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<h1 id="post-title">The Hacker Way</h1>
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<p><strong>Entry Question</strong>: How come hackers are so good at what they do?</p>
<hr />
<p><strong>Note</strong>: “<a href>Hacker</a>” in the sense that PG uses (not a security cracker).</p>
<h1 id="the-hacker-way-to-greatness">The Hacker Way to Greatness</h1>
<p>The Hacker Way is to do the action for which you feel Max Motivation at each point.</p>
<p>Now, you’re deeply in contact with the market forces of Motivation.</p>
<p><strong>Corollary</strong>: As a Hacker, you’re never bored.</p>
<p>Boredom is your greatest enemy.</p>
<p><strong>Corollary</strong>: You will laugh at limitations and bureaucracy.</p>
<p>And you can afford to, cos you have the tremendous power of Max Motivation on your side. All resistance melts in the face of Awesome Motivation. You have no restraints. You can do anything you set your mind to, man (as the fellow said).</p>
<p><strong>Corollary</strong>: You will be really good at whatever you choose to do.</p>
<p>Cos you will have epic motivation. All the other stuff - Deliberate Practice, coaching, etc. will follow automatically.</p>
<p><strong>Corollary</strong>: If you tell yourself “No” too often, or keep being rigid about your “plans” for the future and about what you “should” do… you will probably kill your Motivation.</p>
<p>You will lose touch with Motivation.</p>
<p>Let go sometimes. Let delight pull you.</p>
<p><strong>The Best Corollary</strong>: You will be <em>super-excited</em> all the time.</p>
<p>Sound familiar, SPK? That’s me! I was always excited about Emacs or Linux or Lisp or Haskell or Unit Testing or whatever latest awesome thing I had discovered about programming.</p>
<p>Similarly, the good programmers I know have a nearly unhealthy amount of love and passion for their favourite topics, whether it be competitive programming, or theoretical computer science, or Python, or whatever.</p>
<h1 id="x-motivation">X-Motivation</h1>
<p>The main condition of being a Hacker is what we might call Xtreme Motivation (X-Motivation).</p>
<p>X-Motivation: You <em>have</em> to stay true to your Motivations at all times.</p>
<p>It’s not optional.</p>
<p>The only things that can get in the way are Ethical Injunctions (when you’re doing something highly unethical). Filter those out and then get out of the way!</p>
<p>It’s like Xtreme Ethics - Do the Right Thing and speak with complete Honesty at all times, no matter what. There, you protect the connection between you and the Truth.</p>
<p>Here, you protect the connection between you and Motivation.</p>
<h1 id="the-hacker-deal">The Hacker Deal</h1>
<p>What’s so hard about that?</p>
<p>If it’s as easy as just following your instincts (aka Max Motivation) at all times, why isn’t everyone a Hacker? Why isn’t everyone achieving greatness?</p>
<p>Is following your instincts actually hard?</p>
<p>Firstly, you get in your own way. You can’t even see the future with any clarity, and yet you wanna make “plans” that strait-jacket you.</p>
<p>Secondly, conformity. To truly follow <em>your</em> instincts, you <em>have</em> to go against the pack a lot.</p>
<p>What else is different about Hackers?</p>
<p>What is it about Hackers that normal people don’t have?</p>
<p>PG mentions the <a href>Hacker Deal</a>: You <em>never</em> have to work on boring projects and, in return, you’ll never allow yourself to do a <em>half-assed job</em>.</p>
<p>No boring projects ever => Excitement! Max Motivation at all times.</p>
<p>Never do a half-assed job => High Standards</p>
<p>There we have the other half of the Hacker Way to Greatness: High Standards</p>
<h1 id="theres-the-catch">There’s the Catch</h1>
<p>You knew there was a catch. There always is.</p>
<p>You can do whatever excites you most at each moment (Max Motivation), but the <em>only</em> condition is that you have to set yourself a very high standard in that area.</p>
<p>So, why don’t normal people do as well as hackers?</p>
<p>Because of the lack of high standards. They never get good enough to find the right next activities exciting. They get frustrated or bored and drop out.</p>
<p>??</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Much of success in life is about holding yourself to a high enough standard.</p>
