> Katie Ledecky didn't put in a huge amount of effort in her training before her world-class swimming performances.
Although the training takes lots of energy and time, it needn't be driven by striving towards abstract goals. Rather the training can be a playful/fun practice for the sake of doing it well in the moment. This makes it feel easier to practice a lot, and also makes the practice more "productive" by freeing up attention from distractions of purpose and self.
It's hard to say if most elite athletes are able to do this all the time, but they probably don't have as bad a time of it as normies when it comes to physical exertion.
Reminds me of when I first tried to learn guitar. I tried doing fingering practices. It was so boring. I gave up after like a week.
I thought that playing music just wasn’t for me.
Many years later, I picked up a friend’s guitar next to me and just tried to play one of my favorite songs just by ear. I got enough right that it was fun and I got hooked.
I like repeating something someone else created until I master it. Playing just a little bit better after every attempt is motivating, playing well after training is also motivating.
Creating is not motivating because I compare myself to others. You have to feel that you could do something unique enough or good enough to be motivated.
Electric guitar can be really fun but I always end up playing the piano because it's easier. The keys are in order in front of you, not arranged in weird ways on strings.
If a person wants to do a thing then they will engage with it on their terms. But getting that initial "hook" and then growing it is the trick.
I will never go to any physical training that involves a trainer shouting "pain is gain!". If it hurts, why would I do that? Why are we focusing on how much it hurts?!
Get me hooked on the Gain, let the pain happen naturally depending on how hard I want that Gain.
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
I do a lot of stuff that people think is "hard work", but as they say, physical pain is fleeting, and I typically have a half-dozen or more small and large goals that I am working towards, that requires such "hard work". So, perhaps I yearn for the vast and endless.... something?
That's... actually the exact opposite of what GP suggested, isn't it? They wrote that "training doesn't need to be driven by abstract goals", and you are suggesting abstract goals to work towards. Not saying that can't work too, just that it's something different...
Yep yearning doesnt work for me. But joy does. I try to enjoy the work. For progrmmers, big hint: do one thing at a time. Keep slack off for an hour. Get hooked on a task.
I've noticed that for most hobbies, there comes a point where to improve you need to do the boring part. Yes, to a certain extent, practice can be play, but unless you're the one-in-a-million prodigy who's just obsessed day and night, it's not going to be much fun drilling scales, or practicing your serve, or crimping on a hangboard, or whatever.
Once you get to a certain level, you stop being able to just easily add new skills and capabilities and have to cycle between adding skills and polishing skills. And once you get far enough, adding skills becomes a much smaller portion of time you spend on the activity than polishing, until one day you've mostly added all the skills you're going to and the only thing left to do is polish them to perfection.
And that's why I don't strive for excellence in most any of my hobbies -- they stop being as fun when I'm no longer getting to do new things and only ever pushing against my limit to improve things I'm already doing.
I don't know about that. I've only ever been properly good at one thing in my life - I'm a dilettante at everything else, including my current career - but in my experience (in common with even more talented artists with whom I've worked) is that the polishing is where the fun begins. You get to a point where you're working at such a finely detailed level that only you, and others equally invested, will ever notice, and you're pursuing perfection that you know isn't ever possible, but you get moments where it's just... Yes: that was it, and then you're chasing that feeling again. I dunno, there's maybe something egoistic about that, and you obviously have to really care about what you're working on, but I've never experienced anything else remotely as satisfying. I can easily imagine that generalizing to swimming, or writing code, or driving a racecar, or pretty much any other activity that humans engage in.
Well yeah, it helps to become a good (even world-class) swimmer if you actually like swimming and do a lot of it from an early age. Same as you are more likely to become a good developer if you actually enjoy programming rather than just thinking "I want to be a developer someday because I want to earn $$$".
There is a school of thought that all psychiatric crap can be expressed in terms of disordered synaptic plasticity ... Dementia it falls apart; psychosis it forms and prunes "wrongly", etc.
