
Joseph Campbell’s daily routine for “the most important period of my study” - tuxguy
https://betterhumans.coach.me/joseph-campbells-daily-routine-for-the-most-important-period-of-my-scholarship-and-study-68d1c35dd0d5
======
a_d
Key passage: "When you find a writer who really is saying something to you,
read everything that writer has written and you will get more education and
depth of understanding out of that than reading a scrap here and a scrap there
and elsewhere. Then go to people who influenced that writer, or those who were
related to him, and your world builds together in an organic way that is
really marvelous. Whereas the way these things are taught normally in college
and school is a sampler of what this one wrote and that one wrote and you’re
asked to be more interested in the date of the publication of Keat’s sonnets
than in what’s in them.”

I think many of us have deployed this graph in our own lives. I watch movies
this way - watch more movies made by a director I like. Then watch movies by
the people this director likes. Its a wonderful exploration.

I wish there was a version of IMDB that allowed this meta exploration of
movies - i.e. exploring the influence-graph for movies (or any art as a matter
of fact).

There is a wonderful documentary called Connections [1] that explores this in
the world of science, technology and engineering -- it traces the sequence of
inventions and inventors that had influenced each other. I strongly recommend
viewing it. You may find it very inspiring!

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_\(TV_series\))

~~~
subatomic
> I think many of us have deployed this graph in our own lives. I watch movies
> this way - watch more movies made by a director I like. Then watch movies by
> the people this director likes. Its a wonderful exploration.

I use [https://www.metal-archives.com](https://www.metal-archives.com) in this
manner. The number of dimensions on which you can find connections and
similarities makes finding new music a joy. A version of IMDB based upon the
ideas in MA is what you seek.

~~~
vvanders
Wow, how have I never seen MA that's awesome and pretty darn accurate.

------
siliconc0w
Routine is simultaneously marvelous at producing results and a prison of one's
own making. I'm into archery and at a certain point I was shooting everyday.
My groups got tighter. Then, at a certain point a good shot lost it's wonder
and became expected. I didn't feel anything except disappointment when I made
a less than perfect shot. I then stopped and better understood why those that
are better are better. There are no heroes, no calls to adventure or
treacherous journeys - just a dull ceaseless repetition. Like a hammer driving
a nail.

~~~
erasmuse
No no. The routine is a _space_ for unstructured improvement. Nor is there
such a thing as repetition in learning. Every attempt at gaining skill is at
least _slightly_ different and is made under at least slightly different
conditions. Progress being the slow accumulation of mastery over many details.
If it feels dull then either a plateau has been reached or the ambition itself
is an unworthy one and should be abandoned in favour of something else.

~~~
jonathanstrange
I don't believe this is true, or at least it depends on the kind of thing
you're learning.

For example, when you want to become an outstanding guitar player, you'll need
to go through many, many hours of dull and definitely boring training in order
to perfect your playing technique. Without that training, you can become a
good or a creative guitar player, but not a genuine master.

I presume that it's similar with many other instruments and related skills
like archery, gymnastics, dancing, or skateboarding.

~~~
CuriouslyC
Active engagement in what you are doing is a sign of arousal and dopamine
release, which are critical in learning. If you're "going through the motions"
or you're bored you are going to learn very slowly, if at all.

If you want to master the guitar, instead of boring repetition, you need to
find ways to train your technique that engage you and are rewarding. People
quote the 10,000 hours figure, as if you just needed to put in the time, but
in reality those are 10,000 engaged, focused hours where you push yourself. It
doesn't matter how many disengaged hours you put in, you'll plateau at
"decent" and never become truly excellent.

~~~
jonathanstrange
Maybe that's your opinion and the perceived opinion right now, but your claims
directly contradict what many successful teachers state. (But see below, maybe
we don't disagree.)

In Germany, for instance, there used to be these little "ETP books" for guitar
players called _Tägliche Übungen zur Entwicklung einer Technischen Perfektion_
that involved lengthy and absolutely monotonous finger exercises that really
had nothing to do with music. Everybody praised them and everybody said that
these and similar exercises are essential to become a world-class player.
There is hardly any way around it, they said, you cannot become _that_ good by
merely playing music. I still have no reason to believe they were wrong. It
would be surprising if arguably harder instruments like classical piano didn't
involve similar monotonous exercises and the same couldn't be said about
ballet, world-class athletes, etc. A friend of mine is a professional jazz
saxophonist and while he was studying saxophone he had to practice scales up
and down for hours and hours every day.