<p>Eliezer Yudkowsky, <a href>Challenging the Difficult</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>So, everyone wants to do exciting stuff, exciting projects, but few want to hold themselves to the high standards that are necessary to gain the skill keep doing exciting projects.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Hacker Way: Follow your Instincts but hold yourself to a High Standard</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Plans are antithetical to the Hacker Way. They force you to work on possibly boring stuff and make you lose sight of other exciting projects. But, plans sound very reasonable. No need to think, too, once you’re on a plan. Go down that road and you are screwed.</p>
<hr />
<p>Note: Intelligence could be a big part of it too. I’m not too sure about this.</p>
<p>I don’t know if it’ll work for a not very intelligent person. But it will definitely work for people above a decent intelligence threshold.</p>
<h1 id="varieties">Varieties</h1>
<p>Intolerance for Boredom means you’re always seeking new stuff. You don’t want to do the same thing twice (or do something once it’s no longer exciting).</p>
<p>Let’s try out different values for Boredom Tolerance and Standards and see what we get.</p>
<ul>
<li><p>Boredom is ok + High Standards</p>
<p>Become crazy-good at something dumb.</p>
<p>Most of the stuff in the Guinness Book of World Records?</p></li>
<li><p>Boredom is ok + Low Standards</p>
<p>Stumble through life apparently half-dead.</p>
<p>Maybe many elderly people? People who aren’t considered very bright?</p></li>
<li><p>No to Boredom + Low Standards</p>
<p>Do random new easy stuff all the time.</p>
<p>Basically what every novelty-seeker in the world does. Look at what the average person on Facebook does. I think this includes a large part of the world, or maybe just mainly extroverts.</p>
<p>They will seek novelty, but it should be easy. They never take on hard stuff (“boring”).</p></li>
<li><p>No to Boredom + High Standards</p>
<p>The Hacker Way. The Way of highly creative people, I think.</p>
<p>The Hacker Way is novelty-seeking on steroids, with world-class high standards.</p></li>
</ul>
<h1 id="reaching-all-the-time">Reaching all the Time</h1>
<p>Consequence of High Standards: You spend more time and effort pursuing something than you would have.</p>
<p>Examples: spending 2-3 hours getting your essay right where you want it, spending the entire weekend refining your program and making it perfect, etc..</p>
<p>When you follow the Hacker Way, you <em>actually</em> seek out projects that stretch you. You work on those tasks that make you <a href>Reach</a>.</p>
<p>Else, it is so easy to cheat!</p>
<p>You might tell yourself that the “plan” requires you to start off with simple and easy (and mind-numbing) stuff so that you can “build it up” successfully.</p>
<p>You tell yourself that you’re starting off slowly to maintain your motivation and increase the difficult level later. But in reality, you’re just putting off working on the core of the problem, the stuff that will actually get you the results you want.</p>
<p>It’s hard to find anybody who generates and maintains insane motivation better than hackers. Maybe gamers, gamblers, and addicts.</p>
<p>I was aimlessly procrastinating for the whole month of October by sticking to simple stuff, telling myself that I was doing it to get motivation and that if I took on stuff that was too hard, I would get demotivated.</p>
<p>WRONG! That’s not how <a href>motivation</a> works.</p>
<p>Learn from the masters - the hackers. The moment I switched to the Hacker Way, I immediately found a Challenge! I had to Reach. I had to struggle. After nearly one month of no struggle and easy (boring) progress, I was suddenly forced to actually think and actually produce results.</p>
<h1 id="honestly-working-insanely-hard">Honestly Working Insanely Hard</h1>
<p><strong>Corollary</strong>: It is probably impossible to <em>honestly</em> keep working at the Edge of your abilities unless you have High Standards.</p>
<p>Else, you would just “try” to do something “beyond” your limits and rest satisfied in the knowledge that you at least tried.</p>
<p>When you start growing in skill, the easy tasks will become less interesting. There will a perverse kind of boredom in doing them - you will be aware at every second that this is not even scratching the surface of your abilities. But, it’s also much less work. You are guaranteed to finish these tasks quickly, whereas who knows how long the next hard problems will take.</p>
