Among other things, I have come to the realization that the way that our schools are structured (in the US anyway) promotes this type of thinking you're talking about.
There's a reinforcing feedback loop taking place:
1. You have no natural interest in (say) algebra, possibly due to lack of knowledge about what it is and what it is for. This is never explained to you in a way that makes sense to you.
2. You don't spend time thinking about algebra, and neither does your subconscious.
3. You do your homework, but don't care much, and don't care to learn. Because you don't care, you don't care to understand deeply. You're now stuck learning in a shallow way, or, in other words, memorizing inert knowledge. The knowledge is mostly unusable to you, and the homework and tests are structured in such a way to allow shallow understanding to get by, so you're fine. You mainly care to meet the expectations of the teacher (get a good grade and be viewed favorably), so all is good.
5. Because of the above, you mostly suck at tests, and mostly suck at meeting the teacher's (and peer's) expectations. You suck compared to others in the class.
6. Because you don't fully understand the implications of what you're learning, you continue not to care. Because you are sucking, you care even less.
7. See #1 with the same or other topics.
I'd recommend reading about Carol Dweck's Entity vs. Incremental Self-Theories on Learning. Incredible stuff.
"The amount of skill that you have in a certain area is proportional to the amount of work that you put into it."
Instead of using the word "work", I would say "proportional to the amount of time you and your mind spends on it." One reason people are significantly and seemingly naturally better at certain skills is because they are naturally drawn to it. Things you are naturally drawn to you both consciously AND subconsciously spend time on. In the past I've never spent much time contemplating or trying to understand the intricacies of the stock market, and neither has my mind, and I have never had much interest, and so I'm not a particularly skilled stock broker.
I second the recommendation of Mrs. Dweck's texts. Her book "Self-Theories..." changed my life. Or at least reinforced the changes I was undergoing then:
The right strategy and appropriate effort are much more important than results.
As a developer/designer, I spend a lot of time getting this _exact_ message across to developers who "don't do design" and designers who are afraid of code. I've given that same schpiel many times before -- in almost the exact same words ("false dichotomy", "labels", "we can be skilled at anything we dedicate ourselves to").
What's wrong with being a developer and saying that you "don't do design"? Even in the context of this article, that can very simply mean that, you've never done design and therefore aren't good at it because you haven't worked at it. (This is certainly true for me; even though I'm both a talented coder and musician, I've never spent an hour trying to get better at design and hence don't try to foist my mediocre design skills on anyone.)
I usually know what I want with web design and know how to use html/css to get me half way there. It really becomes more efficient though to then hand the vision off to someone experienced with design to get the rest of the way.
Sure I could spend a lot of time to learn how to take it to say 90% but I think a lot of the time that is better spent focusing on my core areas.
I guess this is similar to a designer who will jump in and modify view code to work better with their design, but leave the heavy lifting on the backend to the programmer.
Identifying myself as something of a developer/designer, I'm always interested to see what others are doing. There's no info in your profile, got a blog or something?
Joe Kraus once said in a talk that companies, especially startups, need to triple down on what they're good at rather than focusing on all their weaknesses - that's really the only way a startup can win since it can't be better than a big company at a lot of things, but it can be head and shoulders better at just one thing. I'm not sure how this applies to people, especially since balanced people can bring a fresh perspective to things (i.e. a programmer with some creative background might approach a problem in new and interesting ways).
Without arguing the efficacy of the TigerMom approach, this is indeed why a lot of parents force their kids to do something - you may not have a knack for it at first and be tempted to write off that it just isn't for you, but you need to put in a little more time to really figure out what your true learning curve for something looks like.
One interesting question is whether you really love doing something or just love doing it because you had a knack for it initially and picked it up quickly (which results in a positive feedback loop: you spend more time on it and get even better at it compared to the things that you didn't have a knack for at first). I think college really hammered that home for me - before, I just really liked a lot of math of science because it seemed to come naturally, but to find what you really love doing, you have to hit the wall and see if you enjoy it when it becomes a struggle.
I don't disagree regarding the dichotomy between Technical/Creative per the article. I also subscribe to Heinlein's "Specialization is for Insects" truism (below).
However, one of the best pieces of advice I ever got from one of my favorite mentors (Bob Muglia) was to never take a job where you have to do something you know you are not good at.
