The thing that doesn't click in articles like this is the advice section afterwards. Do you think the people described thought about how to increase their practice surface area? No, they were simply /interested/. And part of the reason they were interested was because of natural talent! Do you want to know how to increase your practice surface area? Find things you're interested in.
But the reality is that many people just aren't as interested in anything as some people are interested in something. And that's okay. The real advice is to learn to accept yourself as you are, whether you're an obsessive or not.
The article’s advice section is actually quite practical, and directly addresses your point:
> It should go without saying that the best way to increase your practice surface area in a given field is to be obsessed with that field. Obsession makes quick work of formal and bounded training sessions, and it doesn't need "tips" on how to do so.
> So the question then becomes, "How do I increase my practice surface area if I'm not already obsessed?"
> Do you think the people described thought about how to increase their practice surface area? No, they were simply /interested/.
In fact, many of them did think about it. Many of them designed, tested, experimented, and tweaked their approaches to their crafts endlessly throughout their lives.
It can be comforting (because it lets us off the hook) to think that masters of their craft all follow the "just do it" ethos while simply "accepting themselves as they are," but usually the opposite is true. At least at the margin.
I never understood why people want to work so hard on things they are not good at. On the surface it seems obvious that you should do that. But I would rather put that time into getting even better at the stuff I am already good at.
I don't think he meant to not try. I think he meant you shouldn't have to try. Trying implies some resistance or conformity. To him, art and creation was something that was there and natural. You just did it. You were mad with it [1].
It reminds me of nights when I was a teen hacking away at some computer games or writing my first emulator. There was no class, no jira tickets, no books. Just a teen struck with a madness.
I was gonna say. I did it with French some years ago and it worked like a charm.
Later I became obsessed with Argentine tango. Unfortunately, I thought, "comprehensible input" won't work with dancing, especially not a couple's dance. Nevertheless, unable to dance every day due to my local scene being quite small, I instead consumed a boatload of YouTube videos during my spare time. Instructional content, performances, class summaries, and what have you. And I progressed super quickly.
First off, as a leader, it is good to have seen competent dancers with good musicality and how they choose their steps to fit with phrases of songs. That much fits in parallel with input-based language acquisition techniques. But I also think I gained a good amound of intuition about how to move my own body. Not perfect intuition, but more than nothing, which was very much my starting point.
Watching lots of Doom videos on Youtube helped me learn some aspects of the game surprisingly fast. I can't control Doomguy as fast and as precisely as the best Doom youtubers but I can read a situation in the game about as fast and as good as they can and often come up with the plan they eventually follow faster than they do.
I get it! Years ago my obsession was Classic Tetris, and it was common knowledge that watching skilled players at work would improve your own stacking and strategy. A lot of the pros openly admitted to watching their competition while starting out in order to get good
I wonder how the indie/entrepreneur space is doing nowadays. I tried to do it myself but never really got anywhere this was back in 2016. Whenever I go on sites/subreddits around this topic a lot of the posts just seem to be about generating clout/some fake revenue numbers/screenshot of earnings. It's like entrepreneurs selling to each other.
I suppose nowadays it's probably around LLM wrappers, photo generation, video generation services... there were those niche ones in the past like the teacher with her bingo cards maker
It's still in my mind as I don't like waiting for a paycheck, just wondering how the space is doing nowadays
It's doing better than ever! LLMs offer the equivalent of $500k+ in outside funding if used correctly, so there's a huge uptick in # of new bootstrapped startups.
In fact we (the Indie Hackers founders) are bootstrapping a new B2B app now that Claude Code & Codex CLI (etc) are on the org chat.
For post-product-market-fit hires or scale-up engineering teams, the interview process could skip LeetCode and instead test how well candidates can identify and debug issues introduced by LLMs. Less binary trees, more LLM bug-hunting
I don't want to use the word "grift", but it really seems like we're scraping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to new ideas for products a lot of the time. Go and read this month's HN "Who is hiring" thread for an example. It's all either fintech crypto crap that never seems to come to fruition for anything normal people want to use, weird microloans, and products for extremely small niches like using AI to help with gift-giving and so forth.
It's honestly hard to imagine wanting to work 12 hour days to advance some of these interests. We're seeing some of the greatest minds of our generation lost to these kinds of ephemeral, short-lived projects that flame up, consume VC, and mostly burn out uselessly, having created a bunch of IP that is shelved never to be seen again. What's the point?
Maybe we really all ought to just get drafted. At least I'd be able to explain to my kids what I do for a living.
