shower.

> When you go out when it is showering you will feel, ‘Oh, that’s terrible!”. It is not so bad but when you get wet by fog it is very difficult to dry yourself. This is how we make progress. So actually there is not need to worry about your progress. Just to do it is the way. It is, maybe, like to study language. Just repeating, you will master it. You cannot do it all of a sudden. This is how we practice, especially Soto way, is to do it little by little. To make progress little by little. Or we do not even mind, we do not expect to make progress, just to do it is our way. The point is to do it with sincerity in each moment. That is the point. There should not be Nirvana besides our practice.

Source: https://www.shunryusuzuki.com/detail1?ID=80

My favorite imagery of this idea comes from the last two stanzas of a poem:

    For while the tired waves, vainly breaking
       Seem here no painful inch to gain,
    Far back through creeks and inlets making,
       Comes silent, flooding in, the main.

    And not by eastern windows only,
       When daylight comes, comes in the light,
    In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly,
       But westward, look, the land is bright.

— Arthur Hugh Clough https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43959/say-not-the-str...

You’ve just introduced me to a good poem. Thanks!

After the magnificent concert one patron of the arts gushed to the virtuoso "oh, I would gladly trade half my life to play as well as you could!" The virtuoso replied after a moment's thought, "that's precisely what it cost!"

I can't help but feel like our modern society has sadly become the opposite of what this quote is talking about. Rather than slow and accepting, we're all about doing things fast and efficiently and betterment at all costs. The growth mindset, get up and grind, etc etc. Can't you practice faster? Learn faster? Put in more time? Even the most a human can reasonably do is never enough nowadays. High achievement is the new table stakes. IMO it's time for our society to take a hike and allow us to return to the spirit of the quote you've shared.

I'm fortunate enough to live in kinda nowhere land considering, so this is from the perspective of nowhere land (people with space and nature etc).

I was hoping that the large COVID response in this country at the start of it all would finally get people to breathe, slow, and all that you mention. For a while , around my location, you could see life almost returning to a more connected to life, life.

When things settled down, nothing much seemed to stick. The rat race restarted the grid is good to go, and the pace ever more frantic.

People can, will, do, and should do whatever it is that makes them live their fulfilled life, 100%.

I just hope they do it for themselves, not for others. Would be a shame.

I did not post this earlier because what the post says and what I am going quote are not exactly same. Time on Progress-craft/ Problem Solving. But maybe at some level of abstraction, the idea is same.

Quoting from 'The Road Less Traveled' by M. Soctt Peck.[0]

Section on Problem-Solving and Time:

> At the age of thirty-seven I learned how to fix things. Prior to that time almost all my attempts to make minor plumbing repairs, mend toys or assemble boxed furniture according to the accompanying hieroglyphical instruction sheet ended in confusion, failure and frustration. Despite having managed to make it through medical school and support a family as a more or less successful executive and psychiatrist, I considered myself to be a mechanical idiot. I was convinced I was deficient in some gene, or by curse of nature lacking some mystical quality responsible for mechanical ability. Then one day at the end of my thirty-seventh year, while taking a spring Sunday walk, I happened upon a neighbor in the process of re-pairing a lawn mower. After greeting him I remarked, "Boy, I sure admire you. I've never been able to fix those kind of things or do anything like that." My neighbor, without a moment's hesitation, shot back, "That's because you don't take the time."...

> The issue is important, because many people simply do not take the time necessary to solve many of life's intellectual, social or spiritual problems, just as I did not take the time to solve mechanical problems...

> And this is precisely the way that so many of us approach other dilemmas of day-to-day living. Who among us can say that they unfailingly devote sufficient time to analyzing their children's problems or tensions within the family? Who among us is so self-disciplined that he or she never says resignedly in the face of family problems, "It's beyond me"?...

> Actually, there is a defect in the approach to problem-solving more primitive and more destructive than impatiently in-adequate attempts to find instant solutions, a defect even more ubiquitous and universal. It is the hope that problems will go away of their own accord.