<p>There is a terrific battle here between effort and boredom. You can have low-effort and boredom or high-effort but insane excitement.</p>
<p>(TODO: I’m not sure of this. Can you back this up with the Motivation equation? What exactly is the tradeoff and when does it swing in favour of the low-effort task?)</p>
<p>Your mind will seek out easier, lower-effort tasks unless you <em>ban</em> easy tasks.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Boredom and Drudgery are Evil.</p>
<p>– Eric S Raymond, <a href>How to be a Hacker</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Not “undesirable”, not “less preferred”, <em>evil</em>.</p>
<p>Boredom is Public Enemy Number One for Hackers.</p>
<h1 id="best-laid-plans">Best-Laid Plans</h1>
<p><strong>Corollary of High Standards</strong>: Your best-laid plans will never take you to the pinnacle of Talent.</p>
<ul>
<li>Hard to <em>plan</em> for hard projects - too many unknowns</li>
<li>Easy to cheat by doing easy work but calling it a “hard” project</li>
<li>Hard to search for and do really hard projects unless you have an binding injunction that you <em>cannot</em> do Easy ones - your mind will always seek out loopholes.</li>
</ul>
<h1 id="the-path-to-insanely-high-skill">The Path to Insanely High Skill</h1>
<p><strong>Hypothesis</strong>: Hackers are on the Path of Maximum Growth</p>
<p>We know they keep reaching on every task. You never stay within your comfort zone. That right there is the <a href>sovereign path</a> to insanely high skill.</p>
<p>Don’t you need lots of repetition to build skill?</p>
<p>Yes. But this is a <a href>soft skill</a>, like skateboarding or running a company or composing music - you need variety and challenge. You need to build up flexibility. I would say hackers are right up there.</p>
<p>It is for the hard skills like playing music or singing or figure skating where you need insane repetitions of the same precise actions to burn it into your brain.</p>
<p>There are arguably more reaches in one <em>perfect</em> product than in ten half-assed ones.</p>
<p>There is lots more invisible work to get it from ok to awesome. It’s the difference between getting 90/100 on a math exam and getting 100/100 on the same one. Sure, it’s only 10 marks, but it takes an order of magnitude more skill (imho) to get there.</p>
<p>This means that doing the insane hard work of figuratively pushing your score from 90 to 100 will end up giving you great rewards. It’s the same for writing an ok program that barely passes the test cases vs refining it into the best goddamn possible program you can write. In the short run, the results would be pretty much the same. Your program would give the same output as the ok program. But over time, your skills will grow exponentially. You will be able to take on programming challenges that others dare not even touch.</p>
<p>That’s the Hacker Way to do it. Do insane work on each project making it reach high standards instead of flitting from project to project without actually pushing yourself past your edge!</p>
<h1 id="maximally-creative">Maximally Creative</h1>
<p>I think Hackers (i.e., people with very High Standards and Zero Tolerance for Boredom) are on the path of maximum creativity for humans.</p>
<p>Unless you <em>forbid</em> yourself from solving the <em>same</em> problem or from doing another project at the same level of difficulty, you will <em>never</em> end up doing Challenging Project after Challenging Project.</p>
<p>Imagine that: Hackers have, literally, never solved a problem <a href>twice</a>. Minimum boredom right there.</p>
<p>This mean Hackers are forced to think <em>new thoughts</em> all the time. Stale and safe methods just don’t survive on the fast-paced path of the Hacker. They are forced to apply their wits to come up with new solutions each time. That’s innovation right there.</p>
<p>(TODO: However, show that they are <em>maximally</em> creative. Compare this method to other methods used to become highly creative. Or are those methods part of the Hacker Way?)</p>
<p><strong>Corollary</strong>: This is why hackers generally look down at programmers in big companies.</p>
<p>They have committed to solving pretty much the same problem several times (as many times as management wants them to).</p>
<p>Boo! Boring!</p>
<p><strong>Corollary</strong>: This is why hackers (not just programmers, other independent workers like writers, designers, artists, etc.) have so much contempt for corporate workers and repetitive workers of any kind.</p>
