
How To Be Fucking Awesome - sant0sk1
http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2008/11/how-to-be-fucking-awesome.html
======
beaudeal
I found this really interesting, because we covered this exact topic in a
psychology course that I took while in university, and I think that it is
often mis-quoted / mis-used. The conclusion that was drawn from scientific
research was that the vast majority of experts all shared a common trait -
they all had at least 10,000 hours of deliberate practice (not that anyone who
practiced for 10,000 hours would definitely be an expert). Deliberate practice
was defined as practice which: has a goal / task that relates to improved
performance, there are explicit instructions as the the best methods of
improvement, there is immediate feedback on the performance, and the person
repeatedly performs these actions. Obviously his isn't leisurely practice like
playing catch in your backyard if you're a baseball player. The experts also
didn't practice for 1 hour per day for 30 years like someone in the comments
mentioned; the average was about 4 hours per day if I remember correctly. The
research had also noted (much like the Matt Maroon article) that this does not
mean, for example, that ANYBODY can play in the NBA. What they are really
pointing out is that those who are in the NBA probably had at least 10,000
hours of deliberate practice. They also noted that some fields of expertise
(such as the NBA) have built-in physical constraints (ex: height) which must
be considered. Their study actual dealt with the field of music (violin
playing, specifically) which has fewer constraints than something like
basketball, and the results were significant.

~~~
aneesh
In short, practice is necessary but not sufficient for awesomeness.

In particular, this implies: "If you have not practiced, then you are not
awesome."

So to be awesome at X, you need:

1) some natural talent for X, varies based on the field

2) a love for X that will allow you to practice for 10,000 hours

~~~
aaronblohowiak
3) the discipline to make 10,000 hours of your practice deliberate

~~~
brlewis
I was struck a few years ago by an interview with an olympic athlete. She was
asked how she found the discipline to keep a grueling practice schedule. She
answered that what many see as discipline is actually passion.

If you're having trouble finding discipline, the answer may lie in finding a
way to love what you're doing more.

~~~
marvin
This is very important. Having the iron discipline to work very hard for a
long time at something you don't really like, in order to achieve some
unrelated goal (for example getting rich) is also known as obsessive-
compulsive disorder. The worst thing is that this approach sometimes works - I
have met guitar virtuouses who definitely have this disorder. But if it's at
the expense of your well-being, it is probably not worth it.

There is a lot of this in the startup community. I'm pretty sure the early
life of Cisco is a pretty good example, but unsuccessful instances are all
around you.

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aneesh
Another equally important thing is choosing your battles: you have to not only
work hard, but work hard _at the right things_.

I could practice basketball for 10,000 hours, but there's no way I could do it
professionally. You have to figure out what your natural abilities are, and
work hard in those areas.

~~~
migpwr
If you practiced basketball for 10,000 hours then you would be fucking
awesome, regardless of having a contract.

The right things don't exist... or have we already forgotten the whole "do
what you love" concept?

~~~
aneesh
Loving what you do is necessary, but not sufficient.

What you do should be at the intersection of what you love and what you're
good at.

~~~
mdakin
How do you know you're good at something a priori without spending the 10,000
hours to find out empirically?

~~~
aneesh
You do what statisticians do ... take a small sample and estimate.

Spend 20 hours each doing 10 different things, and then pick 2-3 of them to
spend 200 hours doing. Then pick the one. While it may take 10,000 hours to be
truly awesome, you can probably get a sense of being "good" at something in a
much smaller amount of time.

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matt1
Time and awesomeness is a correlation, not cause and effect. Sure, talent and
time help, but the key ingredient is passion. Without it, you've got a long,
painful road ahead of you. With it, you can climb mountains. .

The article gives Bill Gates as an example. According to the article, Gates is
a great programmer because he sat in front of the computer for seven years.
But Gladwell has it backwards... Gates sat in front of a computer for seven
years because he had a passion for programming and that's what lead him to be
great.

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henning
If you get 3 solid hours of work (work you could, if you were being paid
hourly, bill for) on something you're doing in a day, you'd accumulate your
10,000 hours in about 9 years, assuming you get 3 hours in every single day of
the year. That's unrealistic, so bump it up to 10 years.

This has been brought up before: <http://norvig.com/21-days.html>

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david927
Wait, wait, wait. Bill Gates didn't program ANYTHING (at least not anything of
note). He bought DOS, which made his fortune, and it was his connections
through his mother which helped him in the deal with IBM.

You /can/ be awesome with practice. But Bill Gates isn't an example. (And,
yes, I know he wrote an early Basic interpreter, but he was also considered a
mediocre programmer by many who knew him.)

~~~
kthakar
you can call billg an awesome businessman, after all it takes a lot to be the
richest man on earth. I haven't heard much about his programming skills, so I
don't think he was a great programmer.