Forced conscription sucks, at least a difference between real war and something mandatory like 2 years of reserves equivalent (I'm not talking about US)
Of course, it's abhorrent. The only imaginable upside would be a grand shift of societal priorities away from the kind of useless effort I'm talking about.
quite sad, the space had inspirational stories. & IndieHackers brought those stories to the masses to inspire.
but later 'fast money / influencers' entered the space. It has become a mini ponzi sell a starter pack / template to wannabe indiehackers, sell a course to wannabe indiehackers.
For solo founders I guess if you wanna get all meat no bones stick to MicroConf
There is a book called "Talent is overrated" it essentially says, you need to 1) invest time, 2) do targeted practice, and 3) have a mentor, who helps you in targeted practice. Practice alone is not enough, it must be targeted at 1) what is relevant and/or 2) where your biggest weakness is at the moment.
Author here. I've spent a decade drinking my own "snake oil" (the advice in this essay), and I've only now committed it to writing so that others can apply it or ignore it as they wish.
I haven't burned out. Instead, I find my work fulfilling, endlessly novel, and valuable to others.
Does this do anything to change your mental model?
How is IndieHackers doing since being independent? I used to use it quite a bit but it seemed like recently it's focused more on articles, similar to Starter Story I guess, which makes a ton of money so I can't blame you for going that route, than the forum (which I can't even figure out how to get to anymore). But then again, the forum had quite a lot of promotion and spam that got boring to read after a while.
It's doing quite well. Thanks for asking. :) Good observation re the forum: folks find it novel and engaging for about a week, then get bored of the repetition. Not very monetizable for an indie team.
> The difference between being good and being great isn’t talent or formal training, but the invisible practice that happens when you're just living life.
Pure nonsense.
Necessary != sufficient, and honestly neither are demonstrated in the anecdotes.
It's possible to be great at something simply by practicing, assuming normal capabilities. But great here just means "better than virtually everyone". Being mediocre among people who practice regularly it makes you immediately better than basically everyone who has done it once or twice. By most definitions that's "great".
Median daily StarCraft ranked player? You're great at StarCraft.
Second, if you start young enough, you get the compounding effects of time. You're now "pretty good among lifelong daily players in their prime". That's Olympic/ world class.
Like that guy who had kids just to make them Chess masters. He did so by making chess part of the family life, so integral it wasn't working it just was. The guy from the original post actually.
So it's tempting to say things like TFA posits, and while I'm not sure it's 100% true, it's definitely not 100% false or pure rubbish.
This article might be interesting, and I'm not against AI use. I am not interested in AI slop though, and I immediately lost interest in the banner photo with nonsense text in it.
Sorry for the interruption. We're an indie business with no banner ads, and our newsletter helps us keep the lights on. Hope you enjoyed the piece up to that point.
AI polarization is a little interesting. The AI generated image prompted the parent to not even consider whether the content was on topic. This might be a decent heuristic, but it's bound to throw out a lot of potentially useful stuff as well.
Thanks for the change, sorry if I came off as too aggressive. I've seen some uses of AI that were very similar that strictly made the article worse and it would have been better to simply delete it. I'll concede that I simply didn't get it, and that's a me problem here. I'll give the article a more fair chance when I have some time later :)
The thing that doesn't click in articles like this is the advice section afterwards. Do you think the people described thought about how to increase their practice surface area? No, they were simply /interested/. And part of the reason they were interested was because of natural talent! Do you want to know how to increase your practice surface area? Find things you're interested in.
But the reality is that many people just aren't as interested in anything as some people are interested in something. And that's okay. The real advice is to learn to accept yourself as you are, whether you're an obsessive or not.
The article’s advice section is actually quite practical, and directly addresses your point:
> It should go without saying that the best way to increase your practice surface area in a given field is to be obsessed with that field. Obsession makes quick work of formal and bounded training sessions, and it doesn't need "tips" on how to do so.
> So the question then becomes, "How do I increase my practice surface area if I'm not already obsessed?"
> Do you think the people described thought about how to increase their practice surface area? No, they were simply /interested/.
In fact, many of them did think about it. Many of them designed, tested, experimented, and tweaked their approaches to their crafts endlessly throughout their lives.
It can be comforting (because it lets us off the hook) to think that masters of their craft all follow the "just do it" ethos while simply "accepting themselves as they are," but usually the opposite is true. At least at the margin.
This article is quite shallow. It's essentially saying, in order to excel at something it needs to become a part of you.
There's some truth there, but Charles Bukowski said it much better and more succinctly with, "Don't try." [1]
1: https://poets.org/poem/so-you-want-be-writer
I couldn't disagree this poem more.