I have always sucked at detailed-status-list tracking. I eventually figured out how to compliment myself with others who could do it. However, at one point in my career when I was looking at new opportunities I saw one that would have forced me to get good a being very detail oriented. When I showed Bob my potential job options and asked for his advice he told me "Don't take the detail job. You will suck at it and you will hate it. You have other super-powers that are valuable and you should focus on finding jobs where you can apply those."
You CAN do anything, and you SHOULD try everything. But in the end, you'll be most successful if you focus on what you know you are great at.
-----
"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects". -Robert A. Heinlein
To me, this is consistent with Paul Graham's essay "Keep Your Identity Small." If I have strongly identified myself as a "technical person" then I have excluded myself from the possibility of becoming conversant in non-tech things, like good graphic design. Because I'm just a techie!
Then this got me thinking about footnote #2 in the essay - that perhaps it is a net win to call oneself a scientist, which implies that one is not committed to any belief in particular. I was pretty pleased when I read this; "great, I'm a scientist, I must be pretty open-minded!" Easy.
Except that - and this article seems to highlight the point - if you box yourself into being a "scientist" (I will suggest that many of us techies consider ourselves scientists, or at least science-minded) then you run the risk of excluding yourself from non-science things. Things like graphic design. (or marketing, accounting, or musicianship.)
So. I am not a scientist! Not a techie. Not a designer. I am a person who is pretty (darn) good at technology and still has a lot of difficult things, like graphic design, to practice and get better at!
This is interesting, but I disagree. It's certainly possible to be able to engage in rational discussion about things related to ones own identity.
I am a programmer, and primarily I identify as a C++ and Python programmer. Compared to other languages, for a given problem (unless it's truly massive, where the efficiency/expressiveness gain over the other two is large to offset becoming an expert in it), I am almost certainly going to provide an adequate solution quickest in one of those languages.
But if you say that Python is slow, doesn't do concurrency well, or has trouble scaling to truly large, 100+ programmer codebases, I'll agree with you.
And if you call C++ a large, ugly, language with a ton of ways to really screw yourself, and that is tied to a slow edit/compile/debug cycle, I'll agree with you there too.
Here perhaps maybe enlarging my identity helped, if I was just a Python programmer, I wouldn't see how static typing and a really good code searching system would help getting an anchor on a large, complicated C++ code base. Those static types and non-virtual functions means that yes, I can see every place that this particular function is called in our entire code base without having to dig all that much. And if I was just a C++ programmer, I wouldn't know the bliss that is hacking a 200 line program in Python, and solving some mildy complicated but mostly self contained problem in few hour session, all without the bondage of makefiles, compiles, static typing and seg faults.
The problem is some titles, such as scientist or engineer, are used to reinforce group identity at some level. And that group identity then starts to push on the self.
This is very interesting to me, as a computer science student, who does "techie" things like code a take a lot of technical classes, yet always been considered (or considered myself) a "artistic" person.
When I was younger, my best subjects were Art and English, and my worst subject was always Math. This had continued to be true, as I consider myself much better at design than at coding or problem solving. I wouldn't say the dichotomy is necessarily true or false - I hate to think we are stuck as one or the other, and I certainly know people who are talented at both.
On the other hand, in my observation, there always seems to be an inherent aptitude - I struggle and work a lot harder with "technical" things; but it can be overcome - I am still a CS student at top university, and am not a phenomenal coder, but I can keep up. For so-called "technical" people, you may or may not believe in the dichotomy, but that doesn't mean hard work can't make you better at "creative" work than "talented" others.
Edit: Imagine what would happen to the industry if you changed titles from software engineers to software artists.
I long the day when software engineers start looking at themselves as artists. Take this from someone who isn't an engineer. You take your ideas and turn them into something others can interact with, play with, control, morph, do other freaking cool things with and sometimes they even get a feeling/emotion out of it. That's f&&ing art to me.
Here is an excerpt:
=================
Olmsted had no formal design training and didn’t commit to landscape architecture until he was 44. Before that, he was a New York Times correspondent to the Confederate states, the manager of a California gold mine, and General Secretary of the United States Sanitary Commission during the Civil War. He also ran a farm on Staten Island from 1848 to 1855 and spent time working in a New York dry-goods store.
