Learning another (human) language is like that. Almost anyone can do it. It requires no special skills, training, or experience. There are some tricks that you can use, but mostly it's just an enormous amount of work, not particularly challenging work either, that you need to persist at for years, even decades.<p>I'd like to think this is common knowledge, but I have many times talked with people who hope to learn French to fluency in six months, and people who are convinced they could never learn it no matter what. Both types are terrible with estimating their abilities.
In April 2021 I started to read 4 pages a day from big books I always wanted to read, but never had time for it. 4 pages and stop even if I get into the flow, 4 pages even if I'm falling asleep because it's so boring.<p>Not even 2 years in, I've already read the Bible, the Elements of Euclid, Zeldovich's Intro to Higher Math, and am in the middle of Das Kapital. The Great Books canon never looked more approachable.<p>Just 4 pages a day. It really adds up.
Tony Robbins has been saying this for decades. People overestimate what they can do in a year but massively underestimate what they can do in a decade. One implication being that if you take up a hobby (say, playing the piano) after a year you are probably not very good and a lot of people then give it up because their performance doesn’t meet their (over-)expectation. But stick with it, grinding it out year after year, and almost anyone can meet their expectations. The trick, of course, is to only undertake those few things which you think you’ll want to stick with over the long term.
I also claim that people overestimate the effort needed but underestimate the time needed. Perhaps we mostly do not take learning (and efficiency that comes with it) into account. Longer real projects are more an S-curve than straight line where time = effort.
I have a number of personal development projects that I consider critical for my existence. One is to learn the language of the country I'm in; another is to go to the gym 3-4 times a week (75% of my sessions are currently with a trainer, because I'm new to it, started about three months ago).<p>And a recent 'wear away the stone' project was to earn X$ per month writing about AI, which took five years, beginning from some very humble pay checks.<p>But these are not 'vanity' projects: the latter was obviously pivotal to my survival, as I'm not independently wealthy, and had no job when I migrated; my motivation for the gym is that I have suffered from depression for forty years, and pushing myself physically and engaging with my body is the most effective treatment (albeit found late in life) I have ever come across to massively alleviate this (hence looking better, muscles, etc. is just collateral benefit); and the need to speak the language of my adopted country is obvious.<p>Sure, there are other things I have persisted in and improved in because they massively accord with my interests and enthusiasm, but those three projects are my demonstration to myself that persistence, while not a magic bullet (some people are never going to make it in Hollywood, for instance), is as near to a magic bullet for personal transformation as most of us are ever likely to have access to.<p>The gym is the one that fascinates me most at the moment; I look around me, as a relative newcomer, and wonder at the motivation behind the incredible bodies you see there. Are they all sprouting out from some deep psychological need? Even if it's 'just' vanity, it would have to qualify as pathological - as my own reason for being there is.<p>So I am interested in people who will go through these kind of pain and boredom barriers for less intense reasons, if indeed they exist.
This feels adjacent to something I've done for a long time: I will do a task of moderate complexity by hand, typing several commands as needed, until I've done it enough to get a feel for how it varies, and only then start automating it.
I don't always code as much as I'd like to in my job, and following some advice here, I've started coding an hour every morning, first thing in the morning, since Jan 1st. I've only missed one day, which reminds me of my own falibility, but the habit has otherwise been transformative and liberating.<p>I'll be writing a post about it once I hit the two or three-month mark for a little bit more of street cred when talking about the experience, but if anyone's interested I can give you a few preview points here.
Very similar to Amara's Law, the equivalent for technology - we overestimate short-term impact while underestimating long-term. Funny how this phenomenon crops up at both the societal and the individual scale:<p><a href="https://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/amaras-law" rel="nofollow">https://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/amaras-law</a>
All good, but esp. in the tech industry people tend to make 1001 excuses for 100% short-term thinking at the complete exclusion of long-term thinking, and that means a mountain of unresolved always-just-barely-worked as well as an organic journey that lands you in a random spot instead of an ideal one.<p>Put differently, consecutive short-term investment payoffs do not add up to the same value as long-term investment over the same period. The long play is harder with greater rewards accordingly. So you balance "keeping the lights on" with "where do I wanna be in 10 years?"
Done means perfectable. It means it's not perfect, but there must be a simple way to make it perfect.<p>That's why monopoly, or monothlic architecture eventually failed. They can't scale.
I think the former leads to the latter. I can't count the number of times I set myself up to do a ton of different projects at once, only to end up slowly paring it down to just whatever the most critical project was and spending more time than the entire estimate for the rest of the projects on that one thing. If that happens to you enough times, you'll start to extrapolate the pattern to long-term estimations of what you can do and it can really mess with your self esteem.<p>Interestingly, I find this only happens with personal projects. At work I just overestimate everything to protect myself. So, it may also be that for things outside of work I simply underestimate how many of my life resources (time, energy, willpower) are eaten up by work and that confounds my estimates. I'm honestly not sure which thing is the bigger factor.