<p>The question seems to be: How will you ever grow if you keep doing the same old thing everyday?</p>
<h1 id="the-extrapolation-fallacy">The Extrapolation Fallacy</h1>
<p>This means you should not feel guilty about having to spend three hours on one essay.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“But… how will I write 100 essays on all the topics I’m interested in if I go at this slow rate?”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>You won’t. Because you won’t have to.</p>
<p>The essential mistake here is that you extrapolate to the end using your current capabilities.</p>
<p>This is the most important mistake I’ve made so far in my life when I was planning to do something major (big mistake, I know).</p>
<p>Here’s how it goes: You currently take A amount of work (in time or resources) to make one unit of progress. For example, you take 2 hours to write a decent essay, you take 1.5 hours to solve a programming problem, etc..</p>
<p>You have a long way to go before you reach your desired skill level. You can see that. Say, around B units of progress before you reach there.</p>
<p>So, it seems to you that you will need to do (A x B) amount of work to get there.</p>
<p>And so, you feel you cannot tolerate any inefficiencies! You have to eliminate all wastage right now! OMG, OMG, intense pressure. You can’t let slip on your pressure right now, everything will be lost! (My biggest failure and the reason behind my constant stress)</p>
<p>Wrong! You won’t make it to the end using your current skills, nobody ever does. You don’t get there by doing a hundred times what you did so far. You get there by evolving into a person who can do the stuff needed to get there.</p>
<p>Time and again, I had thought that, <em>now</em> I know everything I need to get to the end. I have accumulated all the major insights I need. I just have to get down to it and do this stuff with 10x more intensity for 10x longer. That’s it. Then, I will get to my goal.</p>
<p>[TODO: This is the End of History Illusion]</p>
<p>And I was always wrong. Always. (Though, to be fair, my goals kept multiplying.)</p>
<p>Learn this now: You don’t get to One Million power level by doing a <strong>lot</strong> of your current training. You do it by <em>transforming</em> into a Super Saiyan!</p>
<p>You will need to <em>level up</em> time and again. Your current skills are not enough to get you all the way. You just can’t see it. (Dunning Kruger Effect? Can’t see the whole mountain but I convince myself I do? Can’t see the Black Swans ahead - both negative and positive?)</p>
<p>[Note: Part of the problem above is that you think you have techniques, when you actually only have “techniques” - stuff that makes you feel it’s gonna give you great results, when in reality it doesn’t. So, you think your current “techniques” are enough to take you all the way, but they aren’t.</p>
<p>The only way you will discover the limitations of your current skills and invent better techniques is by taking on harder and harder problems, not by doing the same kind of thing over and over.]</p>
<h1 id="create-gems">Create Gems</h1>
<p>Don’t flinch from putting in insane efforts in your every essay or math problem or program or poem or exam preparation or whatever.</p>
<p>It’s <em>not</em> a waste of your time to take so long to write one single essay even if, by itself, it is most probably not gonna have much value in the long run. This is not how you’re gonna do it in the future. You’re gonna evolve! And the only way to evolve - aka develop way more skill - is to put epic amounts of TLC and hard work into your every effort now. Go beyond ordinary norms and create Gems!</p>
<p>Remember the Hacker Deal - you never let yourself do a half-assed job on anything.</p>
<p>This means put way more work into it than any <em>sane</em> person would.</p>
<p>Great programmers don’t stop hacking away at their program until it’s beautiful. Mathematicians obsess over making their proof as elegant as possible. And it goes on… for every high achiever.</p>
<p>From the outside, it would look like you’re wasting your time on something that is already “finished”.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“The program passes the test cases. Why are you still working on it?”</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>“The proof is done. Why are you still looking for other possible ways?”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Too bad we can’t peer into our skulls and see our skill level shooting up. Then, nobody would dare make such inane comments.</p>