His views on landscapes developed from travelling and reading. When he was young, he took a year-long voyage in China. And in 1850, he took a six-month walking tour of Europe and the British Isles, during which he saw numerous parks, private estates, and scenic countryside. He was also deeply influenced by Swiss physician Johann Georg von Zimmermann’s writings about nature’s ability to heal “derangements of the mind” through imagination. Olmsted read Zimmermann’s book as a boy and treasured it.
=======================
It's tempting to believe that others have placed these kinds of restrictions on you, but the truth of the matter is that we put these restrictions on ourselves. That's the truly important discovery: you have control over the mask you wear (albeit not unlimited control).
The irony of the supposed dichotomy of creative/technical is that both art and programming are incredibly creative fields where one must synthesize with very limited constraints. It is very difficult to excel at either without passion and dedication.
I think this is more a matter of transferability. If you're good at one quantitative or technical skill, it's not so hard to learn another, and you can do it pretty quickly. Teaching yourself to become an artist is a bigger gap. I can appreciate design (although I never studied it formally) but I can recognize that it may be more efficient to get someone else to do it for me. The optimal degree of specialization isn't always "none."
The amount of skill that you have in a certain area is proportional to the amount of work that you put into it.... This realization changed my life.
Heh, this realization does change your life... very, very slowly. Catching up on all those hours invested is hard. Making them pass pleasantly is also a challenge. Spending all day and half the night doing something is easy when it's a source of pride and your refuge from all the stuff you aren't good at.
I spent years aspiring to be good at music. I took piano lessons for years as a kid, even after my parents told me I could stop. I played saxophone in junior high orchestra band and junior high jazz band. I wised up in high school, but then in college I wasted a few hundred bucks on a guitar. I sold it after a month, but then later I started going to the music building several times a week to play the Hanon piano exercises. I actually kept it up for several months before I stopped. No real music, just Hanon.
Music was a waste of time for me because I absolutely hated it. There was the generic pleasure of improving at a skill, but that was the sum total of the pleasure I derived from it. My entire goal in learning music, from the time I was a child until I wasted that fifty or so hours in college, was to play music that I liked hearing and that other people would like hearing. Of course, I was so far from that.... I remember as a child being conscious that my older sister's playing bugged the crap out of me. The mistakes, the awkward tempos. And she was much better than me, five years ahead and also better for her age than I was. The entire payoff for playing music was always years away, even assuming I suddenly became extremely dedicated. Every hour between me and my goal would be me enduring the misery of producing noises that I disliked and was ashamed of. I thought that was just the way it was. I flagellated myself for not being disciplined and far-sighted enough to pursue that distant dream like so many other people did. I knew some kids just enjoyed making bad music, but I didn't think they were the ones who would be good at music someday. I just thought they had horrible taste. The ones who were actually good had clearly been tougher than me; they had fought through all the shame and humiliation of playing badly. They were fierce and ruthless with themselves, and finally, after thousands of hours of hardship, they were able to enjoy the fruits of their labor.
Nowadays I know that's not how it works. I'm more realistic with myself. I could be a great dancer before I'm forty, except that I don't really like dancing. I could be decent at drawing, except that I don't really like to draw. Every couple of weeks I get a great idea for a cartoon and wish I could draw it, but I really don't want to sketch crummy cartoons every day so I'll be ready when I get a good idea. Programming, though.... Fire up gdb and look at a core dump? Why the heck not? Install a new library and play around with it? Fun! Read through some code, figure out how it works, and be on the lookout for a memory leak? Ooh, kind of exciting, I might be the one who finds it.
Those aren't especially stimulating activities, and there's no glamor in them. They're nothing I could brag about to my friends or show off to a cute girl. (I'm working on HTML and CSS now to fix that :-P) They're just something I usually don't mind doing and often find pleasurable. I never chose to be good at programming, and I actually took a pretty snobbish and dismissive attitude towards it until I found myself making a living at it. (Looking down on it was probably what enabled me to believe I could be good at it. Pfft, I can do this, any idiot can do this, especially if he's half-autistic like me.)