I see this most often with people who get all gung-ho about working out, they get themselves into these hours-long intense workout regimens and then either run out of steam or hurt themselves.<p>Rather just do a 30 min routine 3-4 days a week and look at yourself after 1/3/6 months.<p>You will have built a habit and achieved a lot more.
Indeed, a good example is that people overestimate how many pounds they can lose in the short term, and underestimate how many pounds they can gain in the long term.
this is why I don't like school. It squeezes everything you need to know into a semester and you feel dumb for not understanding it right away. At least I do. But if you just had a little more time it would be totally fine.
Well, then if I'm only interested in getting results in the short term and don't care about getting results in many years from now when I'm old, what could I do?<p>A psychotherapist? Denying reality and dooming myself?
If this is a continuous function, that implies there is some time horizon between short-term and long-term where our ability estimates are spot-on.<p>Finding that precise time horizon is an exercise left for the reader.
> <i>We overestimate our short-term ability, but underestimate our long-term ability.</i><p>In a short timeframe, this guy started a whole bunch of projects that he didn't finish. In the short term, he overestimates his long term ability. And perhaps he underestimated his short term ability because he's impressed with starting so many projects, more than he could finish with his overestimated long term abilities.<p>but don't listen to me, glass half empty sounds optimistic ("I've identified the problem, I can see room for improvement! I know how to fix this!") and glass half full sounds like you're trying to convince yourself you don't need to do anything, that everything is going to be OK.
I think there’s a point where the opposite is true in your life too. Especially when you’ve past the “productivity is bullshit” phase. Parkinson’s law tends to be more true for people who want to be more efficient than productive.
I can’t speak to my own accomplishments, but: I am not quite as often impressed by what some people manage to do in a couple of weekends, but I am more often impressed by the things that they do in a matter of months or years.
Got me thinking of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tortoise_and_the_Hare" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tortoise_and_the_Hare</a>
I think we do overestimate short term things and underestimate long term things. However, I think it is important to clarify that it would be a mistake to think of this tendency in a pejorative way. It is, best as I can tell, more correct than the alternative.<p>Some reasons for that:<p>- Conjunction of events is less than the probability of its individual constituents and unless the events were certain to occur is always less than the probability that they occurred given that they occurred.<p>- Making an estimate out of multiple different approximations with unknown error bounds you should have decreasing confidence in your approximation because you have increasing confidence of error in your approximation.<p>- Modeling with the bellman equations such that overestimation of true utilities in short term and bad underestimation of true utilities in the long term can produce superhuman cognitive abilities in many decision making contexts.<p>- We ought to see overestimation and underestimation: given a coin that is biased, it does not follow that you bet on that coin with probability proportional to the bias, but rather to the rounding. So we should see actions that correspond with rounding up in the short term which is more likely to be less conjuncted and therefore higher probability and we should see rounding down in the long term wherein there is more conjunction and therefore lower probability.<p>This all leads me to suspect that a framing around faith being justified, not around whether we overestimate or underestimate, might be a more correct framing. This is actually exceedingly true in the cooperative regime wherein other agents force underestimation of probabilities due to the potential for competition, but in which a cooperative environment supports overestimation.<p>To get at what I mean by that, consider that no one must teach you proper form such that you do not injure yourself at a gym, so your probability of injury is actually pretty high if you are estimating using only the things you can control, yet in practice you will probably get high quality advice to avoid injury if someone cooperative notices you are likely to hurt yourself - it is not sufficient to point at the ability to learn this information yourself to refute this, because all the information available to you is a function of a cooperative society. So the going to the gym and avoiding injury while doing so should use a non-cooperative creature like an octopus going to an open location and doing exercise there in sight of predators: they don't have access to books to help them, they have access to sharks. As an aside, lots of people are so surrounded by the waters of cooperation they can hardly notice they are swimming, which is kind of interesting to contrast with the octopus with adaptive camouflage that is more prone to death the moment it become visible.<p>But now we are getting into a defense for bad estimation - because we are starting to get into estimates that are predicated on self-reference: agent one observes agent two and makes a decision based on their policy, but agent one is also making observations of agent two and deciding policy based on that! This is a regime wherein we start getting paradoxes like the halting problem, godel's incompleteness proof, or the linguistic paradox of heterological classification. In other words, we find strong evidence for the need for some other concept than yes or no, something more like the idea of mu or the idea of undecidability.<p>So here we reach another reason to disagree with the idea: how can an answer which isn't even well defined because it is undedicable be an overestimate or an underestimate?