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  38. brutalism 7
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practice

Close
  • Leveling up aptitude

    Image from www.ribbonfarm.com on 2021-07-31 at 10.29.18 AM.png

    Your first short story takes 10 days to write. The next one 5 days, the next one 2.5 days, the next one 1.25 days. Then 0.625 days, at which point you’re probably hitting raw typing speed limits. In practice, improvement curves have more of a staircase quality to them. Rather than fix the obvious next bottleneck of typing speed (who cares if it took you 3 hours instead of 6 to write a story; the marginal value of more speed is low at that point), you might level up and decide to (say) write stories with better developed characters. Or illustrations. So you’re back at 10 days, but on a new level.

    This kind of improvement replaces quantitative improvement (optimization) with qualitative leveling up, or dimensionality increase. Each time you hit diminishing returns, you open up a new front. You’re never on the slow endzone of a learning curve. You self-disrupt before you get stuck.

    The interesting thing is, this is not purely a function not of raw prowess or innate talent, but of imagination and taste.

    Venkatesh Rao, Mediocratopia
    www.ribbonfarm.com
    • learning
    • creativity
    • taste
    • practice
  • Thinking in situations

    Naturally, practice is not preceded but followed by theory.
    Such study promotes a more lasting teaching and learning
    through experience. Its aim is development of creativeness
    realized in discovery and invention – the criteria of creativity,
    or flexibility, being imagination and fantasy. Altogether
    it promotes “thinking in situations,” a new educational concept
    unfortunately little known and less cultivated, so far.

    Josef Albers, Interaction of Color
    • learning
    • creativity
    • practice
  • Reaching 95

    Reaching 95%-ile isn't very impressive because it's not that hard to do. I think this is one of my most ridiculable ideas. It doesn't help that, when stated nakedly, that sounds elitist. But I think it's just the opposite: most people can become (relatively) good at most things.

    Note that when I say 95%-ile, I mean 95%-ile among people who participate, not all people (for many activities, just doing it at all makes you 99%-ile or above across all people). I'm also not referring to 95%-ile among people who practice regularly. The "one weird trick" is that, for a lot of activities, being something like 10%-ile among people who practice can make you something like 90%-ile or 99%-ile among people who participate.

    Dan Luu, 95%-ile isn't that good
    danluu.com
    • skill
    • practice

    There still seem to be a number of things where 95%-ile is still impressive – things like academia, especially primary education, where participation and regular practice are mandatory for everyone. 95%-ile on the SAT isn't quite as impressive as it seems as first, but it's also still good.

  • Practice before theory

    Instead of mechanically applying or merely implying laws and rules
    of color harmony, distinct color effects are produced
    – through recognition of the interaction of color –
    by making, for instance,
    2 very different colors look alike, or nearly alike.

    The aim of such study is to develop – through experience
    – by trial and error – an eye for color.
    This means, specifically, seeing color action
    as well as feeling color relatedness.

    As a general training it means development of observation and articulation.

    This book, therefore, does not follow an academic conception
    of “theory and practice.”
    It reverses this order and places practice before theory,
    which, after all, is the conclusion of practice.

    Josef Albers, Interaction of Color
    • understanding
    • learning
    • practice
  • Things you didn't know you can be bad at

    An Article by David R. MacIver
    notebook.drmaciver.com

    I wonder how many things we're all going around doing badly because the idea of not knowing how to do them well seems too ridiculous to admit to.

    ...You've probably never been taught to have a conversation. I've had exactly one class on it and it was in the last six months. I know damn well that many people have not self-taught this well... In general there's this entire class of implicit skills that we mostly don't think of as skills, that we're entirely self-taught on, and that we practice sufficiently non-demonstratively that we can't easily watch what other people do. The result is a very personal skill idiolect.

    1. ​​Idiolect​​
    • skill
    • learning
    • practice
  • The Helsinki Bus Station Theory

    An Article by Arno Rafael Minkkinen
    www.fotocommunity.com

    Stay on the bus. Stay on the f*cking bus.

    Why? Because if you do, in time you will begin to see a difference.

    The buses that move out of Helsinki stay on the same line but only for a while, maybe a kilometer or two. Then they begin to separate, each number heading off to its own unique destination. Bus 33 suddenly goes north, bus 19 southwest.

    ...It’s the separation that makes all the difference, and once you start to see that difference in your work from the work you so admire (that’s why you chose that platform after all), it’s time to look for your breakthrough.

    Suddenly your work starts to get noticed. Now you are working more on your own, making more of the difference between your work and what influenced it.

    Your vision takes off.

    • creativity
    • practice
    • photography
    • experience
  • Touch the keys

    An Article by Rach Smith
    rachsmith.com

    In his course Being Productive: Simple Steps to Calm Focus, Kourosh Dini emphasises the importance of taking a moment to “be with” the work every day (or however frequently you need to tackle a project). “Being with” your work is to be fully present and intentional about that activity and doing nothing else.

    This idea was inspired by Dini’s piano teacher, who encouraged him to sit at his piano and touch the keys every day. Even on the days that he felt he had no time or inclination to practice. Sometimes touching the keys would lead to a good practice session, even when he didn’t feel like it would before he actually gave it a go.

    Just like Dini, I find that once I give the task my full attention and be present, the actual doing of it turns out to be much easier and more enjoyable than my mind had been expecting. As usual, the resistance to getting started is far more uncomfortable than actually doing the thing.

    1. ​​To pick up my pen​​
    • productivity
    • work
    • creativity
    • practice
  • I completely ignored the front end development scene for 6 months. It was fine

    An Article by Rach Smith
    rachsmith.com

    What I’ve learnt through experience is that the number of languages I’ve learned or the specific frameworks I’ve gained experience with matters very little. What actually matters is my ability to up-skill quickly and effectively.

    If you focus on:

    • learning how you best learn, and
    • practicing effectively communicating the things you've learned
      you can't go wrong.
    • learning
    • programming
    • skill
    • experience
    • practice
  • Writing and Speaking

    An Essay by Paul Graham
    paulgraham.com

    Being a really good speaker is not merely orthogonal to having good ideas, but in many ways pushes you in the opposite direction...there's a tradeoff between smoothness and ideas. All the time you spend practicing a talk, you could instead spend making it better.

    • writing
    • speech
    • communication
    • practice
  • Long Form Study: Why Photographers Should Repeatedly Revisit a Scene

    An Article by Scott Reither
    petapixel.com

    I learned years ago how important it is to shoot the same subject and location over and over again.

    The practice teaches a photographer how to form deeper relationships with the subject, and better understand how the primary subject interacts with secondary elements – like the way high tide may introduce a stunning new reflection, or how a blaze of stars in a dark sky might be the missing element that lifts the image to new heights.

    Revisiting a subject also serves as valuable “practice.” You cannot develop your skills in anything without a healthy (or obsessive) amount of practice. It always surprises me to find out aspiring photographers think that they can simply photograph their two-week vacations once or twice a year and come home with compelling imagery! It doesn’t work that way.

    • repetition
    • photography
    • practice

See also:
  1. learning
  2. creativity
  3. skill
  4. photography
  5. experience
  6. repetition
  7. understanding
  8. writing
  9. speech
  10. communication
  11. programming
  12. productivity
  13. work
  14. taste
  1. Josef Albers
  2. Rach Smith
  3. Scott Reither
  4. Dan Luu
  5. Paul Graham
  6. Venkatesh Rao
  7. Arno Rafael Minkkinen
  8. David R. MacIver