I still get off on stupid tangents, though. I took a vacation several years ago and was extremely frustrated with the performance of my point-and-click digital camera. I ended up buying a DSLR, and suddenly I felt the pressure. I had to become a good photographer. My friends were taking pictures and putting them on Flickr (now on Facebook) and I had to keep up. I couldn't suck at taking pictures. Especially not after I bought the DSLR. I bought a crapload of books and read at least a third of the ones I bought. I read on the web. I took classes. I took my camera with me to places and took pictures instead of having fun. The fact that I was taking shitty photos became a huge monkey on my back. Still is, kind of. Last fall, I took an amazing trip to a place I'd been wanting to go to for years, and I obsessed over the quality of the pictures. When I got back I immediately looked through them and couldn't find a single one I liked. For weeks I procrastinated processing them. Finally I did. They sucked. It was awful. Now I don't even know if I should take my camera with me on the next vacation I take.
So please, let me indulge in the misconception that I am just a "technical type." That way I can take pictures in peace, without knowing that it is really my fault and my shame if they suck, and that I should be putting in the hard work so that one day I will be competent and my friends will not have to endure my shitty photos. No, my shitty photos are not my fault. I am just not a creative type. I am a techie. Leave me alone and stop reminding me that all my artistic deficiencies are just one big character flaw!
- everyone sucks at taking pictures. The difference between a good photographer and a bad one is largely how well they curate their work. Don't go to the MOMA and get depressed because the walls are lined with incredible works by incredible photographers - realize that it's an incredibly selected subset of everything they've done. After all, you're taking decades of a career and choosing only the finest, oh, 50 photographs?
- your keep rate shouldn't be much above 1%. 99% of the pictures you take will be shit, and that's just the natural order of things. Throw these out - preview them at home from the SD/CF card, and make sure none of them ever survive to your HDD. Treat the remaining 1% carefully (back them up). Spend time editing them and looking at them with a critical eye to see if they can be better.
- slow down, think more. New photographers mash the shutter release as if it dispenses candy, particularly in the digital age. Put a jar on the kitchen table at home - put a quarter into it for every single picture you take (or $0.50, or $1, depending on what is good for you). Donate this jar to charity or something - the point here is to force you to take fewer pictures. You will work harder for each one, and think more before each shot, and these will make your work dramatically better. Personally, I do this by shooting film. I rarely leave home with more than 50 exposures or so in the camera/bag. On a good day I'll shoot maybe 15 pictures.
- go shooting more. What work inspires you? Ansel Adams? Winogrand? Cartier-Bresson? Look at lots of photographs and think about what makes them great and what you like about them. Then go out and try to "see" the same images in real life. A photographer's eye is far more important than their ability to operate a DSLR.
- join a critique group. Yes, this will suck for your ego, but it is extremely helpful for your development. Join a small group (5-10 people max) so it's not a complete zoo. These people will tell you how to make your pictures better and give you actual directionality in your improvement.
Lots of people in photography are hackers. If you're ever in Seattle, give me a shout and we'll go shooting. Otherwise, keep snapping.
Very strange, indeed. So you actually spent lots of your precious time in creative endeavours, music, photography, but in the end you decided that you're worthless? That doesn't compute. Did you really were under such a social pressure that you felt obliged to comply?
Your example of music : though I've been a professional pop musician 20 years ago, I'm currently learning Beethoven's 8th sonata. I don't plan to ever play it in a manner "competitive" with any classically trained pianist; I do it just because of the pleasure I get from playing it. I don't give a smoking fuck of what any potential listener would think of my (pretty poor) interpretation.
I've never stopped making music. I understand that people who've been constrained to learn some piano when young abandon it later, because they never really wanted it anyway; but apparently you decided to learn it yourself, then simply throw it away later judging you're not worth it? Doesn't make sense to me.
It is your fault though to be so hard on yourself. Nerdy hackers always want to master everything they put their hands on (I'm guilty too!), but I've realized it is not because I tried to compete with friends or other artists or professionals.
It was because I made my skills compete with each other.
Even the assumption I can draw as nicely as I code is ridiculous. Lately I've tried to put less highlight on the outcome and enjoyed the process in its own beauty.
I have to say you sound like a very determined person to be willing to practice so much Hanon despite not liking music in the first place. It is an amazing quality.
In the light of your lack of progress, I wonder whether it is because you set standards that are too high or your dislike of music made the work harder than it has to be?
