[vitehozonage]

I think I disagree with the article. I think it is true that if you choose to expend time and energy on something that few people spend effort on, then you can become better than most people at that one thing. However, it seems that the article is trying to say that is true for everything and for everyone, and i disagree with that.

The missing key factor is that you have to find something unpopular and easy which will actually have a payoff if you become an expert. Risky and easier said than done.

If you read a few books on mathematics you think you're easily going to become one of the top mathematicians? Many ambitious people try to study math and decades later are disappointed by how they are still mediocre in their field or simply fail to make it into an academic career. Many PhDs in general, actually.

[Legend2440]

>If you read a few books on mathematics you think you're easily going to become one of the top mathematicians?

No - but you will easily become more educated in math than most people. 99.9% of people couldn't tell you the difference between a derivative and a integral.

It's not about becoming an expert. You don't need to be the best in the world to be usefully good at something.

[nextlevelwizard]

I have an engineering degree and I can’t remember the difference since I have literally never needed either since school.

Just like examples in the post it self, sure you can get better fast, but if no one cares why bother? Oh you got a bit better ELO in chess, nice, what now? Now your average friends don’t want to play you and you aren’t good enough to beat anyone at the chess club. So either you quit or you have to dedicate yourself.

Same with the shooter game. Do you really want to play a video game competitively? If yea then go ahead but you need to do more than just play to get good which again probably means switching friend circles

[Legend2440]

You’re right, you should just be bad at everything. That’s a much better way to live your life.

[nextlevelwizard]

Just because I don’t want to get better at a game doesn’t mean I want to be or am bad at anything much less everything.

What I am trying to say is that you should get better at things that matter to you. I am sure you could get better than most people at making sand castles put of feces real fast, but is that something you should do.

[dehrmann]

>> 99.9% of people couldn't tell you the difference between a derivative and a integral.

> I have an engineering degree and I can’t remember the difference

Really? I realized I forgot the mechanics of computing the closed-form solutions (like you, I used this type of calculus for maybe four years of my life), but the idea of derivatives being the rate of change stuck with me.

[baxtr]

And integrals are the sum of things.

[shermantanktop]

The difference is between getting into the top 10% vs getting into the top 0.1% (or add as many zeroes as you want).

Top 10% just takes a bit of intentional work, rather than just chasing dopamine hits you might get as a casual. And that’s why the 90% aren’t losers or suckers… they just have different priorities.

[vjk800]

> If you read a few books on mathematics you think you're easily going to become one of the top mathematicians? Many ambitious people try to study math and decades later are disappointed by how they are still mediocre in their field or simply fail to make it into an academic career. Many PhDs in general, actually.

I don't know about being one of the top mathematicians, but I'd argue that actually, fully reading a few graduate level technical books is more than even most PhDs do.

I was once a PhD student in theoretical physics myself and I'd say that we mostly skim over the books or read only the sections that are immediately and obviously relevant to us.

I once did read one of the shorter known-to-be-difficult books of my field fully from cover to cover, and worked out most of the exercises in the book. After this exercise, I realized that I immediately had much better understanding of the somewhat foundational things described in the book than many of the more senior researchers had. And this was a book that everyone in my field knows, but apparently no-one actually reads it.

The reason why no-one reads actually the difficult books, even when half of their job is reading them, is because it's harsh, gruelling work.

So yeah, maybe you won't become the next Terence Tao by reading three or four graduate level mathematics books, but you can get pretty good if you actually seriously do it without any cheating or skimming.

[Tainnor]

While what you said may be true simply by the virtue of graduate level textbooks being so dense, I think GP wanted to imply that "just reading a moderate amount of mathematics" isn't sufficient to get anywhere. I would say that 3-4 entire graduate level textbooks (which you wouldn't understand anyway without having done the undergraduate stuff beforehand) is much more than "a moderate amount".

[TeMPOraL]

> The missing key factor is that you have to find something unpopular and easy which will actually have a payoff

Why?

I found the article refreshing precisely because it didn't assume you're doing it for the money, or otherwise insisting that a hobby only makes sense if you make a business out of it.

I take this article as a reminder of how little time and effort it takes to achieve basic proficiency in just about anything.

