
Entreporn: Learning vs doing vs wasting time - adnam
http://swombat.com/2012/7/11/entreporn-learning-doing-wasting
======
xd
I use to be a mechanic, and I love nothing more than watching youtube videos
of other people fixing problems I should be fixing on my own/friends cars. It
requires zero effort but has pretty much the same sense of satisfaction at the
end .. until the realisation kicks in that it wasn't my car that just got
fixed.

------
tomblomfield
>> Instead, stop reading this article (it's a waste of your time too), get out
of your chair, and go and find some concrete problems and opportunities to
measure yourself against.

This advice applies to at least 30% of articles on HN

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Also, remove Hacker News from your favourites/homepages/pinned tabs. You'll
procrastinate here less.

~~~
zerostar07
But you will probably procrastinate regardless.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Ah, yep, got me there. Think it's about time to turn on noprocrast again.

------
yogrish
In short: "Start every day as a PRODUCER, NOT a CONSUMER. Start your first
free moments of the day with thoughts of what you really want to do" One of
the Best Practices, I recently came across on Reddit/HN and I am still
'trying' hard to follow :)

~~~
stevenkovar
You just made my day yogrish; seeing one of my HN posts referenced. Your
comment was a good (and much needed) reminder to stick to that methodology.

For anyone curious, <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3555237>. Post
compliments of Redditor 'aceex'.

------
Smerity
Unfortunately, stuff that is interesting to hackers isn't necessarily what
they're up to right now. As long as these things pass a certain threshold of
interesting or cool, they've caught us. Massive flocking (Boids) simulations
on GPGPUs, esoteric bloom filter implementations, optimising instructions on
the 6502, cutting edge machine learning research across 2k cores, ...

This curiousity is what, in my mind, makes the community so interesting.
Unfortunately it's also what leaves so many of us stuck in the mud,
obsessively reading articles from each and every frontier of our hacker world.

Then there are those entrepreneurs who have read nothing yet stumble their way
to success. The code is atrocious, their algorithms mind boggling, but they're
the ones with the customers. The customers might be complaining, yes, but
there's almost always time to fix the product, especially when you have both
the motivation and money from those customers pushing you.

Edit: Yes, yes, yes, my mind took a brief vacation and decided to reignite a
decade old tag line from elsewhere. Skip the one small issue and pay attention
to the content of my post -- I don't think a single error warrants downvoting.

~~~
redwood
Isn't that the slashdot motto?

~~~
xd
Yes, it is. I didn't even think there was a HN moto.

------
hopeless
It doesn't just apply to startup advice.

I've stopped reading articles or watching screencasts which, although
interesting, is not immediately actionable. Instead, I'll bookmark it so I
feel that I can get back to it when needed and I move on (in practice, though,
I rarely go back through old bookmarks but its psychologically soothing to
bookmark them).

~~~
j21
I do the same. Is there some sort of program/system you use to look up stuff
you've bookmarked? I'm thinking I'd like something to set tags/keywords to
each bookmark so I can look them up a bit easier later on.

~~~
Apocryphon
Maybe a personal wiki?

------
DanielBMarkham
_if you would consider paying someone to solve this problem for you, then
learning about the problem is valuable. You wouldn't pay someone to talk to
you about startups in general, so don't waste your time on it._

So why am I reading your article, swombat? It has no specific advice about
startups that I can determine. Perhaps the topic is "how to stop wasting
time"? If so, haven't you written exactly the kind of generic article you're
railing against?

That was a bit of a cheap shot, but I love the recursion involved so I took it
anyway. :) Now on to the substance.

The problem as I see it is twofold: first, the person consuming the content
they enjoy never sees it as something that's self-indulgent. There's always
some kind of reason they can come up with to justify it. Many times it can be
an upcoming task. The mind is a wonderful thing. This is one of many reasons
why it's good to have somebody to report to.

Second, and more to the point, you make a delineation between things that have
"...concrete and obvious value to you..." and "...randomly reading all sorts
of articles..."

I'm not so sure that such a delineation actually easily exists. What I've
found is that I pick up material on problem X I want to solve and once I get
to the meat of the answer -- which sometimes takes many hours -- it either
ends up being a sales pitch or so tied in with some particular method of doing
business as to make it unusable.

Startup advice is _contextual_. It's very difficult to do generically. So if I
want people to love me on Facebook, I pick up an expert's guide to Facebook
marketing. He talks about his business of making CDs for indie bands and how
on Fridays he started giving out free CDs as part of a contest. This drove up
likes and engagement 100-fold.

Great idea -- if I had a product. Or if I had a product people would enjoy and
talk about if it were a contest prize. Not so good if I'm offering a service.

Or let's say I want the SEO rating of my business blog and landing page to
increase. So I pick up a few books and lectures -- specifically tailored to my
concrete problem -- and consume them.

I can tell you how that story ends. a) don't be a sleazebag, b) make sure the
technical details of your site are dialed in, and c) do things like write
great content to make your business popular! Then people will come and share
by word-of-mouth! Popular businesses get lots of traffic! mirabile dictu.

