
Improving Yourself is Easy - holman
http://zachholman.com/posts/improving-yourself-is-easy/
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onan_barbarian
Those goals aren't exactly "win the Olympic Games", "make a contribution to
P=NP?", etc.

It's good to set goals and meet them, but there are qualitative differences
between the experience of completing a major project with substantial
uncertainty and a lot of pressure vs. "2009: Make it to a Ruby conference".

Drawing the conclusion that "everyone's vague, important motivations are more
a matter of willpower than anything else" is making some pretty major
assumptions about the modesty of everyone's motivations.

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codeslush
I don't agree with your comment, but I get what you're saying. I think the guy
should be applauded for what he did do - which is substantially more than a
lot of people do! He had some goals - he achieved them.

The lesson he learned from this is likely to lead to larger and larger goals -
and I'm willing to bet 10 to 1 that he ends up accomplishing a lot over the
next ten years as a result of the "little" steps he has taken already.

Good job!

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holman
Something I didn't include in the actual post: I don't want to say everything
is easy. If one of your goals is to scale your service to a five-hundred box
setup, that's probably "hard".

But everyone has those vague, important motivations in their lives that are
more a matter of willpower than anything else. Those are the meaningful goals.
Those are the "easy" goals.

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glimcat
If you set easy goals, meeting them is easy.

Now if you can just learn how to break seemingly unachievable goals into easy
goals, you'll be all set.

~~~
Mizza
The way to deal with an impossible task was to chop it down into a number of
merely very difficult tasks, and break each of them into a group of horribly
hard tasks, and each of them into tricky jobs, and each of them..

(Terry Pratchett, Truckers. I read this when I was 6 years old but it always
stuck with me.)

~~~
shadowfox
I do agree in general with what you are saying. But sometimes the trouble is
that the subdivision (at least a good one) is hard to find.

Often enough it is that you don't understand the problem well enough. But
sometimes you just can't seem to find the proper sub-problems. I have had this
experience while doing research work.

~~~
tomjen3
Thats true and I hope you often encounter that problem in research work; if
you do not, you are too far from the edge.

And if somebody things "that never happens to me", I kindly ask you to take a
look at the the Collatz conjecture
[<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collatz_conjecture>].

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tren
Out of them all, I'd say the 2011 goal could potentially be daunting for
people. Speaking at a tech conference, you really need to know your stuff.
Slightly more concrete objectives might help too. Good to have general
guidelines though.

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vladimirchen
I completely and utterly agree! Nice and encouraging lines of wisdom you have
there. Congrats on making a continuous progress and setting a new standard all
the time. Thanks for sharing this with us, and I am pretty sure it will kick
some butts to do something :)

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Oompa
I'm making my own journey through similar milestones, and I'd agree. It is
easy!