I'm fond of the view that the 80/20 rule applies recursively: you can get 64% of value in 4% of effort, or 51% of value in 0.8% of the effort. Applied to "deliberate practice" meme, that gives you 51% of value for 80 hours of deliberate practice. Sounds absurd, but then most people never done 80 hours of deliberate practice in anything at all.

Personally, I round this up and call it a "10-100-10k framework": 10 hours of deliberate-ish practice is not that big of a sacrifice to pick up some random, specific skill, but you can go surprisingly far doing that. 100 hours should give you competence - good investment for few things that matter for you daily. 10k is for stuff you want to be world-class expert in.

[serviceberry]

> If you read a few books on mathematics you think you're easily going to become one of the top mathematicians?

No, but so what? The guy behind 3Blue1Brown probably isn't one of the top mathematicians of his era. But he's having quite an impact. He turned explaining fairly basic math concepts in mathematics into a lucrative job.

And who wrote the textbooks you're referring to? Probably not any of the top 10 living mathematicians. That doesn't make the work less useful.

Is Linus Torvalds one of the top 10 computer scientists? He probably wouldn't describe himself that way, and respected academics mocked his work. The list goes on. I think this is compatible with the premise of the article: it's not about being best, it's about being better than the average bear - and then putting that knowledge to some productive use.

[Earw0rm]

It's about combinations of skills.

0.01%ers in one field tend towards monomaniacal obsession.

Sometimes that's useful. But having mostly depth, and enough breadth to balance it out, is better in most cases than depth only.

People who are all breadth, no depth are worse. Those traits give you MBAs and politicians. That doesn't mean breadth is inherently bad, it's about balance.

The sweet-spot is typically to get inside the top 1% and get 75th or 90th percentile people skills or communication skills. Those can take a lot of different forms, good writers / managers / youtubers / teachers are all in that class but there's not necessarily that much overlap.

[Tainnor]

All those people you mention have studied mathematics for a long time, Grant Sanderson has probably studied it the "least" but that still means a BSc in his case which is not something you accomplish in a weekend. All the textbook authors are usually professors.

[serviceberry]

The parent's quip was that you can't rise to the top of the field. My point is that it's irrelevant.

Textbooks used in college coursework are usually written by academics, for obvious reasons. Plenty of independent learning / pop textbooks are written by "normal people" who aren't tenured professors.

[Tainnor]

It's not about being in the top of the field. Even just getting to the point of being able to halfway competently talk about mathematics takes a grueling amount of work.

> Plenty of independent learning / pop textbooks are written by "normal people" who aren't tenured professors.

Idk, Simon Singh is one very well known example of "pop maths" and he has a PhD in particle physics, that's quite a bit more than just "do the reading for a year". Other examples like Eugenia Cheng and Ian Stewart are similarly credentialed.

It's the same in other fields, really. Yes, you can learn to play simple tunes on the piano relatively quickly, but even just being able to play the full Für Elise just takes so much more than that. Or you can learn Hiragana relatively quickly which I guess means that you understand more about Japanese than 95% of people, but it'll still not be enough for you to engage with Japanese in any meaningful way.

The beginner stage is always the easiest. It's after that that it gets really hard.

[peoplelikelikes]

Plus, the premise comes with a broken assumption regarding distribution and goals between social media and actual human activity.

A friend group has 20 people and 3 making an effort. It's easy to stand out. A sports club has 200 members and 5 stars. Social media has 120 million users. And a screen shows 2 posts at a time. Maybe 10-ish if you're using a non-stupid version of a platform.

A lot of people just want the validation of having low stakes engagement. Likes. Upvotes. Views. Shares. Things that happen absentmindedly or even automatically. Just a small indicator that people saw you, and are generally satisfied even with relatively little of it. So what if that a fraction gets 99 bajillion of likes out of the 100 total. The remaining bajillion still means a small time artist who just wants to show their latest work gets to have 100 people who like it and 2 or 3 who comment.

And that's all they'll realistically amount to while being VERY active. To fall for the trap of thinking "it just takes participation to get there" falls straight in the face of the fact it's a competition of scale.

Speaking of which, so is job hunting. Recruiters even get spammed on the phone. I wish job listings had to be on public platforms with a lot more rules honestly.

[te_chris]

Why does it matter if it’s popular? This is neoliberal bullshit. It’s not a competition if you want to know more and then go and acquire that knowledge

[ljlolel]

Soccer