>Problems do not go away. They must be worked through or else they remain, forever a barrier to the growth and development of the spirit.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M._Scott_Peck#The_Road_Less_Tr...

Practice now, realize later, feels deeply dualistic to me.

He’s saying practise is realisation, which is a concept developed by Dogen, the founder of Soto Zen

that’s not what the story says. in any case, the point is to explain, in terms of dualistic if-then logic, that the if (you practice now) and then (you will wake up) are a single non-dual thing. but to communicate in in terms which make sense to the dual, if-then mind, one needs to use dualistic language.

Isn't it just saying, a gain realized from compound interest over long-enough time is crazy yet short term gains is practically zero, yet total gain is anything but zero, and also there really isn't a magical zero effort quick and easy jackpot skill gain IRL

It isn't. Because when they put it much more sensuous & yet concrete terms, than the one of numbers & cents, the reader's mind might be primed to apply the idea to more general problems if & whenever they do arise, such as the problem of finding the right problem to solve.

I imagine he would say to practice is to realize and to realize is to practice.

Wow. The fog example is fantastic.

...Reminds me of how I ruined my old wallet, hiking thirty miles on a foggy day in Algonquin Provincial Park.

Great, useful article. Remember: the same principle holds in the world of the psyche. Those people walking around, seeming effortlessly happy? Unless if they're little children, a horrendous amount of effort has been invested to their inner peace. It took me years to realize that. Being envious is much easier than being humble and diligent with getting one's shit together.

My wish for 2025 is for massive, decentralized, slow yet steady psychological magic. HNY, HN.

A good and often useful generality, however it's important to recognize how vast the difference can be in the amount of energy needed to achieve inner peace from one person to the next.

For example, I had absent drug addict parents, was instead raised by extremely abusive and restrictive guardians. I was homeless since 16 and I spent my 20's undertaking the self-actualization that I should have been doing in my teens but lacked the safety, stability, autonomy and financial requirements.

Meanwhile, my typical peer has a functioning family unit, and has enjoyed a relatively struggle-free existence. I also had to overcome disabilities such as ADHD, which has had an enormous negative impact on my life and mental health.

I'm not jealous of anyone, and I love and support my peers who were provided more opportunities and didn't waste them. But it's quite clear to me that the level of effort that I and the average US adult had to expend in order to achieve inner peace is off by magnitudes. Cognizance of this fact is important.

I see your point. I've had my fair share of trouble as well. Talking about this stuff on HN after the storm has passed, from a financially stable place, is a luxury on its own.

Nevertheless, I don't see any value on acknowledging the delta between me and peers that happened to be luckier. It'd be useful were I on the other side: for instance, if I hadn't seen my father sink into dementia, if he was still with me, I'd better keep reminding myself of the importance and blessing of growing alongside a functional, healthy dad.

But now... Thoughts like "I have struggled more than these guys" seem dangerous to me. Whenever I've taken them seriously I've ended up using them as justification for the next tiny act of self-destruction.

>>...the next tiny act of self-destruction

A world of truth in that phrase

It all really comes down to the tiny acts of building one's self or wasting the time... Yes a (non-wasteful) strategy & goal is key, but it comes down to how we spend our seconds...

It's not about people who have already gone through it, or about yourself. It's about people who are still going through it, and how you treat them. For most people, the delta isn't (just) used to justify their own self-destruction, but to justify their cruelty to others. You never know what battles people are fighting. And while it's true that someone can do a lot of damage to themselves, that pales in comparison to what a group of others who don't understand their struggle can do to them.

Yeah, I should have been clearer that my intent is that the delta should be used to increase empathy, not decrease it. Anyone out there could be dealing with anything.

I've lashed out at people before while under a great deal of stress. I've been the recipient of such as well. I've seen and experienced what poverty, illness and depression can do to the mind, how it warps habits and motivations. How things that some people might see as no-brainers for fixing a situation might simply not be options for others at that moment, at least not without assistance. A good support network makes all the difference in someone's life.