> if it's hard work just thinking about doing it,
> don't do it
If it's hard work just thinking about doing it, it's a very good sign that it's something worth doing.
(I know I shouldn't take motivating quotes literally)
I have a rule that for any profound statement there exists an equally profound contradictory statement.
No there isn't.
I never understood why people want to work so hard on things they are not good at. On the surface it seems obvious that you should do that. But I would rather put that time into getting even better at the stuff I am already good at.
Telling people to ignore things they dont like thinking about is completely terrible advice. Its almost the worst possible advice.
I don't think he meant to not try. I think he meant you shouldn't have to try. Trying implies some resistance or conformity. To him, art and creation was something that was there and natural. You just did it. You were mad with it [1].
It reminds me of nights when I was a teen hacking away at some computer games or writing my first emulator. There was no class, no jira tickets, no books. Just a teen struck with a madness.
1: https://bookshavepores.tumblr.com/post/9013559249/charles-bu...
Either that or specialization
Good read, a summary:
When you become obsessed with A, your whole life becomes a practice of A.
This is the same thing that AJATT (All Japanese All The Time or something) recommends to learn a new language too.
I was gonna say. I did it with French some years ago and it worked like a charm.
Later I became obsessed with Argentine tango. Unfortunately, I thought, "comprehensible input" won't work with dancing, especially not a couple's dance. Nevertheless, unable to dance every day due to my local scene being quite small, I instead consumed a boatload of YouTube videos during my spare time. Instructional content, performances, class summaries, and what have you. And I progressed super quickly.
First off, as a leader, it is good to have seen competent dancers with good musicality and how they choose their steps to fit with phrases of songs. That much fits in parallel with input-based language acquisition techniques. But I also think I gained a good amound of intuition about how to move my own body. Not perfect intuition, but more than nothing, which was very much my starting point.
Watching lots of Doom videos on Youtube helped me learn some aspects of the game surprisingly fast. I can't control Doomguy as fast and as precisely as the best Doom youtubers but I can read a situation in the game about as fast and as good as they can and often come up with the plan they eventually follow faster than they do.
I get it! Years ago my obsession was Classic Tetris, and it was common knowledge that watching skilled players at work would improve your own stacking and strategy. A lot of the pros openly admitted to watching their competition while starting out in order to get good
I wonder how the indie/entrepreneur space is doing nowadays. I tried to do it myself but never really got anywhere this was back in 2016. Whenever I go on sites/subreddits around this topic a lot of the posts just seem to be about generating clout/some fake revenue numbers/screenshot of earnings. It's like entrepreneurs selling to each other.
I suppose nowadays it's probably around LLM wrappers, photo generation, video generation services... there were those niche ones in the past like the teacher with her bingo cards maker
It's still in my mind as I don't like waiting for a paycheck, just wondering how the space is doing nowadays
It's doing better than ever! LLMs offer the equivalent of $500k+ in outside funding if used correctly, so there's a huge uptick in # of new bootstrapped startups.
In fact we (the Indie Hackers founders) are bootstrapping a new B2B app now that Claude Code & Codex CLI (etc) are on the org chat.
> LLMs offer the equivalent of $500k+ in outside funding if used correctly
And it only costs $1M to use them correctly!
I hope this is a parody post and not actually the real exhultations of an actual founder.
For post-product-market-fit hires or scale-up engineering teams, the interview process could skip LeetCode and instead test how well candidates can identify and debug issues introduced by LLMs. Less binary trees, more LLM bug-hunting
Well the OP is the co-founder of Indie Hackers...
:shrug: Good for him
I don't want to use the word "grift", but it really seems like we're scraping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to new ideas for products a lot of the time. Go and read this month's HN "Who is hiring" thread for an example. It's all either fintech crypto crap that never seems to come to fruition for anything normal people want to use, weird microloans, and products for extremely small niches like using AI to help with gift-giving and so forth.
It's honestly hard to imagine wanting to work 12 hour days to advance some of these interests. We're seeing some of the greatest minds of our generation lost to these kinds of ephemeral, short-lived projects that flame up, consume VC, and mostly burn out uselessly, having created a bunch of IP that is shelved never to be seen again. What's the point?
Maybe we really all ought to just get drafted. At least I'd be able to explain to my kids what I do for a living.
Is it better or worse than when the greatest minds of our generation were lost to increasing user engagement by any means necessary?