You've got to put some serious effort into it, you agree with that, right? So
maybe we agree in the end, because you use vague word "engage". Of course,
nobody denies that you need to find a way to motivate you to get through these
exercises or to stay "engaged". I didn't deny that. All I'm saying is that a
lot of "mere repetition" is needed in many disciplines in order to reach a
really high level _while staying_ motivated.

~~~
log_base_login
You're both right.

Extensive practice is essential to getting one's self to the point where
creativity can take over, where the muscle memory can 'meld' with one's
expression of whatever emotions are being communicated via music.

There are certainly counter-examples, musicians who compose from day one, and
don't really focus on melodic theory, running scales, and all of the other
pieces of the neuro-muscular puzzle that go into making one technically
'good', and some of them do well.

There are those that allot all of their time to becoming technically
proficient, pianists who spend endless hours working up Rachmaninoff's 2nd
concerto, only to get so lost in the technicality of their discipline that
they become cold and mechanistic, but, again, are so proficient that they find
work their entire lives.

But true greatness needs both. You have to, as one artist put it, be able to
'forget' all that you have learned and compose and/or perform from the heart,
letting all of that training do what it will naturally do, resulting in a
transcendent expression of artistic grace.

That's what makes Campbell so accessible. He speaks and writes as though he is
talking about the weather to his best friend, but his erudition provides such
a solid foundation in the topics he expounds upon that one hardly notices that
one is being educated.

------
kleiba
Presumably, he must have had a good public library nearby in order to find
enough reading material for that time frame, and also to be able to afford
those books without a job.

Learning is a luxury, and reading is key to it. That said, if you think about
fields like mathematics or even programming, reading about them will hardly
lead you to mastery: you need to sit down and get your fingers dirty, trying
to do it yourself. Have you ever had this happening to you: when a teacher
shows you a new method to compute something, it all sounds perfectly clear and
simple, until you sit down and try it out on an unseen problem yourself?

If you're on Hacker News (which you are) chances are you love reading to --
after all, it's a site that provides links to articles (sometimes videos). But
increasingly, I realize that my time is better spent building something
myself. Being a "hacker" (in the original sense of the word) implies doing
something actively, while (to me) reading is a rather passive occupation.
Enjoyable, yes, but at the end of the year, I'd like to look back and say
"this year, I made X and Y" rather than "I read about X and Y".

Has anyone actually read Campell's classic "The hero with a thousand faces"? I
did when in college, but to be honest, I found it too dry to make it to the
end. But I still have my copy of the book. Maybe I should get it out of the
shelf and give it another try.

Not for 9 hours of the day though. There's code that wants to bet written...

~~~
majewsky
> I'd like to look back and say "this year, I made X and Y" rather than "I
> read about X and Y".

A false dichotomy IMO. What I want is "this year, I understood X and Y", and
understanding a thing involves both making and reading (most of the time).

~~~
kleiba
It's not a false dichotomy, it's an opinion - mine. An opinion about personal
satisfaction. To me, reading and learning is great. I do it for a living,
basically. But building something is much, much more satisfying for me. Not
because I might have to understand something new along the way - that's an
added bonus. But even building something new for which I didn't need to
acquire new knowledge will give me a better feeling. It's about "creativity"
in the original sense of the word. Perhaps it's because creating something is
harder than reading something that makes it that way, although even reading
something very difficult and finally getting it still can't beat "making".

------
pravda
If you've never heard of Joseph Campbell:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1qd0KGOv9Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1qd0KGOv9Y)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbeWTOubqSo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbeWTOubqSo)

~~~
ak39
Thank you very much for this. It is serendipitous. I wish I had the fortune of
simply talking to or being in the presence of a man of such calibre. Such men
are indeed rare and often their compassion and humble wisdom is easily drowned
out by the noisy loud-mouthed advice we often get from so many self-help
gurus.

I've been kicked to curb this year with failures, with skullduggerous cheats,
with outright rejections and with rejections of no communication. A growing
sense of a dark godawful dread has made residence in the core of my belly. I
walk around with it everywhere I go. I feel more than ever that I have now
truly and completely doomed my family's future. I should have instead
remained, I now think, grinding at that safe but soulless day job before I
even thought of cultivating that perilous and impossible journey - that
falsely advertised dream to go out alone in consulting and into the business
of enterprise bloody software. (A place where arse-kissing and networking
matters more than your ability to produce software that is actually useful to
clients!)