<p>We need to have High Standards. We need to create Gems.</p>
<p>You can either have a bucketful of pebbles or have a handful of Gems!</p>
<p>You <em>have</em> to Level Up.</p>
<hr />
<p>??? part of previous section? (Ed: Yeah.)</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It is the drive to “focus” on what makes sense to us. Living on our planet, today, requires a lot more imagination than we are made to have.</p>
<p>Nassim Taleb, preface to <a href>The Black Swan</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is a general fallacy for me - thinking that the solution is to do way more of my current work - a <em>hundred</em> more essays, <em>dozens</em> more programs, <em>thousands</em> of hours of practice… and then, I will be good enough. Nope. That’s not how it works.</p>
<p>It’s not that you won’t do all that - you will. You have to, if you want to reach stratospheric levels of skill. But… you won’t do what you’re doing now. And you definitely won’t have to <em>push</em> yourself to do a predefined number of essays or problems or anything. It will come out naturally. It has to - motivation won’t have it any other way. At each point, you will either do what you have most motivation for, or you will push yourself to do “what you have to” using your Will Power. And the results are decidedly inferior (<a href>PG</a>).</p>
<p>To do something well, you have to <a href>love</a> it. <a href>Don’t let a To-Do List push you, let delight pull you.</a></p>
<p>??</p>
<h1 id="the-hacker-leap-of-faith">The Hacker Leap of Faith</h1>
<p>Don’t miss the forest for the trees. You may be so anal-retentive about the current “irrelevant” action which is not included in your “plan” that you miss out on the long-term side effects. Small, fun, irrelevant but cool side-projects are prime examples. Don’t banish them; you are saying goodbye to <em>delight</em> - aka intense motivation.</p>
<p>This is the subconscious Hacker Leap of Faith - <em>believe</em> that it will all pay off. Do something ostensibly irrelevant and worthless just because it is challenging and interesting. <em>Believe</em> that if you do it to the best of your ability and hold yourself to a high standard, you will end up having epic skills that you can then deploy on real valuable problems.</p>
<h1 id="if-youre-so-great-then-why-arent-you-rich">If you’re so great, then why aren’t you rich?</h1>
<p>Q: If Hackers have such epic awesome Hacker Spirit, why aren’t they better at Social Skills?</p>
<p>Why don’t they push themselves to do new things all the time everywhere, especially in social situations? If the Hacker Way is the path of maximum growth, why haven’t they grown to have huge skills even in the social world?</p>
<p>PG’s answer: <a href>Because they can’t</a>.</p>
<p>They don’t have the time and attention to invest in social skills mastery and still be a master at solving programming problems.</p>
<p>Social skills are hard, too, you know. Humans do it for decades and that’s why they are so good and why hackers are (generally) abysmal in comparison. Hackers care more about programming mastery than about social skills mastery, so they don’t (and can’t) give social stuff the time required.</p>
<h1 id="the-hacker-injunction">The Hacker Injunction</h1>
<p>You cannot let yourself do the same problem again.</p>
<p>Never - on pain of losing your Hacker Club membership privileges and losing the association with great hackers.</p>
<p>It takes an Injunction (even if it is as personally felt and self-inforced one) to keep you on the Hacker Path of Rapid Growth.</p>
<h1 id="why-are-good-plans-hard-to-make">Why are Good Plans hard to make?</h1>
<p>Good plans are hard to make cos it is hard to know <em>in advance</em> which actions will be non-boring or challenging.</p>
<p>aka which ones will be exciting and will push you beyond your skill levels.</p>
<p>The best advance guide of which action is most challenging and requires the most Reaching is… your feeling at the moment.</p>
<p>Plans may say one thing, but your feelings when you reach the point will say another.</p>
<ol style="list-style-type: upper-alpha">
<li><p>Frustration and pessimism => Too hard for me right now</p></li>
<li><p>Boredom => Too easy</p></li>
