The most valuable thing I learned at university was how to tackle difficult problems. Taking advanced math and science courses where I had to really study, and still struggled, and having to write essays so frequently that I could no longer procrastinate or wait for the spark to hit me, was more valuable in the long run than any of the actual knowledge I gained.
The advice to break a hard problem down into simpler pieces good, but I feel like that is often difficult without proper domain knowledge. In many cases, knowing how to break apart a problem like that is how you become an expert in the first place. If you want to learn a musical instrument, there are plenty of good simple excercises to start with, but only an expert can tell you what they are, you can’t easily intuit them from scratch. An experienced programmer will know how to break down a difficult project into small and simpler pieces, that ability is part of what makes them an expert. “Find a good teacher” and “put in the work” seem like rather banal pieces of advice, but it’s a system that has consistently worked throughout the ages. If you are truly breaking new ground then you should already have a framework and significant experience to guide your exploration.
Your comment reminds me of the exercise where a class was split into two cohorts, one was tasked with producing just one clay pot (I can't remember the thing now), while the other cohort was tasked with making one per day or something similar.
Put simply, one group put all of its energy into producing just one, and the other group just turned out pot after pot after pot.
At the end, so the story goes, the group that cranked out pots like crazy ended up producing pots of higher quality.
In my own life, I can often find out the thing that I'm afraid of learning because I've set it up like that first cohort: making the one perfect thing, instead of putting it out there and iterating on it or making another based on what I learned. Goes with learning languages (I'd do way better if I simply tried speaking every day, but I wait for perfect opportunities).
Don’t worry about the details; it was just a made-up story in the book Art & Fear; I have never seen any evidence such a pottery class ever existed. https://kk.org/cooltools/art-fear/
> The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pound of pots rated an "A", forty pounds a "B", and so on. Those being graded on "quality", however, needed to produce only one pot -albeit a perfect one - to get an "A". Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the "quantity" group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the "quality" group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.
This story comes from page 29 of Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland. In an email conversation with Orland on October 18, 2016, he explained the origins of the story. “Yes, the ‘ceramics story’ in ‘Art & Fear’ is indeed true, allowing for some literary license in the retelling. Its real-world origin was as a gambit employed by photographer Jerry Uelsmann to motivate his Beginning Photography students at the University of Florida. As retold in ‘Art & Fear’ it faithfully captures the scene as Jerry told it to me—except I replaced photography with ceramics as the medium being explored. Admittedly, it would’ve been easier to retain photography as the art medium being discussed, but David Bayles (co-author) & I are both photographers ourselves, and at the time we were consciously trying to broaden the range of media being referenced in the text. The intriguing thing to me is that it hardly matters what art form was invoked—the moral of the story appears to hold equally true straight across the whole art spectrum (and even outside the arts, for that matter).” Later in that same email, Orland said, “You have our permission to reprint the any or all of the ‘ceramics’ passage in your forthcoming book.” In the end, I settled on publishing an adapted version, which combines their telling of the ceramics story with facts from the original source of Uelsmann’s photography students. David Bayles and Ted Orland, Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking (Santa Cruz, CA: Image Continuum Press, 1993), 29.
It's a ironic to me that the original inspiration for the story was not ceramics, but photography. My main pastime is photography, and I took this advice to heart and started being as prolific as possible, which is something that digital photography has made easy and compared to film, inexpensive. It was a great relief to just accept that the first attempts at anything are going to be terrible and that failure was a necessary barrier to entry of getting good. Ten years, and tens of thousands of photos later and I've gained a lot of experience and produced some work that I'm proud to call my own.
I believe it was Henri Cartier-Bresson who quipped (or at least has had it attributed to him) that "Your first ten thousand photos are your worst."
I've found that using digital to gather new skills is terrific, but yet I find some of the work I am most satisfied with is analog; I believe it is mostly down to my own lack of self discipline - when shooting digital, exposures are free and hence I shoot lots and lots.