You're approaching photography wrong. Sometimes, quantity == quality. In this case, it's not the quantity of time you spend studying to be a 'serious' photographer but rather the raw quantity of pictures you take.
Before you give up, try this:
Next time you're out taking photos, commit to throwing away 75% of what you shoot. Now, relax, have fun, and shoot with the goal of filling up your flash card. Forget about everything you've read about aperture settings and exposure. Leave that stuff for the people that depend of their photos for their income.
Shoot in auto mode. Do stupid shit with your camera. Anything that you think will make you look like an idiot will probably make a better picture. Lay on the ground and shoot pictures of people's feet, hold it over your head and blindly snap portraits of your family. Get in people's faces to the point where they are uncomfortable. Switch to aperture priority and set it wide open. Take 20 pictures of the exact same thing 12 different ways.
Then go back home and throw 75% of them away. Most likely, you'll still hate 99% of the ones you saved. But come back to them in a year, after you forgot you shot them, and you'll find you love them.
But more than anything, relax and have fun first. Because ultimately, no one really cares if you can take Pulitzer-winning photos or not, they just want to reminisce about that trip the family took to the Smokey Mountains and joke about that horrible hat they were wearing. And if you can have fun doing that, then you can get better at taking photos.
While I agree with the conclusion that you only get out of something what you put in, a quick review of the history of genius will reveal several characters that did have an innate talent that was indeed cultivated through hard work, but was not learned "from scratch". You may, in fact, be the artistic type, and glean from that a certain advantage over someone who is not.
We should act and do as though there are no limits to what we can do, but we have to remember that nature & nurture do impose boundaries. We just don't know what those boundaries are.
It feels like someone could learn some Zen here. Most things in life are not of type boolean. It is true that these labels are a wrong concept in some way. But of course the same applies to the idea, that everybody can do everything in the same quality and quantity, just after spending the same time learning it. It is too simple a point of view, isn't it?
Other than that I also get the feeling these days, that you can't be a good coder without any ideas about design. To understand how we construct software we all naturally learn the interface to processors, electronic waves and so on. Why should learning about the human interface not be as important for understanding how we should design our software. Also we all need to express what we have in mind, which also needs some design abilities to create appropriate ppts and prototypes.
people need to stop attaching themselves to what they do, this way its easier to both have fun just doing, no matter skill level or adherence.
I've seen bizarre cases of very skilled people tearing themselves up just because whatever they do is not perfect in any given respect, be it technical or artful. They end up miserable.
I don't design. I could, but I know that the time I would spend designing would be twice the amount compared to a skilled designer. Instead I ask someone who loves design. collaborate with them to create something awesome. We bash and we chastise, but always realize that its about the work, not the person or his/her skill level.
This does not translate well to corporate, but for the better it really should.
This article perpetuates a dichotomy that I have only just (at 50+) realised is false: creative versus technical. Technical people create: software and hardware often come out of nothing more than an idea.
The real dichotomy that this article is getting at might be effectively described as artistic versus non-artistic, but even that is not a complete description of the distinction. Maybe it comes down to the old left-brain/right-brain thing?
I used to call myself non-creative, until several good friends united to point out that I do create things, just not things that you could plausibly turn up in art galleries.
We need to reach a definition of creativity before we can have any discussion about whether an activity is creative or not.
A good definition I found somewhere is that creativity is the ability to create solutions for a problem, any kind of problem. A lot of creativity (if not all creativity) is the ability to assemble large objects from smaller ones, such as writing symphonies, designing a motorcycle engine, or building a computer program.
Creativity is the ability to create new things. It is the ability to hear 100 jokes and make a really funny new joke, or to bring a number of words and use them in a new manner to create a creative poem.
I find absolutely nothing inherently creative in a person's ability to follow musical notes and thus play the violin. The same goes for painting, and any number of other 'creative' professions. But to excel at these fields creativity seems to be necessary. Writing a novel without creativity will only produce a dull one that nobody wants to read, and the reviewers will say 'there is nothing new in it', because the author hasn't used creativity to produce new material.
Programming is one of the most creative professions, it is hard to think of a better example of a creative profession, because programming is problem solving, which is creativity.