You can spend tens of thousands of dollars for that advice and end up pretty
much where you started. All they're really saying, which is completely true,
is that if you can make your business popular, people will talk about it.
True, but useless.

Perhaps a technical example will help. Let's talk building systems than can
handle huge amounts of traffic. So let's assume, without an idea of what my
business does, that I want to make sure it fits on a stack that can grow
massively and easily as my customer base grows. So I go out and buy some books
or listen to podcasts on building huge systems. (By the way, there's a huge
number of people doing just this. Why they are preparing to run at Google-
scale without any product at all is a very interesting question).

But you know where that road ends? It ends with something like "once you have
a business model, you'll know which architectural pieces you need, so then
you'll be able to start designing your system". There is no easy or one-size-
fits-all answer. It's all contextually-dependent.

Yes, if I had some kind of static, atomic problem that I needed advice on --
perhaps building an HTML5-enabled website -- buying little bits of atomic
solutions would work. We programmers are used to buying information like this.
"I need a book on AWS provisioning using Puppet" or "I need some help on typed
exception handling in Java" But when you finally come up with something that
is so stand-alone, _it has absolutely zero business value_. It's just
technical information to assimilate.

So yes, I enjoy reading "How I got a billion people watching my YouTube videos
which created a steady stream of income to my self-help site" But it's been my
experience that, unless it's just me and I'm just impervious to absorbing
information, after I finish I'm going to be left feeling something along the
lines of "Wow. If I only had a business that allowed people to groom their
pets with power tools, I could use every one of those pieces of advice!"

That doesn't make consuming such content useless. It just makes it a hell of a
difficult thing to do. In my opinion, in order to be useful, you have to have
content tailored to some long discussion you're having about a business
hypothesis you're testing. It's extremely difficult to get that in itty-bitty
mass-produced chunks of interviews. Not impossible, but extremely difficult.

Peer-to-peer, ad-hoc, informal communication is a million times more effective
than publish-subscribe interviews or presentations. Especially in areas where
the information is nuanced or highly context-dependent. In my opinion the
reasons you're seeing people shell out money to all kinds of startup-
assistance services and sites is NOT because they are receiving some terrific
value from them, although I'm sure each has its fans. It's because there are
tens or hundreds of thousands of people desperately trying to do exactly what
you suggest: get immediately applicable help. But they're not finding it.

~~~
j45
Some of best advice I've used is to quit reading that isn't tied to solving
the next problem or two I'm working on.

How many articles that we read and bookmark do we ever go back to?

Until I started using Diigo and actively annotating each link to create a
searchable feed based on my links... not quite sure how else anyone gets value
of an article if they can't action it in the short term and have to come back
to read it anyways.

Being in a state of 'building', we can look at the front page of hn and see
what % of that on average could be a fit to help solve problems, maybe a
different 15-20% for everyone? Now, which percentage of the 15-20% will hit
what you're facing right now?

Even engaging this discussion wasn't one that solved a problem for making or
saving money, or towards a startup. Why am I responding? Reinforcing my belief
that I know the difference between reading something that truly helps me be
productive in the now.

I like learning random things like anyone, but I find for me it's best done
like an exercise, controlled, scheduled, focussed.

~~~
makmanalp
Incidentally, that was the perfect sales pitch for diigo :)

Edit: Encompassing idea: Viral sales based business plan: Build something in a
field that a lot of people talk and argue about, so people suggest your
product during heated debates. Has this been done?

~~~
j45
Lol, that was unintended.. I have no affiliation with diigo but it's the first
bookmarking tool I've ever used since coming online in the early 90's, the
annotation is too hard to live without.

Other tools might have similar features but it's what found me first.

------
richieb
Whatever happened to reading stuff for entertainment and fun?

~~~
smacktoward
Reading for entertainment is great! But if you're working in the startup world
and your fun reading is all about startups, you should probably broaden your
horizons a bit, if only to avoid becoming a bottomlessly tedious person. Go
read some fiction, or some non-fiction in a field that has nothing to do with
your work.

~~~
rads
Who are you to say what people should enjoy doing in their free time? You know
what's bottomlessly tedious? Doing things you wouldn't normally do simply to
appear more interesting to people who don't get you.

------
larrys
"You wouldn't pay someone to talk to you about startups in general, so don't
waste your time on it."

A distinction needs to be made between talking to someone knowledgeable (about
anything) and reading about it. Having a conversation is interactive. The
person can dial in give exact advice which takes into account your exact
situation and specifics. Things that would take much much more time if you had
to read about every possible scenario (which you wouldn't necessarily
understand the nuance of anyway) can be covered and discussed in a
conversation.

That's one of the problems that I have with advice that people read on the net
about anything. It doesn't (and can't) cover all the possibilities that apply
to one's particular situation.

In general you might be able to find advice regarding startups that says
summarizes something in this way "young people can take the chance with a
startup because they have less to loose and more time available than a middle
age person who has a secure job with a big corporation, a family, and will
loose seniority and possibly not be able to find a new job". So that might be
a generality that sticks. Otoh change one factor in the older person's
situation (say they have a trust fund) and that info is no longer as valid. A
conversation allows you more easily to uncover the dozens if not hundreds of
specifics that apply to an individual and what is important to them. It also
allows someone to clear up misconceptions ("medical school is tough be
prepared to work hard") that might not be entirely correct.

------
gioele
Too many words to express what The Ultimate Productivity Blog already said
three year ago.

<http://productiveblog.tumblr.com/>

PS: ;)

~~~
mhitza
Now I know what I have to do. Thanks for the link.