There is some truth to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and in addition to not being jealous of those dealt a better hand, we should be supportive and attentive to those who weren't, and resist applying our own heuristics to their lives.

> Meanwhile, my typical peer has a functioning family unit, and has enjoyed a relatively struggle-free existence.

Are you sure about this? I know that I enjoyed a relatively struggle-free existence, and assumed that most other people did. But, whenever I have taken the time to get to know someone really well, I have found that they had struggles beyond anything I had to handle, and that do not reveal themselves at all until you know them very well.

That's a valid question, but I don't know how to answer it without going into great depth rehashing stuff I've said on here before as well as stuff I haven't. Suffice to say that my Adverse Childhood Experiences score is quite high, and that my life has been marked by a series of unfortunate experiences which I have found myself unable to relate with the vast majority of my peers over.

And I have tried. The older I get, the more it just looks like PTSD when I do try and relate with people. That doesn't mean that each of them haven't had their share of struggles, it just seems like a magnitude or more less for the majority of folk I know.

The difference in current struggle has dropped off a bit in the last few years because life has been getting rough for everyone outside the wealthy class, but the majority of my life was absolute hell. The first time I put a gun in my mouth and sat with a finger on the trigger, I was nine years old.

A good example (in my twisted mind) is the folks that set up concerts and sports games.

I have a friend, who runs setup of major venues. Like, stadiums and conference centers, for big-time events (thousands of people).

The deal is, that a whole lot of moving parts, need to come together, for one event, and there can be no screwups[0].

Takes a lot of planning, prep work, validation, and, most importantly, experience (my friend is in his sixties), as there are bound to be curveballs, and newbies aren't very good at handling out-of-band events.

Not many people can actually do it, but almost everyone thinks they can do it.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOSDrT_eDhk

> Not many people can actually do it, but almost everyone thinks they can do it.

I think so, too!

I organise a yearly two week long event for about a hundred people. I do it for free. I have a couple volunteers helping me. I believe that doing this as a job, with heaps of money and teams of paid professionals isn't all that astonishing...

A week-long conference is a long one. Three people is a small team. Kudos!

I have been involved with setting up weekend-long or one-day-long events, for decades.

A lot of what people think of as "technology" is actually this knowledge. Your friend has lots of experience. There's people they know and trust to do certain tasks. Those people know other people who know how to solve this or that problem. They know their gear and are constantly experimenting with new gear and getting to know it.

You could gather all the "technology", all the equipment, all the cables and boxes and speakers and ropes and everything else, and hand it off to a smart, motivated young crew of complete newbies, and the "techology" wouldn't work. The show would not make it, and it's possible people would even get badly hurt or killed trying.

This is the real catastrophe when a team gets nuked and the jobs sent somewhere else, anywhere else, doesn't even matter. You can transfer the code, you can transfer the infrastructure, but you can't transfer the lived experience. Our so-called elite managers understand that this is why they can't be replaced but lack the courtesy to extend that understanding to the people who work for them, that everyone everywhere who does anything non-trivial ends up building these same networks of lived experience that are the real ability to achieve.

Putting on a show isn't about knowing that steel is made of carbon-infused iron; it's all the networks of lived experience that have developed to the level that they can achieve something like a major stadium show, safely.

Yup.

The term “tribal knowledge,” is used as a pejorative, in tech architecture, but I have found it to be the “magic ingredient” to really successful endeavors.

I worked for a corporation that is over a hundred years old, and is absolutely dripping with “tribal knowledge.” They regularly accomplish stuff that is considered nearly impossible.

But “tribal knowledge” basically means that you need to keep employees around for a while, and also, stay at a job for a while, which is sort of anathema, in today’s tech culture.

I see this misunderstanding all the time. A manager (people manager or project manager) gets bent out of shape because person X can do something and person Y with the same job title can't do it. Sometimes this is for bad reasons: poor documentation practices, or person X protecting their turf or their job security by hoarding information. But just as often it's because person X has a ton of relevant knowledge and experience that is a great asset to the company, and person Y maybe has less experience, or their experience and knowledge are concentrated in a different area. Often the fault is with the people or project manager, who is failing in their responsibility to understand and manage the company's talent effectively.