~~~
david927
exactly. And he didn't spend 10,000 hours practicing business.

I'm not trying to be snarky by pointing this out; I'm trying clarify that,
while we should remember that in order to be great, we require dedication,
effort and patience, the example chosen of Bill Gates shows that, sadly, this
is often irrelevant.

~~~
wheels
Microsoft was founded in 1975. 10k hours is 5 years of 40 hour weeks. I think
it's fair to say that he was working more than 40 hour weeks, so by the time
MS rose to dominance, he'd almost certainly spent over 10k hours at it.

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utsmokingaces
Gates was brilliant because of his business decisions in which m$ partner up
with IBM and dominated the PC operating system market. He was also brilliant
in taking the risk in dropping out of Harvard and starting a business with
Paul Allen. Gates is not famous for his coding skills. His coding ability is
just one part of the foundation that led to his success.

------
mhb
Need to season this with a little <http://mattmaroon.com/?p=583>

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rokhayakebe
4 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, you will be fucking awesome.

~~~
kirubakaran
No. At 4 hours a day, you'll need 2500 days. [6.8 years]

If you did it full time (40 hours a week), you'll supposedly be fucking
awesome in 4.8 years.

If this were true, I should be an awesome programmer. But I know I am not yet
one. Far from it. So I call bullshit. (Some popular 'fucking awesome'
programmers for reference: Steve Yegge, RMS, John Resig)

~~~
bloch
"Finally, deliberate practice is an effortful activity that can be sustained
only for a limited time each day during extended periods without leading to
exhaustion (effort constraint). To maximize gains from long-term practice,
individuals must avoid exhaustion and must limit practice to an amount from
which they can completely recover on a daily or weekly basis." (K. Anders
Ericsson)

"A number of training studies in real life have compared the efficiency of
practice durations rangingfrom 1-8 hr per day.These studiesshowessentiallyno
benefit from durations exceeding 4 hr per day and reduced benefits from
practice exceeding 2 hr (Welford, 1968; Woodworth & Schlosberg, 1954). Many
studiesof the acquisition oftyping skill (Baddeley & Longman, 1978; Dvorak et
al.. 1936) and other perceptual-motor skills (Henshaw& Holman, 1930) indicate
that the effective duration of deliberate practice may be closer to 1hr
perday." (K. Anders Ericsson)

projects.ict.usc.edu/itw/gel/EricssonDeliberatePracticePR93.pdf

~~~
13ren
I consider myself to have about 1.5-2 hours of "genius" per day. I don't know
if it really is genius, but during it, I'm operating at an intellectual level
where I feel that I'm really making progress, and am able to grasp things,
formulate clear questions and goals, and notice new connections.

After that time, my own thoughts start to elude capture, as if someone else's
dream...

I can work longer, but I need to have a structured task - i.e. that doesn't
require original thought, but is just a slog.

It's great to have a study to support my experience, and encourage me to value
and nurture this "genius" time, with recovery time and activities.

 _EDIT_ at 1 hour per day, 10,000/365 = 27.4 years; say 30 years. _If you are
blessed with a naturally stronger constitution,_ enabling you to do 3 hours
per day, you could do it in 10.

------
dustineichler
Short and sweet read says... if you want to be awesome. Put it time. I believe
it.

~~~
adldesigner
I agree.

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dmoney
If you believe it takes 10,000 hours to become Fucking Awesome, it will take
10,000 hours to become Fucking Awesome. Of course it must take many hours of
practice at a given activity, but 10,000 is just a number (and Fucking Awesome
is vaguely defined).

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sireat
There is one important thing: some of those hours should come before certain
age. For many disciplines/fields it is under 18 and for almost all it is
certainly 25. In other words, if you start practicing basketball at age 37,
you are not going to make it to NBA even if you put in 20000 hours of
deliberate practice. While this principle seems obvious for largely physical
pursuits, it holds true for purely mental fields, as well, be it chess,
programming or piano playing.

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unalone
Flagged: it's a fun little post, but it's repeating the key claim that
Gladwell made in his new book, which appears here in 3 other top-page stories
right now, and it's not adding anything new other than the title.

~~~
raganwald
those are reasons not to upmod it, but I thought the flag was for spam. do I
misunderstand? am I to flag everything I consider a waste of time??

~~~
tdavis
I flag anything that makes me think, "I could have spent those X
minutes/seconds of my life reading something worthwhile." This screams of a
plug for Gladwell's book, which may well be worth reading, but doesn't really
offer anything interesting beyond "Bill Gates spent lots of hours programming
and made a successful software company so practice a lot."

Well, yeah, duh.