Bad programmers either lack the skill and experience to build solutions, or are simply not creative enough to do it. A person's creativity is limited by their ability to hold complex problems in their brains, and different people seem to have different capacities of this brain 'RAM'.
After loading a complex problem into our heads, we then need skill to manipulate the objects to make something beautiful out of them, and this ability can be severely limited by the lack of knowledge of the field. It will be hard to create elegant mathematical solutions to programming problems without some knowledge of math.
My article actually intended to do the opposite - to argue that there is no dichotomy at all. I'm interested how you got the opposite impression. Maybe I should go back and edit some more. :)
I suffer from Artism as well :-) Which is to say as an engineer I solve problems with materials at hand in ways that meet constraints. That often requires creative thinking but the creative act is appreciated by other engineers more than lay people.
I think of it as the ability to see the unseen. A very non-crisp way of describing the ability to see a solution amongst a pile of symptoms or pain points. A sculptor sees the figure 'inside' the stone, an engineer sees the solution 'amongst' the available resources.
Now if I could reliably interview for it I'd be all set :-)
Really? I thought it was about building skills by just applying yourself. You don't learn guitar or Ruby in a night. You practice and play with them for years and integrate them into your projects.
I've recently taken up hobby blacksmithing (focusing on blades). The skills required were completely alien to me at first.
At this point, I can hardly make nails. But stretching myself in such a dramatic way has really fueled my creativity, even when it comes to developing software.
No matter how much I struggle, I know that in 20 years of systematically pounding away on evenings and weekends, I'll have enough skill to make some good stuff. I'm confident that I can become a ABS Journeyman, and perhaps a Master if I live long enough.
[+] [-] aik|15 years ago|reply
Among other things, I have come to the realization that the way that our schools are structured (in the US anyway) promotes this type of thinking you're talking about.
There's a reinforcing feedback loop taking place:
1. You have no natural interest in (say) algebra, possibly due to lack of knowledge about what it is and what it is for. This is never explained to you in a way that makes sense to you.
2. You don't spend time thinking about algebra, and neither does your subconscious.
3. You do your homework, but don't care much, and don't care to learn. Because you don't care, you don't care to understand deeply. You're now stuck learning in a shallow way, or, in other words, memorizing inert knowledge. The knowledge is mostly unusable to you, and the homework and tests are structured in such a way to allow shallow understanding to get by, so you're fine. You mainly care to meet the expectations of the teacher (get a good grade and be viewed favorably), so all is good.
5. Because of the above, you mostly suck at tests, and mostly suck at meeting the teacher's (and peer's) expectations. You suck compared to others in the class.
6. Because you don't fully understand the implications of what you're learning, you continue not to care. Because you are sucking, you care even less.
7. See #1 with the same or other topics.
I'd recommend reading about Carol Dweck's Entity vs. Incremental Self-Theories on Learning. Incredible stuff.
"The amount of skill that you have in a certain area is proportional to the amount of work that you put into it."
Instead of using the word "work", I would say "proportional to the amount of time you and your mind spends on it." One reason people are significantly and seemingly naturally better at certain skills is because they are naturally drawn to it. Things you are naturally drawn to you both consciously AND subconsciously spend time on. In the past I've never spent much time contemplating or trying to understand the intricacies of the stock market, and neither has my mind, and I have never had much interest, and so I'm not a particularly skilled stock broker.
[+] [-] Revisor|15 years ago|reply
The right strategy and appropriate effort are much more important than results.
[+] [-] fastfinner|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] idan|15 years ago|reply
Can't upvote this enough.
[+] [-] colanderman|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] archgoon|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robryan|15 years ago|reply
Sure I could spend a lot of time to learn how to take it to say 90% but I think a lot of the time that is better spent focusing on my core areas.
I guess this is similar to a designer who will jump in and modify view code to work better with their design, but leave the heavy lifting on the backend to the programmer.
[+] [-] gaelian|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dtran|15 years ago|reply
Without arguing the efficacy of the TigerMom approach, this is indeed why a lot of parents force their kids to do something - you may not have a knack for it at first and be tempted to write off that it just isn't for you, but you need to put in a little more time to really figure out what your true learning curve for something looks like.