Yup. The wrong people do idiotic things like buy the wrong type of UV bulbs and fry people’s retinas making them blind.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4022D0C2D4AB65BC

"Derren Brown, a British illusionist and mentalist, showcased a horse racing betting experiment called "The System" in a 2008 Channel 4 special. In this program, he demonstrated a method that appeared to guarantee winning bets on horse races. The process began with Brown anonymously sending a woman named Khadisha a series of correct predictions for five consecutive races, leading her to believe in the infallibility of his system. Subsequently, she was encouraged to stake a substantial sum on a sixth race.

The underlying mechanism of "The System" involved initially contacting 7,776 individuals, dividing them into six groups, and assigning each group a different horse in a six-horse race. After each race, only the group with the winning horse progressed, while the others were eliminated. This process was repeated through successive races, reducing the number of participants exponentially, until only Khadisha remained, having experienced an unbroken series of wins."

That's a version of a classic financial-advisor scam.

It operates on a similar mechanism: a set of predictions is sent to large number of marks. Roughly half the predictions are in the money, the set of marks is reduced with each successive round to those who's previous "predictions" were accurate. At the end of the cycle, there are only a small number of marks left, but they're given the option to subscribe to future predictions for a handsome sum. Of course there are no further predictions....

There's also the apocryphal physician's trick of predicting a baby's gender (back when this wasn't trivially determinable in advance). The doctor would verbally give their prediction, and write it down in an envelope. Occasionally the parents would recall a different answer, but opening the envelope would confirm the gender of the infant.

The trick of course was that was was written was the opposite of what was said. When what was said matched the delivery the envelope wasn't opened, so the secret was safe.

This is based on an old scam, the core idea isn't Derren Brown's.

But what a nice execution. I really liked how be complimented the core idea with a bit of sleight of hand in the last episode, turning the mark from a victim into a winner.

it bugs me to an unreasonable extent that he finished one person short of 7777.

The system and the fact that he executed it though is genius.

7776 is 6^5, that's the amount he needed to find a single correct 'winner' since each race would only have 1/6 chance.

7776 is 6^5. The exactly right number for the trick to work.

> it bugs me to an unreasonable extent that he finished one person short of 7777

Perhaps (likely?) he himself should be counted too, so 7777 in total.

Along a similar theme, Jacob Kaplan-Moss wrote an essay in 2021 entitled "Embrace the Grind," also quoting Penn & Teller:

> I often have people newer to the tech industry ask me for secrets to success. There aren’t many, really, but this secret — being willing to do something so terrifically tedious that it appears to be magic — works in tech too.

https://jacobian.org/2021/apr/7/embrace-the-grind/ Discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26747305

I don't know, having spent a third of of my life on a single project almost daily, not all that time deliberate and most of it ADD-driven problem avoidance, I ended up inflicting upon myself a personal hell I have only begun to comprehend the depths of. When the interest finally waned I didn't feel I had enough to show for it and every other aspect of my life suffered in ways that will take years to make up for.

At this point all I learned was to fear the next thing, obliterating most of my hyperspecific interests if I'm just going to lead myself down the path of a hermit again another N years. I get out instead but it doesn't make me feel much better anymore. It took too much out of me.

My daughter went from being a walk-on novice in a sport to being selected to a US national U23 team. 1) the amount of time and effort she devoted to training was simply astonishing to me as a veteran of Div III and club sports. 2) but along the way she had the benefit of very, very good coaching.

The effort it turns out is only part of the equation. Directing the effort into the most productive avenues is seemingly nearly as important.

Imagine if the magic trick was:

1. They pour a large bowl of rice onto a table

2. They reveal the exact number of grains

Would this feel exciting as a card buried under the ground? No

Does this still require a lot of effort to count every grain? Yes

Applying a huge amount of effort doesn’t equal achieving the desired result (in this case the suspense, surprise and magical element)

The direction one is going is often even more important than the effort applied

The problem is that it requires the same effort to verify that the magician isn't just lying, and if there's some way to effortlessly verify the number, then that same method could have been used by the magician ahead of time. To capture the sense of something magical, the reveal has to be immediately obvious, but in a way that (seems like it) can't have been used by the magician to set things up.