I was hanging by that last thread of once abundant hope. This dastardly year
is coming to its ignoble end, and I continue to stare solemnly at the targets
I set for myself in January this year. It's deplorable.

Campbell says "the real end is the journey" and that I need to possess the
fire to drive me into battle fearlessly.

I have to summon that courage. But I have to summon the courage to be honest
first!

~~~
jdpigeon
Hang in there, buddy. It sounds like you've got a lot of actually useful
skills and I think you and your family will do fine in the long run. Even if
you end up going back to a "safe but soulless" job.

~~~
ak39
Thanks, JD.

Agreed, if I have to imagine doing fine in the longer run, I have to confront
this phase as a game of nerves. Gotta keep the nerves.

If you were in town, I'd get the first round this Friday!

------
nicklaf
_Whereas the way these things are taught normally in college and school is a
sampler of what this one wrote and that one wrote and you’re asked to be more
interested in the date of the publication of Keat’s sonnets than in what’s in
them._

So instead of reading this sample of Campbell's work of on Hacker News, I
should be following the advice contained in it? But then the advice is to
favor a single body of work over such samples! So had I followed his very
advice too strictly, I would never have had the chance to read it in the first
place!

Unless, of course, if I already _knew_ about Campbell's work because he was
one of the authors I chose to read thoroughly.

That all said, Edmund Burke did say: "Between two evils, choose neither;
between two goods,choose both". So maybe: spend some time reading Hacker News,
and most of it ignoring the web and other shallow sources entirely.

------
fallingfrog
Where did he get money for food and shelter? I would have loved to live like
this in my 20's, and I'm sure I would have gotten a lot done.. sadly I was
employed, and when you take away 8 hours of work and 1 hours of commute time,
you're left with zero hours per day, rather than 9. It was a constant source
of frustration to me that I had to spend my useful hours following someone's
instructions, instead of learning about the world, forging personal
connections, and building beautiful things- which is what I really wanted to
do.

------
hackermailman
He only payed $20 a year for his shack
[http://edricketts.stanford.edu/Campbell_Ricketts3.pdf](http://edricketts.stanford.edu/Campbell_Ricketts3.pdf)
and also went up to expeditions in Alaska during this time which only cost 25
cents per day. I guess you could do this now, find a rural trailer somewhere
and live as cheap as possible to read all day but not with school
debt/insurance obligations.

------
iandanforth
Any article like this that doesn't discuss how people pay for things is bunk.
Yes the method of self actualization great people use is interesting but it's
not _applicable_ unless you know how they achieved their basic needs. While
Thoreau was living in the woods his mother brought him food. Churchill had the
time to write because he was born into a wealthy aristocratic family. These
details matter.

Edit: writer mixup

~~~
bachmeier
I kept saying to myself as I read the article: _this was the Great Depression,
when people starved because they didn 't have jobs_. If all you had to do was
go live in the woods and read books, the Depression wouldn't have been a
problem. There's the practical issue of needing food and shelter, which didn't
fall from heaven, and in his case, buying enough books to read for 16,000
hours.

------
amelius
IMHO, what routine does is get you started every day. That is the most
difficult part of the workday, those first 15-30 minutes.

------
Dowwie
He obviously read Arthur Schopenhauer, "The Art of Literature"

[http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10714](http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10714)

------
criddell
I wish I could read for even one 3 hour period each day. When I sit down with
a book or my ereader and start reading, I start feeling sleepy after ten or
fifteen minutes. I'll also find that I'm scanning the sentences, but not
really absorbing, so I turn back a few pages and start reading again.

I fare much better if I take notes as I read. I'm starting to think that maybe
writing a chapter synopsis after every chapter I read would fix my problem.
Plus then I could put them online and maybe get some feedback from other
readers.

I'm halfway through Cryptonomicon right now and find myself reading Steve
Russillo's page on the book to remind myself what just happened. My brain
might not be good enough for passive reading anymore.

Edit: BTW, Russillo's page is a warm reminder to me of what first made me fall
in love with the web. Check it out:
[http://russillosm.com/index.html](http://russillosm.com/index.html)

~~~
hackermailman
Try 15-30mins on an exercise bike, or/and at intervals in the reading get up
to do push ups or something. Same problem I end up mind wandering while trying
to read and having to flip back pages but exercise solved that. Taking active
notes helps too, I'll have emacs open and write down anything I'll likely use
again, index it in org-mode then year(s) later I'll need to look up something
like generating all n-tuples and have an index.org file that spans the three
books I read on the subject.