Unfortunately this view is a little ahead of technical capability to observe and intervene at that level so it's more of a clarifying viewpoint than a predictive tool
> [A] series ... looking at the structures of life for pre-modern peasant farmers and showing how historical modeling can help us explore the experiences of people who rarely leave much evidence of their day-to-day personal lives.
No - Performance reviews are important legally, it's the only company IP you're entitled to take with you when you leave etc, so this is where you can have evidence of specific projects etc.
Also - If you write the PR you want to get and give to your manager, the burden of effort falls on the manager to correct it where they disagree. If your manager writes it, the burden of effort falls on the manager to comprehensively justify your value as a matter of record. It is better the former be halfassed than the latter
> Performance reviews are (...) the only company IP you're entitled to take with you when you leave etc, so this is where you can have evidence of specific projects etc.
Wait what? I never heard about this in nearly two decades of working. Is this jurisdiction specific or a general case?
You'd think this would be no. 1 thing advice given to new joiners, or given by career couches, or given in all these threads where people ask how to deal with "Github history as proof of work" when you worked on proprietary code for years.
> If you write the PR you want to get and give to your manager, the burden of effort falls on the manager to correct it where they disagree. If your manager writes it, the burden of effort falls on the manager to comprehensively justify your value as a matter of record. It is better the former be halfassed than the latter
I think the point is people embody or create anxiety, whether or not it is a choice. As an emotion the anxiety is inseparable from the person, a dead person cannot be anxious etc.
Then you do not have an anxiety disorder, you just experience the emotion of anxiety.
Similarly, you can be sad, and not have depression. The thing that makes it depression is not being able to trivially drop it. If you 'have anxiety', and can flip it on and off at will, then by the clinical definition you do not have generalized anxiety disorder. That's very nice property of the DSM.
That comment had no advice in it, medical or otherwise. It just described definitions.
However, I would really like to know why would anyone "turned on" own anxiety if they have possibility to not turn it on. What are you gaining from that? Sounds like hitting own leg with a hammer. Even if you can do it ... why?
Watching Netflix. You pay people streaming movies that don't provide a good to society and you do alter your state of mind which affects others and you do destroy your health a cost which also payed by others.
The argument you used earlier could be applied to literally anything, so if it's valid, literally everything should be a crime. I don't think the argument is valid.
You can't counter-argue that streaming movies is good for society, but growing plants isn't. I think it's the other way around, actually.
They do produce movies. I think comparing them to producing addictives to keep a mafia and money washing system operating is a bit disingenuous. I also think movies in general do not remove your ability to form clean thoughts, having goals in life and invoke hallucinations and make you paranoid.
Maybe I shouldn't have used a bunch of euphemisms that sound ridiculous when taken literally.
Some drugs are addictive. Some are not. Some are pretty benign. Do you drink coffee? Alcohol? Actually, alcohol is much worse for you than some illegal drugs are. So is Tylenol - that's actually one of the easiest drugs to fatally overdose on, and you can buy it over the counter. Perhaps each substance should be judged on its own merits and not whether it's legal or illegal.
I grew up near a town called "Moodus" in Connecticut which constantly made noises and had small quakes.
But it didn't prepare me for the few small quakes I experienced in the bay area (typically a bunch of car alarms go off and dogs bark, there's a thud, and then a gentle rocking).
There are even earthquakes you can feel in "Old England". Not often, but I've experienced one. Lived in the BA for a few years and felt many small quakes. Lived in a very seismically active part of Montana for 25 years and felt nothing. YMMV.
Sometimes you have to make the Pan hot enough so all the food goes "Tssss!" immediately and loudly when it goes in, and doesn't boil in its own moisture. Doing this appropriately is one thing that separates okay cooks from terrible cooks
Although the training takes lots of energy and time, it needn't be driven by striving towards abstract goals. Rather the training can be a playful/fun practice for the sake of doing it well in the moment. This makes it feel easier to practice a lot, and also makes the practice more "productive" by freeing up attention from distractions of purpose and self.
It's hard to say if most elite athletes are able to do this all the time, but they probably don't have as bad a time of it as normies when it comes to physical exertion.