Thinking back on my own experiences, I’ve gotten a lot out of this kind of approach. Do the thing that seems useful/necessary at the time and that moves towards achieving some legible goal. It’s highly motivating and keeps the feedback loops tight to avoid spending a lot of time doing things that don’t matter. Plus I think it’s a useful “therapy” for coming out from under years of training to, say, do what others tell you to do and not knowing what to do if no one is asking you for anything.
I think there’s a lot to be said for investing effort in work that won’t pay off for a long time and where the objective is not obvious, but I also think you can only develop the intuitions to engage in such work usefully by first getting a good idea of what good work that “moves the needle” looks like over shorter time ranges.
I also think you can only develop the intuitions to engage in such work usefully by first getting a good idea of what good work that “moves the needle” looks like over shorter time ranges.
This all resembles the problem of learning a strategy game. It’s complex. You must:
Choose a victory condition/goal.
Determine a variety of strategies that will let you arrive at that destination/goal.
Make a tactical choice from a variety of paths that enact the strategy/converge on the destination.
Select from a variety of resources to achieve the tactics/motion.
Know how to acquire and manipulate resources.
When people learn chess, they almost always start by just pushing the pieces around. If they are smart or have a good teacher, they gradually figure out higher-order tactics. Over time, positional strategy becomes relevant. And of course, the victory condition isn’t winning at chess, but being good at it.
My major stumbling block in chess is watching too many grandmaster games, reflecting on their higher-order strategies and complex tactics, and trying to play that way. The result is that I make lots of stupid one-move blunders resulting in lost pieces.
There’s that famous Ira Glass quote saying roughly the same thing.
Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.
Thinking back on my own experiences, I’ve gotten a lot out of this kind of approach. Do the thing that seems useful/necessary at the time and that moves towards achieving some legible goal. It’s highly motivating and keeps the feedback loops tight to avoid spending a lot of time doing things that don’t matter. Plus I think it’s a useful “therapy” for coming out from under years of training to, say, do what others tell you to do and not knowing what to do if no one is asking you for anything.
I think there’s a lot to be said for investing effort in work that won’t pay off for a long time and where the objective is not obvious, but I also think you can only develop the intuitions to engage in such work usefully by first getting a good idea of what good work that “moves the needle” looks like over shorter time ranges.
This all resembles the problem of learning a strategy game. It’s complex. You must:
Choose a victory condition/goal.
Determine a variety of strategies that will let you arrive at that destination/goal.
Make a tactical choice from a variety of paths that enact the strategy/converge on the destination.
Select from a variety of resources to achieve the tactics/motion.
Know how to acquire and manipulate resources.
When people learn chess, they almost always start by just pushing the pieces around. If they are smart or have a good teacher, they gradually figure out higher-order tactics. Over time, positional strategy becomes relevant. And of course, the victory condition isn’t winning at chess, but being good at it.
My major stumbling block in chess is watching too many grandmaster games, reflecting on their higher-order strategies and complex tactics, and trying to play that way. The result is that I make lots of stupid one-move blunders resulting in lost pieces.
There’s that famous Ira Glass quote saying roughly the same thing.