------
jpadkins
Two counterpoints 1) It is better to avoid problems then hit them / solve
them. Understanding where other people have failed is very valuable. Of course
there is diminishing returns to this type of information and of course you are
not going to avoid every potential problem. The point is to avoid the common
pitfalls that many new enterprises tend to make. If your MO is run fast into
next problem -> solve problem -> run fast into next problem, your startup is
probably going to fail.

2) Sometimes you haven't even framed the problem yet. Maybe you are still
exploring the idea space, trying to figure out what is valuable or not.
Getting broad exposure to other ideas and technologies may help you crystalize
what your venture is going to focus on. And of course there is diminishing
returns here too, usual analysis paralysis warnings, etc. But a little bit of
exposure every day to subjects you are not familiar with may just spark that
creative bolt.

------
eddmc
I agree with the premise of this article. Entreporn is something that almost
everyone I know who works for themselves has gone through. The important thing
is to get it out of your system, and get on with building your company!

One thing I found useful was reading a set of books called 'The Naked Leader'.
It essentially reduces an entire business book into a small chapter of 2 or 3
pages. I came to realise that many business books are these core points (that
can be summarised in 2 or 3 pages) spread out over a couple of hundred pages.

I can't say I've never read a business book again. But it has made me very
selective.

------
deepandmeaning
I never thought of it like that. Rather then passively consuming content in
the vague hope it will come in useful one day, or endlessly reading best
practice guides or hot new trends/technology. But instead to search for the
information as and when you need it.

Perhaps we over rate serendipity in the vague hope something will come along
and solve a current problem, or more truthfully we're looking for distraction
and legitimise it by linking it to work in some way.

Either way - it's given me a new perspective. Thank you Daniel, I always find
your articles insightful.

~~~
sdoering
You could make the difference between 'just in case' kind of reading (I could
someday use this) and 'just in time' kind of reading (I need to know how this
works right now).

If it belongs to category 1 it is entertainment/waste of time. Else (and if
good content) it is actionable, valuable resource.

------
roqetman
One indicator to me that an article would be a time-waster (to me) is the
"numbered lists" (10 ways to do X etc.) By avoiding those, my quality to
waster article ratio has increased.

------
Shoomz
Hm...don't know if I was the only one, but I thought this topic was going to
be about the broader consumption of 'entertainingly educational' information
(think Vi Hart vs. StumbleUpon or Khan Academy vs. TED Talks). While some are
just information there is a growing glut of edifying and consumable
information. I guess I'll have to write something on this topic to satisfy my
own reading interest.

------
brlewis
If I merely read "What We Should Have Said To PG" it's wasting time. If I
write up what I think my own answers should be in that kind of interview, it's
taking action.

If this answer gets 6 hours old without me replying with a link to such a
writeup, feel free to mock me in replies.

~~~
brlewis
Did it: <http://ourdoings.com/ourdoings-startup/2012-07-11>

~~~
guscost
The action is still not purposeful, unless you are already trying to learn
what you should say to people like PG. And although pitching to
accelerators/investors might be fun to fantasize about, the overwhelming odds
suggest that you will need to solve many other problems (for real customers)
before that kind of thing ever happens.

~~~
brlewis
I've encountered numerous situations where I've needed to explain concisely
what OurDoings does. Thinking about how to tailor my explanation individually
is always worthwhile. It brings me back to the big picture after some focus on
details.

------
hastur
A little Entreporn is good as a source of inspiration and ideas.

You just need to set a very tough limit of how much time you spend reading
this stuff. (During an initial week or two it should be zero, because you have
to learn to fight the urge - and make sure it's not an addiction.)

Also, you should be honest with yourself - this is not real work, so don't
start your day with surfing for inspiration (don't start your meal with a
desert). Leave that for the evening, when you're done with work and also in a
more reflective mood, so that your mind will make a better use of all the
inspiration.

------
priestc
If you're just reading, reading, reading, reading, then you're not going to
get much out of the reading. If you take a few minutes after each article to
correlate the information to your own experiences, you'll get more out of the
article. Thats why I try to leave behind a comment to each blog/article I
read. Like right now!!

Its sort of lik the difference between going to class, listening to the
lectures but never doing any of the homework, as opposed to going to the
class, and doing the homework each night.