------
evjan
That's admirable, I couldn't read that much!

I'm wondering what Campbell did achieve by doing all that reading and what
made it the most important period of his scholarship and study.

The 10,000 hour figure (which is just an arbitrary number, not an absolute
rule according to Anders Ericsson[1] whose research Malcolm Gladwell referred
to) implies you can reach mastery with a lot of practice, given you do the
right kind of practice.

Mastery is the ability to perform a skill, it's not about knowledge. You need
knowledge to perform, but knowledge without being able to perform does not
imply mastery.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Peak-Secrets-New-Science-Expertise-
eb...](https://www.amazon.com/Peak-Secrets-New-Science-Expertise-
ebook/dp/B011H56MKS/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1509695294&sr=8-1&keywords=peak)

~~~
kitotik
If you are wondering what he achieved by all that reading, read his books or
watch the man speak. I’d say at minimum he achieved a much greater contentment
than most people I’ve ever encountered have, and at most has positively
impacted literally millions of people’s lives.

Seems like a good investment to me.

~~~
evjan
Did he achieve that by reading for 9 hours a day or in spite of reading for 9
hours a day though? I'm aware of no research showing that reading that much
would make you a happier person or more influential.

------
PeOe
Love this. It´s amazing how he on his own maneuvered from a life with no order
to creating his own order and sticking to it. I would wonder how he achieved
that. I guess it was out of necessity.

For anyone that is planning to become more organized and get more done during
the day, I´d recommend [https://zenkit.com](https://zenkit.com)

(Disclaimer: I work at Zenkit.)

Btw: my author of choice would be Tim Ferris. If you don´t know his books,
definitely check him out. [https://tim.blog/tim-ferriss-
books/](https://tim.blog/tim-ferriss-books/)

~~~
HiroshiSan
Interesting choice for author of choice. I used to enjoy reading Tim Ferris'
blog, read the four hour work week when it first came out, but over time I
couldn't help feeling like he just wants to sell me something and it's given
me a bitter outlook towards him. Granted he produces a lot of content at no
cost, but his marketing tactics are very in your face.

~~~
PeOe
Well, yeah that´s true in some way. I really loved the Tools of Titans though
and I´m still listening to his podcast on a daily basis. Just so many great
insights.

------
adamnemecek
The NEET lifestyle is truly amazing. Too bad not many people espouse it.

~~~
waivek
NEET's dont get invited for cocktails.

------
oceanghost
My uncle (a scholar in his own right) knew Joseph Campbell's family. They had
a cattle farm (I'll decline to mention where), and mentioned their "Uncle Joe"
had a room he came to stay in now and then. The family was completely unaware
of the profundity of "Uncle Joe" other than that he was a professor and had
written a few books.

Humble individual, it seems.

------
pruthvishetty
It's the gist of Deep Work by Cal Newport.

------
z3t4
1\. Save up money as a student. 2. Hire an apartment in New York. 3. Don't
take a job, just sit and play computer games all day. 4. Go out for dinners.
5. Get invited to cocktail parties ... Live like that for five years using the
money you earned as a student. 6. Make a computer game. 7. Profit! ... Sounds
like a plan!

~~~
ak39
It does sound like a plan. But he also says don't think of 7. Be "fearless and
desireless".

What a man.

~~~
AstralStorm
And like anything and everything this plan can fail. It is quite hard (or
lucky) to pull off in fact.

Three problem with this plan is that it is very fragile.

~~~
z3t4
I was sarcastic. Most people end school with a fat loan. And who is gonna
afford an apartment in New York !? Then eating out and, going to cocktail
parties - makes it even insulting!

------
erikb
This is really nice for a crunch time. It doesn't have to be 5 years I
believe. Even 3 months is possible, and this can be discussed with the boss as
well, if you have a job.

------
tobych
Typo: Campbell's needs that apostrophe.

------
vongesell
why is this on HN?

~~~
waivek
Joseph Campbell is an important figure in the JavaScript community.