<li><p>Urgent Optimism => The Sweet Spot!</p></li>
</ol>
<hr />
<p>Similarly for your Motivation levels - it’s hard to predict in advance.</p>
<p>If your plan tells you to do some action, what will you do when you have these different motivation levels?</p>
<ol style="list-style-type: upper-alpha">
<li><p>Frustration and pessimism => You will drop the plan</p>
<p>example: all weight-loss plans, all New Years’ Resolutions, etc.</p></li>
<li><p>Boredom => You will just get by and conform with the plan and, thus, go down in skill.</p>
<p>Unless you have a low tolerance for boredom, in which case you will game the system to make things interesting. Example: office workers, <a href>high school students</a>.</p>
<p>In both cases, the purpose of the plan is defeated. You’re not doing the action with full intensity.</p></li>
<li><p>Urgent Optimism => Rock on!</p></li>
</ol>
<p>The way to succeed in a plan is to either</p>
<ul>
<li>Be scary-good at predicting how Challenging and Exciting it will be at each step</li>
</ul>
<p>-or-</p>
<ul>
<li>Not have a plan. Do it the Hacker Way - do the Max Exciting thing at each point with High Standards</li>
</ul>
<p>The whole boredom and challenge-level thing adds more complexity that plans have to deal with. In fact, this could be the major complexity for the plan to deal with.</p>
<p>Not only do you have to postulate actions that lead to the Impact you want (but which you can’t envision fully at the beginning - Essential Complexity), you also have to make them doable and exciting at <em>every single point</em> along the way.</p>
<p>(Note: Games do it all the time. Learn from them.)</p>
<h1 id="success">Success</h1>
<p>No tolerance for Boredom means that you will do the exciting thing at each point. Plus, you will pick up the actions with maximum challenge (and hopefully maximum Impact) at each point without cheating. This follows from the fact that projects within your skill level will not be as exciting as more challenging ones.</p>
<p>High Standards means that you will keep Reaching and thus keep increasing skill. Therefore, you will have enough skill to do the necessary actions at each point. Also, you won’t give up easily. You will persevere.</p>
<p>In other words, with the Hacker Spirit you will keep going ahead with your (non-)plan. You have perhaps the best chance of getting to your goals than in any other way. You will produce all the Motivation and Skill necessary to get to the goals that seem interesting to you.</p>
<h1 id="taste">Taste</h1>
<p>When you have good <a href>taste</a>, the goals that seem <em>interesting</em> to you will be the goals you <em>actually</em> care about. The Impact you are excited about will be the Impact that actually maximizes your utility function (loosely speaking).</p>
<p>The right actions will seem cool to you.</p>
<p>Even the best hackers may not have taste. They may be working on interesting, but non-useful projects.</p>
<p>Great <a href>designers</a> will have good taste. The projects that seem cool and interesting to them will also be projects that maximize their goals.</p>
<p>The Hacker Spirit without Taste is dangerous. It could take you anywhere fast.</p>
<p>The Hacker Spirit with good Taste is the Royal Road to Success.</p>
<p>So, build great Taste along with the Hacker Spirit.</p>
<h1 id="notes">Notes</h1>
<ul>
<li><p>I learnt about the Hacker Way from Paul Graham - <a href>Great Hackers</a></p></li>
<li><p>Talk about Black Swans, especially positive Black Swans for the Extrapolation Fallacy</p></li>
<li><p>Freedom to move away from stuff if it gets boring => Voluntary Participation</p></li>
</ul>
<p>You won’t feel stressed unnecessarily. You can leave at any time. So, you can try out things without too much fear of failure. If it works out, yay! If you get stuck even if trying hard, cool… we’ll ditch it and go somewhere else. No worries.</p>
<ul>
<li>IMPORTANT: Hackers and Skill - Practicing on the Job is not the only way to increase skill. You can practice directly, too. It will speed up your progress enormously, I think.</li>
</ul>
<p>So, in fact, Hackers are <em>not</em> surely on the Path of Maximum Growth. I have a <a href>sense that more is possible</a>. If you put some more time in, isolated the necessary skills, and practiced them directly, you would get way better results much faster.</p>