I'd say it keeps getting worse, and it's not like we've stopped focusing on engagement numbers
Forced conscription sucks, at least a difference between real war and something mandatory like 2 years of reserves equivalent (I'm not talking about US)
Of course, it's abhorrent. The only imaginable upside would be a grand shift of societal priorities away from the kind of useless effort I'm talking about.
quite sad, the space had inspirational stories. & IndieHackers brought those stories to the masses to inspire.
but later 'fast money / influencers' entered the space. It has become a mini ponzi sell a starter pack / template to wannabe indiehackers, sell a course to wannabe indiehackers.
For solo founders I guess if you wanna get all meat no bones stick to MicroConf
There is a book called "Talent is overrated" it essentially says, you need to 1) invest time, 2) do targeted practice, and 3) have a mentor, who helps you in targeted practice. Practice alone is not enough, it must be targeted at 1) what is relevant and/or 2) where your biggest weakness is at the moment.
Or, you can live a balanced happy life with relationships and touching grass where you are "in the moment", and not always distracted.
being passionate about something is not a distraction
Being passionate and obsessive are two different things.
> Turn idle time into mental rehearsal
Any psychologist would bash your head with a book for following this.
Good thing I would neither ever see a psychologist nor take a silly advise like that
This is new level of snake oil. When you're not selling your own snake oil, but trying to piggyback off of other people.
Burn out speedrun 101.
If you want to keep your sanity, you need to find your own passion, not try to emulate others (especially with crazy routines like the examples).
Author here. I've spent a decade drinking my own "snake oil" (the advice in this essay), and I've only now committed it to writing so that others can apply it or ignore it as they wish.
I haven't burned out. Instead, I find my work fulfilling, endlessly novel, and valuable to others.
Does this do anything to change your mental model?
How is IndieHackers doing since being independent? I used to use it quite a bit but it seemed like recently it's focused more on articles, similar to Starter Story I guess, which makes a ton of money so I can't blame you for going that route, than the forum (which I can't even figure out how to get to anymore). But then again, the forum had quite a lot of promotion and spam that got boring to read after a while.
It's doing quite well. Thanks for asking. :) Good observation re the forum: folks find it novel and engaging for about a week, then get bored of the repetition. Not very monetizable for an indie team.
> The difference between being good and being great isn’t talent or formal training, but the invisible practice that happens when you're just living life.
Pure nonsense.
Necessary != sufficient, and honestly neither are demonstrated in the anecdotes.
Two things.
It's possible to be great at something simply by practicing, assuming normal capabilities. But great here just means "better than virtually everyone". Being mediocre among people who practice regularly it makes you immediately better than basically everyone who has done it once or twice. By most definitions that's "great".
Median daily StarCraft ranked player? You're great at StarCraft.
Second, if you start young enough, you get the compounding effects of time. You're now "pretty good among lifelong daily players in their prime". That's Olympic/ world class.
Like that guy who had kids just to make them Chess masters. He did so by making chess part of the family life, so integral it wasn't working it just was. The guy from the original post actually.
So it's tempting to say things like TFA posits, and while I'm not sure it's 100% true, it's definitely not 100% false or pure rubbish.
This article might be interesting, and I'm not against AI use. I am not interested in AI slop though, and I immediately lost interest in the banner photo with nonsense text in it.
Author here. Good feedback: the text isn't nonsense, but it requires background knowledge that the man on the right is the rapper Eminem.
I lost interest when I got to the email address box to subscribe. Interrupts the flow and makes me skim the rest.
Sorry for the interruption. We're an indie business with no banner ads, and our newsletter helps us keep the lights on. Hope you enjoyed the piece up to that point.
That was my first reaction, too, but it’s not actually nonsense - it’s a depiction of Eminem practicing rhymes in a casual conversation.
It’s valid feedback for the author, though. I had to read the article to understand the image.
AI polarization is a little interesting. The AI generated image prompted the parent to not even consider whether the content was on topic. This might be a decent heuristic, but it's bound to throw out a lot of potentially useful stuff as well.
Yeah, it would probably work better if that image were positioned after the reference to Eminem thinking of rhymes all day.
I'm an Eminem fan and didn't get that reference FWIW.
I thought it was some "Silicon Valley bro" that wanted you to drink kelp, and build your biceps or something
Gotcha! Shame on me. Just slapped a "Slim Shady" label on his hoodie. Won't fully stop the bleeding but at least a few more people will get it.
Thanks for the change, sorry if I came off as too aggressive. I've seen some uses of AI that were very similar that strictly made the article worse and it would have been better to simply delete it. I'll concede that I simply didn't get it, and that's a me problem here. I'll give the article a more fair chance when I have some time later :)