[MPSimmons]

My godson wants to be a storyteller of some kind, either video, or music, and he was fretting about not being good enough. My advice to him was, "look, if you just sit and THINK about what you're going to do before you do it, you're going to be better than 80% of the people out there".

That's about what I've run into in my life. Most people do things on autopilot and don't think about what they're doing, or don't consider it worth thinking about. If you want to do something and be good at it, wanting to be good at it is enough to move you past most people, as long as you have a growth mindset.

[strken]

It is obvious to me that there are two types of thinking: there's planning, which only goes so far, and there's ongoing introspection into the work you're doing, which is what most people really need.

I'm trying to write fiction at the moment. It's far, far harder than technical writing, programming, writing a reply on HN, or anything else that's remotely similar. I'm not used to it, at all. My brain suggests things that just aren't good ideas, and then I spend time eliminating those bad ideas, and then my brain suggests more things, and I find one good one, and so we continue. I have to work in ten minute stretches and then go for a walk to clear my head.

I think this is how most skills are learnt. You try something ("write the first chapter of a novella"), you analyse what went well and what went poorly ("I felt my writing was boring, and I noticed that nothing really happened because all I wrote was description and exposition"), you deliberately practice ("I read through the first chapter of some books I enjoy and tried rewriting my first chapter with similar interactions and events"), and then you go back to the base task and get a little further ("the first chapter was compelling but I didn't leave any story hooks and don't know where to go for a second").