
Ask HN: I am giving up early on things I want to achieve.What is the way forward? - newsignup
I have realized that I end up giving up on things more often than I should.<p>If I want to learn drawing or sketching: I may try for a day or two and then think &quot;It doesn&#x27;t look like the one I saw on the internet&quot;.<p>If I want to do kaggle competition: I won&#x27;t even try to do single submission thinking - &quot;I won&#x27;t make it to the top 10, why bother, instead do something else.&quot;<p>I want to be the best in something I do, but I lose patience often, thinking &quot;it is taking more than what it should be taking&quot;. May be I am completely unaware of how time it actually takes to master something and setting up wrong expectations.<p>Have you felt this, and how to achieve your goals or master something without giving up?
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Red_Tarsius
Don't beat yourself too much. 100% of the "overnight successes" you hear from
the media bubble were ALWAYS X years in the making, where X >= 10.

> _If I want to do kaggle competition: I won 't even try to do single
> submission thinking - "I won't make it to the top 10, why bother, instead do
> something else."_

If you want to achieve mastery, you already lost. When the Japanese film
director Akira Kurosawa received a honorary Lifetime Achievement Award at
Oscars at the age of 80 he said, " _I don 't think I understand the cinema
yet_".

Seeking mastery has nothing to do with learning and everything to do with our
own insecurities: "If I'm the best maybe women will love me", "If I'm the best
maybe people will like me", "If I'm the best maybe I will find my own
identity".

Give up mastery. Embrace learning.

> _" It doesn't look like the one I saw on the internet"._

This is the wrong mindset. Instead ask yourself: _Does it look better than the
work I did yesterday?_.

> _Maybe I am completely unaware of how time it actually takes to master
> something and setting up wrong expectations._

It takes time and consistency. Small, quantifiable steps every day. This
applies to _everything_ : dancing
[http://danceinayear.com/](http://danceinayear.com/), web development
[http://jenniferdewalt.com/](http://jenniferdewalt.com/), ...