When out with my Texas Leica (A Fuji G690BL, a 6*9 rangefinder), getting eight exposures to the roll, I take those extra couple of moments to ensure I get it all right.
Looks like I have been pwned; thanks for pointing that out. Guess there was a reason that no good footnote existed in my memory for the origin of the anecdote.
Part of what stuck out to me, though, was that the anecdote aligned with my personal experiences of things that were once difficult until I ended up having to do them everyday for one reason or another.
But you're right, that's still a far way off from there being some actual study or otherwise repeatable exercise to show this in a clinical setting for learning new skills.
The specific anecdote may have been fabricated, but the principle is sound. An example is the marshmallow problem[1], where a group is given some materials and is asked to build, under time pressure, the tallest tower they can with a marshmallow on top. Adults generally fare poorly because they don't experiment enough, building a tall tower and placing a marshmallow on the top as time is running out, only to have the tower collapse under the newly introduced weight. Children often do much better because they start with small, simple structures and iterate quickly.
I don't know if that is really the same principle as the pottery anecdote however, it's not about experimenting but a narrative enforcing the concept 'practice makes perfect', related I suppose but not the same.
And anyway the pottery principle is not really sound either - I can suppose that the group tasked with producing a pot a day produces a better pot at the end than the group that was given a long time, but let us assume pot-makers both extremely skilled - one is tasked with making a pot a day for 30 days, the other making a pot in 30 days - which pot under those conditions will be better? The pottery principle is only interesting in explaining how to build a skill, but does not have anything to say about what to expect from those who have already mastered a skill.
You can make the same very bad $creative_product every day indefinitely without improving at all.
Which is why there has to be at least some assessment and feedback. That's the big benefit of having a teacher, mentor, and/or the feedback of peers, customers, or an audience.
If you have a mediocre talent they'll steer you towards making the most of it. If you have exceptional talent their feedback may be wrong or misleading, but it should at least make you think more deeply about your relationship with what you're doing.
You can't assess your own work realistically unless you have something to compare it with, and the critical skills to understand which features matter.
And in relation to programming, entrepreneurship, etc. getting basic experience doing "the full pipline" matters. Releasing _anything_ gives you experience in preparing _something_ for release, whereas if you tried making a perfect program you would miss out on what matters early on for an eventual release and be able to coordinate those for your next product.
There have also been discussion about the same thing happening in music and science. That is, the people who produce the best work also produce the most work, and a lot of that work is bad. But some of it is very, very good.
Which is much like the Harvard or Yale study (it's usually one or the other) that shows people with specific goals and an action plan do ten times better than those without. Nice to know, except, it's all made up: https://www.peer.ca/Singles/MM255.pdf
There have of course been studies on goal setting and achievement (one of which is mentioned in the above pdf) but while they show an effect, they don't show the spectacular results of the made up study.
I think this rings true for learning. Early on in the learning process people need to focus on just doing a bunch of stuff and failing quick and then looping back to the beginning. Focusing on perfection with no foundation, in my experience is usually a surefire way to create things of lower quality
I think there needs to be a balance. If we want to keep talking about pots at my workplace there are people who produce the same pot quickly but never ever improve. Then there are others who talk about great pots but never make one. And then there are some that produce a little slower but each pot gets better. Depending on the situation probably any of these approaches makes sense sometime.
I've heard a very similar story but with a photo class at UF from James Clear's Atomic Habits. Still, very interesting outcome, although I can't say I was surprised based on the odds. Thanks for the share.
I’ve heard this lil story before but honestly both strategies are really dependent on the situation.
There might be situations where’d you want to continually churn out pots. In other situations, pressure is really high, and you have one shot to get it right.
Both strategies depend on the context. If anything, the best approach is to figure out which strategy is needed for the given situation. I would imagine, strategy of churning out pots is the most common one.