<p>Of course, would you have the motivation to sustain that practice? Open question. I don’t know of any programmers who do this direct practice. [This could be the downer on any direct Deliberate Practice ideas. Maybe hackers are so accustomed to having high motivation that they might find this boring. Though, remember, there are always ways to generate Motivation.]</p>
<p>Note that why hackers are way better than ordinary programmers could be that in field where people do zero deliberate practice (directly or otherwise), you would get massive comparative returns by doing just indirect deliberate practice like hackers do.</p>
<p>Is it that in massively complex and flexibility-demanding fields like programming, you can’t do much useful direct deliberate practice? Is the Hacker Way as good as it gets?</p>
<p>I dunno. Skateboarding is like this too. I don’t know if they do specific direct deliberate practice… Wait… don’t they practice some particular stunt over and over till they get it right?</p>
<p>Are hackers doing the same thing when they write their mini-projects?</p>
<p>Also, isn’t a limitation of the programming field that you basically never (have to) write the same program twice?</p>
<p>Well, you don’t have to. But you may want to. Your brain doesn’t care that this field is “programming”. The rules of the brain are simple - do Deliberate Practice and be able to do those skills really well. Don’t do it and you suffer.</p>
<p>And Deliberate Practice definitely needs lots of repetitions for any skill. But what counts as a “repetition” when you’re writing programs? Maybe you could practice a certain technique (say, a refactoring technique or a unit test writing technique) again and again till you can do it in your sleep.</p>
<p>Remember the ULTIMATE n00b Mistake, always.</p>
<p>Separate the Skill and the Impact. The Skills in writing a program involve many sub-skills like designing a program, writing unit tests for each function, refactoring, etc. The Impact is that you get a program that works and is maintainable. To get more Impact, you use the same skills over and over. To get more Skill, you Deliberate Practice the shit out of its sub-skills. When you’re practicing a Skill, you don’t care about the output you create. You care about the changes happening inside your head. You care about the increase in skill level you get.</p>
<ul>
<li>Another way of keeping High Standards - Do it <em>so many</em> times and reach <em>so much</em> that it because <em>insanely</em> easy and trivial for you to do it. Master the f*ck out of it!</li>
</ul>
<p>Corollary: Every skill you know will be easy and trivial for you to use. So, you can directly focus on mastering new skills. Your current skills won’t hold you back.</p>
<ul>
<li>Practicing indirectly (on the job) vs Practicing directly distinction - thanks to Geoff Colvin, Talent is Overrated</li>
</ul>
<h1 id="summary">Summary</h1>
<ul>
<li>What does the Hacker Way forbid?</li>
</ul>
<p>Be technical.</p>
<p>What happens when you’re in the middle of a task and you’re feeling bored or not motivated to work on it? You get distracted and stuff. What do you do? Do you switch to some other more exciting task? Or do you persevere? But then, aren’t you going against maximum motivation?</p>
<p>And if you switch wantonly, won’t you miss out on reaching High Standards? What if it was just a small moment of distraction, a blip of low Will Power? What if there was something small you could have done (maybe make the next action clearer, etc.) to get back on track and get excited?</p>
<ul>
<li>Major Warning: We are <a href>Beyond the Reach of God</a>!</li>
</ul>
<p>One small misstep can derail years of hard work.</p>
<p>Add in the warnings here from the notes on “Follow your Instincts vs You could go wrong”.</p>
<hr />
<h2 id="what-is-the-hacker-way">What is the Hacker Way</h2>
<ul>
<li>Hacker Way: Do Max Motivation thing at all times.</li>
</ul>
<p>Various corollaries. You will be in touch with your Motivation.</p>
<ul>
<li><p>Why doesn’t everybody rise to Hacker levels of skill? Lack of High Standards.</p></li>
<li><p>The Hacker Way to Greatness: No Boredom + High Standards</p></li>
<li><p>Honestly trying insanely hard</p></li>
</ul>
<p>Without High Standards: Easy to fool yourself that you’re pushing outside your comfort zone.</p>
<p>Feynman quote: The first rule is that …</p>
<ul>
<li><p>The battle between Effort and Boredom - I think this is major</p></li>
<li><p>Plans are antithetical to the Hacker Way (?)</p></li>
</ul>
<p>For reasons mentioned later.</p>