Good luck!

~~~
anon3_
See "A Note on Practice and Persistence":

"As you study this book, and continue with programming, remember that anything
worth doing is difficult at first. Maybe you are the kind of person who is
afraid of failure so you give up at the first sign of difficulty. Maybe you
never learned self-discipline so you can't do anything that's "boring." Maybe
you were told that you are "gifted" so you never attempt anything that might
make you seem stupid or not a prodigy. Maybe you are competitive and unfairly
compare yourself to someone like me who's been programming for more than 20
years."

[http://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/intro.html](http://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/intro.html)

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sgentle
I recommend watching Ira Glass's video on the gap between your taste and your
abilities. He addresses your problem specifically because it's very common:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BI23U7U2aUY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BI23U7U2aUY)

You need to refocus your goals away from _achievement_ and towards _output_.
Learn to become motivated by effort rather than mastery because it will be a
long time before you are top 10 at anything. Nobody stays motivated for that
long without enjoying the work.

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ThrustVectoring
My first impression is that you're trying too many things and not focusing on
what's actually important to you. Giving up on low-value activities in favor
of high-value ones is a good thing.

My suggestion is to make a list of how you want to grow as a person over the
next few years. Sort it by importance, and then do not do anything that's
below number 3 or 4.

Taking my own advice, I really should stop reading/commenting on HN and
reddit. And I know how to break this habit, so I don't have a good excuse. So,
uhh, bye?

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andersthue
To be honest I have had it like you describe for the most of my life, and
still have it in some areas.

What I have learned as a 43 year old is that it is just how I am and when I
accepted that, it became easier and it is no longer a "problem" for me.

Perhaps you are like that?

I took the strenghtsfinder 2.0 test and that helped me understand myself which
helped me to accept myself.

I can highly recommend the book "start with why" to figure out who your
innermost values are, and the letting go book from zenhabits to accept who you
are and letting all your ideas about who you should be go.

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6d0debc071
> Have you felt this, and how to achieve your goals or master something
> without giving up?

Personally I have functional goals when I'm interested in an activity. Learn
C++? Okay, how do I write a program that will draw a box to the screen? Now
how do I shade it? How do I do that with less overhead....

I give myself six months for tasks like that, often it takes considerably less
time. Sometimes a matter of days or weeks. Very occasionally I run into a 'To
make an apple pie, first create the universe.' style problem and it takes
significantly longer in those cases. But at least then I've got a basis to
compare how hard the problem is to, and can cache out the steps that need to
be taken. Worst comes to the worst I get to the end of the six months and
assign new schedules based on how large the problem stack has grown.

If you think of it like a constraint for a problem: You're starting off and
your constraint is 'Best in the world' and that's a very narrow target to hit.
But if you start the other side of things, 'my constraint is to draw a circle'
, 'now it's to shade it' 'Now it's to give the circle a nose' ... then it's a
lot harder to fail, especially if you're generous with your time in those
sorts of activities.

You're starting off with constraints that are at the edge of your current
skills that way, rather than constraints that are... not feasible to reach
that quickly.

Even then, I would warn against a desire to be the best in the world: There
are seven billion people in the world. If you define your success along some
particular line as being the best, you are comparing yourself to someone who
got all the genetic breaks, started when they were a kid, and finds the
subject rewarding enough to work on it more or less continuously.

Chances are really bad that you're the best in the world at anything. Like 7
billion to 1 against. Even worse, the sacrifices demanded of people who are
truly the best in the world in terms of some particular activity often seem to
leave time for anything resembling a life. And for what? The returns on being
the best in the world are rarely in line with the effort it takes to be so, or
at least so it seems.

^_^

tl/dr: Small steps, consistently applied.

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MalcolmDiggs
> _May be I am completely unaware of how time it actually takes to master
> something and setting up wrong expectations._

An oft-quoted metric is 10,000 hours to truly master a skill. Translated into
the working world: That's working full time at a job for roughly 5 years.

> _Have you felt this, and how to achieve your goals or master something
> without giving up?_

When I started boxing as a teenager there was a life-size cutout of Mike Tyson
in the corner of the gym. The words "Your competition is training harder than
you" were emblazoned across his chest. That message stuck with me, and I still
use it as a motivator. When you're ready to quit, just remember: there's
someone else who wants this more than you do, and they're not quitting yet.
Keep going!

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HeyLaughingBoy
Stop worrying about "mastery" and focus on just putting in the time. Every
single day, spend some time, be it 5 minutes or 5 hours, on whatever it is you
want go be great at. Don't compare progress at any interval less than one
month.

Nothing happens overnight except failure.

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meepmorp
Stop giving up.

Seriously, if you feel like you're giving up too early, don't do that anymore.
Keep going, even if you feel like it's hopeless. Maybe not forever, but try
going twice as long as you otherwise might.

You expect to feel magic. Either some kind of power that comes over you and
makes you do the right thing without putting in the sweaty shit work, or that
you'll just start feeling like you can do it after a tiny bit of effort. Magic
isn't real; sweat is real.

Trust me, hard shit takes lot of work. And you might just suck at many of the
things you try, because that just happens a whole lot. You'll never get any
better by abandoning it.

* there's a whole lifetime of this informing my comments.

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ingend88
"it is taking more than what it should be taking" \- This is exactly the thing
I used to think about. But as time progresses I realized even if I would have
stuck with it for just a few more days, I would have been much better.

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TheAlchemist
Just remember every day that 1.01^365 ~ 14 and 0.99^365 ~ 0.07. You will be
surprised how far you can go, just by doing the thing and improving by a small
margin everyday.

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4ydx
As you find yourself not pursuing things, you are also potentially finding
focus by letting go of goals that are not important to you. In order to master
something however, you will have to do boring, repetitive feeling tasks
mentally and physically. You just have to figure out how to push through those
moments of pain. What Red_Tarsius said is excellent advice. It isn't about the
end goal so much as it is about the process.

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lukaslalinsky
You are giving up on things because they are things you don't truly enjoy. You
want to become good at something for no reason, other than to be good at it.
The world is not a competion, even though some people make it look like it is.
Just find something that you like doing and do it for yourself, not to be the
best at it.