But safety critical systems certainly need that pot to be right the first time otherwise people die.
Yea, sometimes if the stakes are high enough you may have to get it right without multiple attempts.
Depending on your time constraints, the tips given here seem to apply particularly well: find proxy problems that allows you to learn without as much hardship would be a good idea, as well as the other strategies of breaking it down, etc.
Sometimes time is not on your side though, and you have to get it right without time to practice on proxy problems (at least I believe this can occur).
Then you can use what I call it the 'Kitchen sink' approach: grab a bunch of tools, a bunch of approaches and start digesting your problem through as many viewpoints as possible. If your problem has safety implications and you can verify it, then well enough. Otherwise you make an attempt if you are sufficiently confident in your solution; and take some kind of NOP otherwise (if a guaranteed 0-return NOP even exists).
Also, if you're solving something while time constrained, you may need to reflect afterwards if you could have either prevented the time constraint or prepared better somehow.
In general though, there's hope in the sense that if something is verifiable or approximately-verifiable you can approach good solutions with time. At least I have high hopes of always finding a solution given enough time (i.e. "You're not good enough" does not exist).
That's only not applicable if your time is finite or in the same vein you need to improve a skill to apply a series of finite-time decisions. Eh who cares about finite time anyway? :P
(Yes, in reality everything is limited but there are plenty of tasks you can take your time with...)
The pot challenge is one group is they get graded just on number of pots made vs. the other on a single pot they can submit. The group trying to perfect one pot ends up making worse quality pots than the quantity group because the quantity group ends up getting way more practice.
That anecdote gives me lots of hope. I hope it's accurate! :)
One thing to note about the pot challenge - it works because making a pot is a physical skill that improves with repetition in a situation where mistakes are really obvious. If you were to apply the same principle to something else it might not work at all.
If you just write a huge amount of code rather than examining what's good or bad about code you wrote, you'd probably end up writing the same bad code over and over again. Seeing where improvements can be made is sometimes really not obvious and can feel like you're going backwards. For example, learning where functional programming applies instead of writing a class for everything. You need to be able to understand why something is better for simple repetition to work.
Most valuable things I did not learned at university:
* Ignore whole craze toward being cool, participating in random competitions, chasing opposite sex
* Keep detailed notes of your days, who did you meet, what did you learned?
* Don't worry too much about acquiring every possible new skills that you come across
* The most important part of the textbook is exercises and that's not because there would be tests. If you really want to learn something, you need to do exercises!
* Write down import concepts you learned, new insights you developed. The process of writing down to explain to someone or yourself improves learning by an order of magnitude.
* Avoid depth-first search. Not every chapter, every book, every subject must be learned in all its gory details.
* Most textbooks are written by people who have little passion for that subject and they just want to show off their expertise. If you think you are wasting time, dump that textbook sooner than later.
Sounds like you could've used a harder course then, if you picked something that suited you, you wouldn't be able to get through it without most of these.
Totally agree. I remember the first days of Algebra at university and you couldn't understand anything what the teacher was saying. Some freaked out as if they didn't know it now, meant they will never understand it (fixed mindset) and some thought "hell, I don't get it but I'll probably understand it once I studied it for a while (growth mindset).
In high school, smart students can often get away with not studying. In university, your attitude and mindset towards failure and learning becomes much more important.
> In high school, smart students can often get away with not studying. In university, your attitude and mindset towards failure and learning becomes much more important.
In high school I rarely opened the textbook and did fine. I ended up on academic probation my first semester in college because I had no idea how to study (or even that I had to study). While it was a rough first year, it was definitely needed.
Sadly my course at university was too easy - most of the times i could easily wing the exams, prepare for a presentation day before, and do the same thing to the project - and get equivalent of B.
Professors were also good at teaching, which reduced the need to study at home even further.
It hurt me in the long run - i am really bad at putting in effort unless something catches my attention(thankfully programming can totally absorb me), and i quite frequently 'wait for the spark'(walking helps with that a lot).