The magic lies not just in the effort itself but in how it is directed. Teller’s months of work burying boxes weren’t random. Sustaining long-term effort toward an uncertain payoff requires more than discipline—it demands resilience and a reimagining of gratification. The real magic, perhaps, lies not in the final trick, but in cultivating a mindset where the process itself becomes fulfilling, where the act of burying boxes is embraced as a craft, not just a means to an end.

It's like being on the winning upward spiral is not hard. What is hard is turning around downward spiral into upward one in context of uncertain outcome.

Though, would the burrying have any meaning without the reveal? Its only purpose was to be used in the end. I have a hard time seeing the meaning of the burrying itself.

Art gratis art.

Some get their rocks off interfacing with the relationship between their art and those who engage with it. Others are entirely satisfied with the process of making art itself. The former is an externalized process, the latter is internalized.

Different strokes for different folks, but you can put me in a box with no human interaction and a keyboard, and I will find no end of entertainment through self-exploration via the artistic process.

Having burried a bunch of boxes with cards inside is art?

I can see the artistic value of the full magic act, but does that make a tool used in the act to itself be art on its own?

Is the bow used by a violin player in itself a piece of art? Perhaps it could be. But if it's burried?

It's art if the artist decides it is. You don't have to agree with them, but art is not some objective form you can define, it's entirely subjective.

> Is the bow used by a violin player in itself a piece of art

A pencil is a work of art.

It's art if the viewer decides it is

What the artist thinks or desires is often irrelevant. (Edited)

And what committee decided this? Who gave them the authority to decide how an artist should feel about their own work?

The end goal is still the organizing principle. The target to relentlessly pursue.

But discovering the path to the goal also has meaning.

Every little step down the path, the surprising things that are easy, the unexpected things that are hard, is worth celebrating. They are all taking us where we want to go! The ups and downs are the path.

And the path is a teacher.

It is like any goal attainment. Like when you call you broadband provider to connect you, which has little meaning until you get to work from home.

Steve Martin has said similar things about making creating and delivering his work his goal rather than getting laughs. Interesting to think about.

And also being able to eat, sleep, and socialize adequately in the meantime.

Except for software engineering where doing for 25 years doesn't make me feel like I am doing magic. It feels like the art keeps moving and I need to keep up. Like the card tricks I did back when are now obsolete so I need to learn human cannonball as table stakes.

I have the opposite experience all the time, perhaps because I've spent a lot of time with early-career programmers. I recognise a problem and say "oh, that's a maximum flow problem", then formulate and solve it in a few lines and they are amazed in similar ways as Penn describes. They're like "how do you know all these things"? And it's just like the buried cards. I've taken all this time to read books on algorithms and solve Advent of code and so on, so my whole mind is filled with these buried cards.

Compare yourself to a person with no experience in software engineering at all and you will quickly understand how many you have, too.

Another great person said something like: sometimes 5 years of experience is just 1 year repeated five times.

I'd guess, less than 1% of engineers in the industry have an opportunity to learn something drastically new at least once a year. Most are doing the same in terms of engineering and just occasionally learn new (not better) tools (that's the only thing that pops in my mind in response to your observation about art moving forward).

On the other hand, considering your 25 yrs of experience, I'd guess just you understanding networking or compilation/linking process will make you look like a magician to 99% of SW engineers outside of your bubble.

I think 99% of what I learn is temporary intracacies of how closed source codebases work lol!

I am doing some deeper dives on reusable knowledge though now. On my list is learn etcd (at a code level) for some reason I am drawn to it. It feels like a microcosm of what bigger complex systems like Kubernetes would be like.

