Ask HN: How do you become the best at something?

[hsikka]

I realized that while I'm fairly competent at some things, I'm not really top percentile in anything save my ability to communicate. It's really weighing on me, and I constantly feel like I have imposter syndrome.

Through it all, I’ve found a love for ml, and I’d like to spend the next 4-6 months diving deep, validating some hypotheses, and becoming a capable researcher/ml engineer. But my insecurities force me to constantly try and productize my learning, and I constantly get distracted thinking about how folks are building incredible companies and I’m losing time to make an impact. I'm all fluff, no depth.

How do I gain mastery?

[nodelessness]

Why become the top percentile of anything?

I see your motivation is seeing your peers "get ahead" of you. We all do through that. I've gone through that. I chased after something because I wanted to keep up with my friends. It made me miserable. It's years long misery to achieve something that is unhealthy and not what I decided what I wanted for me.

I'd avoid being allowing others progress and achievements place pressure on you.

[matt_the_bass]

I agree. I’ve met people who are widely regarded as “one of the best” in their domain. ALL of them were extremely lacking in most of their other skills. Personally, that is not appealing.

[craftyguy]

This is another instantiation of "Keeping up with the Joneses"[0]

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keeping_up_with_the_Joneses

[godot]

I read The Will to Keep Winning by Daigo Umehara (https://www.amazon.com/Will-Keep-Winning-DAIGO-UMEHARA-ebook...) last year. Daigo is arguably the best street fighter player in the world, for generations. (this guy competed in Street Fighter 2 back in the 90s, and still competes in SF5 now) A lot of the book is about his personal stories, ups and downs, but through the book you can really see what it takes to become the absolute best at something. (hint: practice, practice, practice all day. Keep your passion.) One fun part in the book was how he lost his passion for fighting games in the 00s for a few years, and he got into the professional mah-jong scene in Japan. He actually saw a path to becoming one of the best mah-jong players in Japan. At a certain point he decided to just get back to fighting games which he loved most. I think it goes to show when you got the right mentality, you can become the best at anything when you put in enough effort.

[buffaloo]

If you want to be the best at something, first, make sure you are passionate about whatever it is. If you don't care about it, you won't do what it takes. If you are passionate about it, then live and breathe it. Do lots and lots of it. Study it. Read about it. Have posters of it on your wall. Watch every single youtube video about it. Plan your vacations around it as trips where you check out something related to your passion. You basically have to become a one-dimensional crazy person about your thing - whatever it is. Elon Musk lived in his factory. He shot one of his cars to Mars. That's crazy. That's passion. That's how you become the best.

[auslegung]

Agree. There's no point in mastering something for the sake of mastering something; you reach mastery as just one more step in a long, rewarding journey.

To address the OP's question, you stay focused on X for a while and one day you will wake up to discover you think of X as an old, faithful friend. Stay focused on X for long enough and it will become like another appendage. Stay focused even longer and X will become like your skin.

[Leftium]

The best way to become the best at something is to choose that "something" wisely. For example, Scott Adams, creator of one of the most successful cartoons:

> Recapping my skill set: I have poor art skills, mediocre business skills, good but not great writing talent, and an early knowledge of the Internet. And I have a good but not great sense of humor. I’m like one big mediocre soup. None of my skills are world-class, but when my mediocre skills are combined, they become a powerful market force.

More info here (and in Scott Adams' book): [1]

It's like Google AdWords: very difficult to rank highly for one keyword, but possible for a set of three or more related keywords.

Adams alludes to the fact you don't have to be the best to succeed; there are alternate roads to success. Another take on this is "relative expertise." You don't have to be the foremost expert on a subject before you can help others; you just need to know more than the person you're helping.

[1]: http://sourcesofinsight.com/scott-adams-success-formula/

[swatcoder]

Start by picking a small and underserved “something” to master. Then let your expertise expand from there.

Or, you know, reflect on why being exceptional is so important to you. Maybe it doesn’t need to be.

[robotsonic]

>>I'm not really top percentile in anything save my ability to communicate.

Being top-percentile in communication is nothing to brush off. It's about finding where to use your top-percentile skills that can be the challenge.

I could be in the top 1% of people who grow green tomatoes, but if I'm not using that skill for something, does it matter? Maybe skill-for-the-sake-of-skill does matter on some level, but maybe I should find a way to use my mastery for something.

[philcockfield]

>> But my insecurities force me to constantly try and productize my learning.

I wouldn't frame the impulse to "productize" something necessarily as buckling to an insecurity.

Deep learning (no pun) is so often the result of recontextualising what you've studied into some new form of your own making. If that's a "product" of sorts, then all the better for advancing your other goal of "building an incredible company."

[stephen82]

I have just asked a related question and I think you and I share lots of common traits.

Both of us lack of specialization and this is due to lots of factors I'm afraid.

Feel free to read my own issue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18136580

[RickJWagner]

I don't know, I've never been the absolute best at something.

I think to do that, you have to be born with an extra shot of natural talent. I'm very good at some things, but there is always somebody that's better.

As to getting very good at something-- I think study and hard work are the keys.

[anothergoogler]

Eliminate your competitors, obviously.

[jorgemf]

Practice, practice, practice. There is no other way to improve at anything. If you want to be the best, you have to practice as much as you can. Probably will take years or even your whole life to by the best or one of the best. Nothing comes easy in life.

[oceanghost]

The sad fact is, that by the time you get truly good at anything it won't be a marketable skill anymore.

Perhaps this would lead you to the conclusion that you should be a generalist, but nobody hires generalists, I speak from personal experience.

[jvreagan]

10,000 hours: https://www.amazon.com/Outliers-Story-Success-Malcolm-Gladwe...

[pongogogo]

Not this, go to the source rather than Gladwell (Anders Ericsson) if you Google him a bit there's some podcasts where he talks about deliberate practice and he cowrote a pop book called Peak which introduces his major findings. Definitely worth a read as Ericsson is the foremost expertise researcher in the world.