~~~
justindz
Your summary didn't match with what I read in the NYTimes article. The point
seemed to be that people have advantages in certain endeavors that are not
attributable to their skill or talent. Bill Gates is a offered as a case of
someone who had the advantage of privileged access to and time on computing
systems (which is not a knock on his genius). Another case cited has to do
with age cutoffs for Canadian youth hockey leagues. Basically, anyone born
right before the cutoff tends to be the older, bigger, stronger kid in that
bracket and this advantage increases over time. They practice, yes, but they
also have a significant advantage stemming from a factor totally outside of
their influence. The other point being that you can analyze these factors and
reduce that influence, supposing you wanted to do that.

I think your assessment of what the book offers is actually more of an
assessment of what Giles zeroed in on. I'm not defending the book--I have no
interested since the concept can be summed up in a twitter post--but thought
I'd point out that I think there's a different thesis at work.

~~~
unalone
_I have no interested since the concept can be summed up in a twitter post_

You can summarize anything in a Twitter post: any concept, no matter how
complex. Gladwell's advantage is that he tells really fascinating stories that
explore his ideas in a real-world context.

I think that TDavis was trying to say was what I wanted to say, but he said it
more concisely: this post wasn't really saying anything interesting. It was
essentially saying "If you want to be fucking awesome, practice a lot." There
wasn't very much more quantitative than that.

------
hs
if u buy that 10% improvement by 10x effort and mapping the 10000 hours:

10000 -> 99.9% 1000 -> 99% 100 -> 90%

100 hrs is about 13 weeks (a quarter) of 3 uni 1hr credits + 1.5hr practice =
13 * 3 * (1 + 1.5)

if u take deliberate practice as vector, that's only the magnitude part

the direction part is what to study and that ends up being more important

given a constraint of 100 hrs, a nonprogrammer will end up becoming more
productive studying lisp compared to java

but of course, to say such programmer is 90% better than average is too much
:D ... and controversial

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adldesigner
You do realize that spending one hour daily to get good at something would
still require almost 30 years, right? I love the post though. Thanks.

~~~
tptacek
I think the point is that you spend much more than one hour a day at it.

~~~
adldesigner
Agreed. I felt like doing some math. :) Anyway, one hour a day is what many of
us have to pursue other personal goals different from work, family, etc.

~~~
jrockway
> one hour a day is what many of us have to pursue other personal goals
> different from work, family, etc.

Perhaps this lifestyle precludes being "fucking awesome"?

~~~
adldesigner
I'm certainly betting my wife finds me " _fucking awesome_ " for bringing food
back home, and no worries. :)

What would be your definition of being " _fucking awesome_ "?

~~~
jimbokun
'I'm certainly betting my wife finds me "fucking awesome"'

In this case, the literal meaning of the phrase could be quite applicable, and
well worth devoting 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to the cause.

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mironathetin
That reminds me of Peter Norvig: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years.

Let me add: Don't waste your time reading books about trivial topics.

------
plinkplonk
how would someone do "deliberate practice" with programming anyway? Music,
basketball etc involve "body memory" where repetitions of identical movements
help. This _seems_ to be fundamentally different from programming.

I am guessing programming "practice" would involve writing more ambitious
programs? where would the feedback come from?

~~~
giles_bowkett
I explained this in my blog a few posts ago. You write programs to focus on
some particular aspect of your programming that you want to make better. I
think it should be obvious. You use functional programming idioms - write
programs that have using functional programming idioms well as their only
purpose. You use regular expressions - write programs that only exist to make
you better at regular expressions. In other words write a bunch of regular
expressions and make them as good as you can.

In the Ruby community we have the Ruby Quiz. I'm pretty sure that's copied
from some other community, I think Perl. Every programming language community
has practices of this nature.

It's absurd to suggest that deliberate practice has anything to do with body
memory _intrinsically_. How many times will you write a regular expression in
your life? There's no element of repetition there? The literature on
deliberate practice cites Mozart, Bobby Fischer, and Bill Gates. Body memory
has nothing to do with it.

The feedback comes from sharing with others, as in the Ruby Quiz, or
benchmarking your code, or posting it on a blog. Another form of feedback
would be seeing if your programs run at all. ;-)

~~~
plinkplonk
"It's absurd to suggest that deliberate practice has anything to do with body
memory intrinsically. "

Since no one actually made that claim - the intrinsically part that is - .....
:)

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sabat
Anyone read the new Malcolm Gladwell book that this is based on? Is it any
good? A lot of his books seem half-finished. He points out something (Blink:
your intuition is more powerful than you realize, and not well-understood) but
never gets around to explaining _why_ the phenomenon exists.

Is this one worth reading?