It's important to keep in mind that doing magic doesn't feel like doing magic from the inside. Our own competence becomes invisible to us. You know the details you didn't get right. You know the tradeoffs you've had to make. You know the decisions you've made based on incomplete information. It takes someone else to be in awe of you doing something they wouldn't even know how to begin learning to do. It takes someone else to know in their gut that what you're doing is great because they themselves have dedicated a lot of time to the craft.

> I am certain I’ve seen Penn & Teller describe this trick, but can’t find a citation online. They wrote about a similar trick in their book How to Play In Traffic, but let me know if you know where they explain the “buried underground” version.

I also remember watching Penn (I assume) explaining this concept and it's been living in my head ever since. Does anyone know the video?

I've definitely heard it too - the only place I can think of is an interview Penn did with Tim Ferriss (https://tim.blog/2020/01/09/penn-jillette/) but my scratchings from that episode don't include this particular anecdote so maybe it wasn't that.

The way I heard him describe it was "To any normal person this would seem like a totally unreasonable amount of time, EXCEPT to a magician [because that's their job]", or something like that.

EDIT: Maybe it was actually an anecdote from his movie Tim's Vermeer? Been a long time since I saw it...

I think I recall reading about this concept in a magazine article written by Teller. He was describing a trick performed on a talk show (maybe Letterman?) that included releasing cockroaches. He described all the research and testing they did to find a type of cockroach that would move at the correct speed (not too fast or too slow). I think about this when I read about how tricks are done. Like when a girl is instantly teleported from a box on the stage to the upper balcony of a theater. It just never occurs to the average person that the magician would go through the trouble of hiring and paying twin (or even triplet) girls just to pull off that one trick in an act.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/teller-reveals-h...

https://youtu.be/gnEGedfTrzc?si=bqbMx34WORfLWxac&t=143

There's a version of that trick in this video.

The footnotes request a lead on P&T explaining this trick.

I’m a bit of a P&T fan, and I’m pleased to be able to share a fairly obscure old video where they do indeed explain this trick. I’m glad I remembered it, and managed to find it again.

https://youtu.be/gnEGedfTrzc?si=ci7omkG-4zCUmIPc

Cool, thanks for that.

Derren Brown also used a similar idea in his TV special 'The System' [0], though with a darker twist. I'm sure the idea goes way back.

0 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_APYUcwINQo

That's not the same trick, though it has similarities.

Hmm, I think 'fail fast' and 'embrace the grind' are popular and somewhat contradictory advices. Which is better? I think 'fail fast' is (or was?) a bit overhyped so I tend to err on the side of 'embrace the grind'. But obviously the art is in deciding which one to follow in a case by case basis. Working on your dream game for years only to find absolutely no traction is not a good place to be in, but constantly chasing low-effort ideas without any 'moat' can be also fruitless. Moat usually comes with time, effort, and resources invested.

I wonder if this isn't the same as explore vs. exploit.

Fail fast = use it when in exploration mode. Dig here, dig there until you find something of worth

Embrace the grind = once you have found something worthwhile, speed a lot of time

Maybe "embrace the grind" encapsulates "fail fast"? Success rarely comes from failing just once—most of the time, repeated failure is part of the grind.

fail fast is about making money as a startup, embrace the grind is about improving something hard to improve. Startups rarely care about deeper aspects of quality.

Fail fast is a pretty trash idea, if you exclusively mean don't be afraid to do new things, then I'm all for it. If you're careless with the idea, as most of the people who embrace it seem to be. It means do something bad to your users.

I'm gonna steal (badly) a quote from superfastmatt here (before I go find the video and correct the quote)

> The motto of hech companies is "fail fast", the motto of companies like NASA might be "never fail", the motto of Boeing is just "fail"

I think it perfectly highlights the dichotomy between good engineering, and bad.

edit: yeah, his delivery is so much better than my atrocious attempt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQ867EDWcls it's the very start of the video, and his entire channel is amazing and hilarious.

the real quote: Tech companies have a mantra of "fail fast, fail often", This is in contrast to an organization like NASA who could have the phrase "try not to fail", or Boeing who prefers the simpler "fail". While NASA would prefer to do things methodically making sure to check all the boxes along the way; SpaceX would rather just take an educated guess build something strap a bunch of sensors to it and see what happens. You can learn a lot very quickly the second way, I also do things this way but not because I'm trying to disrupt any paradigms it's because it's just more fun to do it that way [...]