It is unfortunate that many smart people go through their life without being truly challenged to work hard and develop these skills. It is often too easy for us (excuse my pride) to coast by on our ability to grasp material quickly and intuitively, yet ultimately feel dissatisfied as we know we didn’t work that hard at it. The only way I have found to overcome this is to engage in rigorous study with those who are better than you. In some ways I think many of the elite schools in the US do a disservice to their students by coddling them with inflated grades and subjective assessments. Having experienced both, I far prefer the brutal and objective assessments of difficult midterms and finals found at large public universities. If you don’t have access to such an education, then start by reading the original works of great thinkers. Take courses at the best school you can find. Online is ok, but don’t neglect the work. Find professional work with peers that challenge you. Being surrounded by smart people who work hard will change your perspective on what is possible. Procrastination is just one form of self-sabotage which allows us avoid confronting our own limitations. There’s no shame in turning in a crap project because you did it the night before, but it would be a catastrophe to spend weeks pouring your heart and soul into a piece and still have it be garbage! The reality is that many hard things require lots of practice, and you won’t always nail it. Laugh at your mistakes, throw it away, start over, iterate and improve. It’s ok to fail, it’s not an indictment of your potential. Great projects may start with inspiration from a long walk, but they also require lots of editing and refactoring. The important thing is to start the thing and keep working at it, keep chipping away at the small pieces until you get there.
> The advice to break a hard problem down into simpler pieces good, but I feel like that is often difficult without proper domain knowledge. In many cases, knowing how to break apart a problem like that is how you become an expert in the first place.
No, you don't always have that choice.
What you do is you break it up, best you can, then try to build each part. If that doesn't work, you break it up differently.
> In many cases, knowing how to break apart a problem like that is how you become an expert in the first place.
Funny, I had this notion that experts are most of the time better at avoiding deadends. Subtlety and patience. Noobs are impatient and depth first and lose hope.
A teacher who recognizes and corrects your subtle misunderstandings is ideal, but in >3 degrees, I've never had one.
Though I have played that role with guitar and computer science students, so they do exist. I guess.
Breaking down problems is obvious and known advice, but very helpful, especially when you are lost in the weeds, can't see the forest for the trees, etc. Having it as "a system" helps self-management. Disagree about the importance of touch-typing.
Grammar snark (for an article about writing): "Sometimes it will be obvious what you need to improve, sometimes it won’t. When it doesn’t, ..."
This was my problem at university. It was way too easy for me, and I didn't get challenged until the final thesis project, which then took way too long and essentially failed even though I did get a passing grade. Real-life work does present complex problems though, and I am basically not capable of tackling them, even though I am smart enough to solve them once someone else has divided them into smaller problems.
I agree in the main . Specially about breaking up hard problems often being a retrospective advantage. I think simplifying a problem by removing details, solving that and then wondering about the differences is pretty effective. Helps you understand what you’re confused about.
totally agree, I think when I confront a new complex system, let's say AWS Cloud, I wish there would be a page or tutorial where all the building blocks would be stated up-front, so I agree with you that identifying those building blocks are crucial, and a good teacher or good documentation should help putting that information up-front then go into details on how those building blocks relate to each other.
The advice to break a hard problem down into simpler pieces good, but I feel like that is often difficult without proper domain knowledge. In many cases, knowing how to break apart a problem like that is how you become an expert in the first place. If you want to learn a musical instrument, there are plenty of good simple excercises to start with, but only an expert can tell you what they are, you can’t easily intuit them from scratch. An experienced programmer will know how to break down a difficult project into small and simpler pieces, that ability is part of what makes them an expert. “Find a good teacher” and “put in the work” seem like rather banal pieces of advice, but it’s a system that has consistently worked throughout the ages. If you are truly breaking new ground then you should already have a framework and significant experience to guide your exploration.