<ul>
<li>Plans can’t make you honestly try insanely hard</li>
</ul>
<p>will never take you to the pinnacle of talent</p>
<h2 id="the-benefits-of-the-hacker-way">The Benefits of the Hacker Way</h2>
<ul>
<li><p>They are on the Path to Insanely High Skill</p></li>
<li><p>They are Maximally Creative</p></li>
<li><p>Why hackers don’t rock at social stuff or other stuff</p></li>
<li><p>Why making good plans is difficult (apart from the other reasons)</p></li>
</ul>
<p>How challenging it will be and how motivated you will be <em>in the moment</em>.</p>
<p>You need to know the first to set the correct High Standard relative to your skill, and the second to see whether you will be bored.</p>
<h2 id="starting-out-on-the-hacker-way">Starting out on the Hacker Way</h2>
<ul>
<li><p>Create Gems</p></li>
<li><p>The Extrapolation Fallacy</p></li>
<li><p>The Hacker Leap of Faith</p></li>
<li><p>You have to protect your connection with Motivation - add more ideas here. Why protect?</p></li>
<li><p>Getting what you want</p></li>
</ul>
<p>(in fields that require massive flexibility - Soft Skills)</p>
<ul>
<li>Also need to cultivate good Taste</li>
</ul>
<h1 id="phone-notes">Phone Notes</h1>
<p>Planning vs Hacker Way - Massive delusion - I think I know the straight path to epic utilons in some area. I don’t! Nobody does! What I’m trying to say is - it’s ok to make imperfect next moves.</p>
<p>Straight Path Plan - End of History Illusion (I know what I need to know to get to a place that I don’t even know right now - Planning Fallacy?)</p>
<p>You do <em>not</em> know here you’re going. You do <em>not</em> know how to get there. You have not the foggiest, actually. Admit it. Just keep doing better next time. Efficiency can be your energy. It’s going to be inefficient as fuck in a sense. It will be wasteful. You simply do <em>not</em> have the evidence or the brain-power to pluck the correct path from the vast possibilities. Premature Optimization, in a single phrase. The root of all evil.</p>
<p>So, locating good hypotheses is nearly impossible with current brain-power or evidence. Simply <em>too</em> many possible paths and unclear goal states. Instead of making a perfect version of a flawed…</p>
<p>Therefore, any path that you do choose is almost certainly going to be wrong! And if you insist on doing it efficiently, you’re going to lose sight of better alternatives. Btw, straight plan, work really hard, master a skill properly - Planning Fallacy.</p>
<p>The alternative is to do your perfectly efficient crap and end up nowhere. Actually look at the strong evidence for the Hacker Way. Also look at how you have empirically got <em>all</em> your evidence so far. I don’t think it was because of planning.</p>
<p>Plus, the whole planning and scheduling thing gives you certainty, which you crave. Highly self-serving. Reality is much too complex to fit in your tiny neat plans.</p>
<p>Anyway, I keep trying to go for an Extrapolation Fallacy plan from here to the end.</p>
<p>There’s more than one way to the end. Way more. Be open to possibilities.</p>
<p>What really has planning achieved? Look at PG. Response to risk. Powerful tools.</p>
<p>What is the situation here? Come to precise conclusions - where you need planning, where you don’t.</p>
<p>Embrace inefficiency! Effectiveness is much, much more important than efficiency! There will not be <em>anything</em> like a straight path to a state that satisfies your goal criteria. But you will get there, bloody and battered.</p>
<p><em>What</em> you do is much more important than <em>how</em> you do it! There’s going to be twists and turns and massive mistakes and lessons and tons of inefficiency! Action is the high bit of success. I shouldn’t be vacillating so much - I’m not updating right. I keep swinging from one end to another.</p>
<h1 id="why-planning-may-be-hard">Why Planning may be Hard</h1>
<p>Planning may be hard because it’s hard to predict what you will find challenging.</p>
<p>The only way you can be overconfident (or underconfident) is if you don’t <em>try</em>. Otherwise, you will find out if you’re not really that good (or that you <em>are</em> that good) when you fail (or succeed).</p>
<div class="info">Created: November 20, 2014</div>
<div class="info">Last modified: January 5, 2017</div>
<div class="info">Status: finished</div>
<div class="info"><b>Tags</b>: plan, risk, hacker spirit</div>
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