Good quote from the article: “Eventually, years in, this will culminate in overnight success.”

That’s a big reason that I spend so much time developing modules.

Most of my published code consists of SPM modules.

I test the bejeezus out of each one, and some, I never use, but it’s worth it, to me, to have their functionality available, when I need it. It’s not particularly practical or efficient. It’s very effective, though.

But WFM. YMMV.

I don’t get paid for the work I do, and seldom have schedule pressure. This allows me to deliver really high-Quality results, fairly quickly. Also, since I’m usually working alone, it allows me to ship rather significant-scope deliverables.

>Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.

This is kind of my secret to everything I do. I'm not super skilled in anything short term. My main talent is just the endurance to do something and concentrate on something for a long time. Running, Elden Ring, investing, gardening, my former career as a scientist. You can get pretty far with just grit, and it is more rare than you would think.

https://www.nosmallendeavor.com/angela-duckworth-is-grit-the...

This idea is presented in The Prestige as well. Magic just being the ability to sacrifice, and then guard the secret

The more challenging part for some people (certainly for me) is what to spend an unreasonable amount of time on.

consuming content

I admit to not understand how the trick was done when I read the beginning of the article. I of course realized it was a trick, it's just that it didn't occur to me how it was done. Then I continued reading and of course the resolution was obvious, but only after I had read it. Now, of course, I can't unlearn it. And the reason I didn't get it was exactly the point put forward in the article: The title of this thread.

I have invested quite an unreasonable-amount-of-time rendering fractals, (just on 1 node so far) myself, mostly only at 2k (square) pixels but really quite a few at 16k (16384x16384 pixels) and I'm also hoping to figure out how to do some magic with these images one day!

Mind sharing some of your results?

Certainly, the best way to browse these days is on Flickr I think:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/57934548@N02/

There's also this old blogger blog where I waffle-on about them:

https://ultraiterator.blogspot.com/

And here's one example of a 16k rendering:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1g1B6pVennldNsswyiiA2qOsy2Nv...

If anyone wants to do a print of any of these, definitely let me know (email on profile)! I will be happy to do a 16k render too if I haven't done the one you like at 16k yet!

This principle (Make the secret a lot more trouble than the trick seems worth)is among others that Teller discusses in this great article: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/teller-reveals-h...

These same techniques are used by politicians and others, too.

I have silly question to anyone here who is willing to answer

I truly understand it takes unreasonable amount of time and dedicated focused effort to get good at something. But why is there any explanation for it? I know about the traditional neuro-sci explanation of myelin[1].

So my question is, is there any research on how to reduce this time? Like we all know life is short and as human we have interest in many things and we should specialize and try to go deep in one craft.But is there any way of getting closed to that master level performance in short practice-perfomance cycle

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4261922/

That thought keeps me motivated to continuously work on a project of mine. That one day, maybe years from now, it will reach that point where it is good enough to get the ball rolling. Only a few, which where there from the beginning, will be able to imagine the efforts that had to go into it.

If you knew the total amount of effort required, you'd never get started. By going in blind, and just keep doing it, you will find that you'd accomplish something you thought you couldn't.

I first read this quote in the book 'Monk Mode': https://bitfieldconsulting.com/books/monk-mode

It's in the context of learning crafts, and the main point is that many people are discouraged because they don't seem to get quick results from their practice—but nor does anyone else! When you have a good sense of how much time is required to get good at something, your expectations will be more in line with reality.

Regarding Teller's trick, I'm waiting for the revelation that a letter from long ago from the late, great Amazing Kreskin had given the exact date and time of his demise.

Reminds me of: https://jacobian.org/2021/apr/7/embrace-the-grind/

The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne

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