One interesting question is whether you really love doing something or just love doing it because you had a knack for it initially and picked it up quickly (which results in a positive feedback loop: you spend more time on it and get even better at it compared to the things that you didn't have a knack for at first). I think college really hammered that home for me - before, I just really liked a lot of math of science because it seemed to come naturally, but to find what you really love doing, you have to hit the wall and see if you enjoy it when it becomes a struggle.
[+] [-] cek|15 years ago|reply
However, one of the best pieces of advice I ever got from one of my favorite mentors (Bob Muglia) was to never take a job where you have to do something you know you are not good at.
I have always sucked at detailed-status-list tracking. I eventually figured out how to compliment myself with others who could do it. However, at one point in my career when I was looking at new opportunities I saw one that would have forced me to get good a being very detail oriented. When I showed Bob my potential job options and asked for his advice he told me "Don't take the detail job. You will suck at it and you will hate it. You have other super-powers that are valuable and you should focus on finding jobs where you can apply those."
You CAN do anything, and you SHOULD try everything. But in the end, you'll be most successful if you focus on what you know you are great at.
----- "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects". -Robert A. Heinlein
[+] [-] memset|15 years ago|reply
Then this got me thinking about footnote #2 in the essay - that perhaps it is a net win to call oneself a scientist, which implies that one is not committed to any belief in particular. I was pretty pleased when I read this; "great, I'm a scientist, I must be pretty open-minded!" Easy.
Except that - and this article seems to highlight the point - if you box yourself into being a "scientist" (I will suggest that many of us techies consider ourselves scientists, or at least science-minded) then you run the risk of excluding yourself from non-science things. Things like graphic design. (or marketing, accounting, or musicianship.)
So. I am not a scientist! Not a techie. Not a designer. I am a person who is pretty (darn) good at technology and still has a lot of difficult things, like graphic design, to practice and get better at!
[+] [-] robrenaud|15 years ago|reply
I am a programmer, and primarily I identify as a C++ and Python programmer. Compared to other languages, for a given problem (unless it's truly massive, where the efficiency/expressiveness gain over the other two is large to offset becoming an expert in it), I am almost certainly going to provide an adequate solution quickest in one of those languages.
But if you say that Python is slow, doesn't do concurrency well, or has trouble scaling to truly large, 100+ programmer codebases, I'll agree with you.
And if you call C++ a large, ugly, language with a ton of ways to really screw yourself, and that is tied to a slow edit/compile/debug cycle, I'll agree with you there too.
Here perhaps maybe enlarging my identity helped, if I was just a Python programmer, I wouldn't see how static typing and a really good code searching system would help getting an anchor on a large, complicated C++ code base. Those static types and non-virtual functions means that yes, I can see every place that this particular function is called in our entire code base without having to dig all that much. And if I was just a C++ programmer, I wouldn't know the bliss that is hacking a 200 line program in Python, and solving some mildy complicated but mostly self contained problem in few hour session, all without the bondage of makefiles, compiles, static typing and seg faults.
[+] [-] mattgreenrocks|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ricefield|15 years ago|reply
When I was younger, my best subjects were Art and English, and my worst subject was always Math. This had continued to be true, as I consider myself much better at design than at coding or problem solving. I wouldn't say the dichotomy is necessarily true or false - I hate to think we are stuck as one or the other, and I certainly know people who are talented at both.
On the other hand, in my observation, there always seems to be an inherent aptitude - I struggle and work a lot harder with "technical" things; but it can be overcome - I am still a CS student at top university, and am not a phenomenal coder, but I can keep up. For so-called "technical" people, you may or may not believe in the dichotomy, but that doesn't mean hard work can't make you better at "creative" work than "talented" others.
[+] [-] rokhayakebe|15 years ago|reply
I long the day when software engineers start looking at themselves as artists. Take this from someone who isn't an engineer. You take your ideas and turn them into something others can interact with, play with, control, morph, do other freaking cool things with and sometimes they even get a feeling/emotion out of it. That's f&&ing art to me.
[+] [-] kmort|15 years ago|reply
The end idea may well be an emotive expression, but there's a lot of disciplined craft that must go in to creating the piece.
Similarly, an architect may design an evocative history museum for example, but it's an engineer that must get the thing built.
[+] [-] rfrey|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robobenjie|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] happyfeet|15 years ago|reply
http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2919-ten-design-lessons-from-...
Here is an excerpt: ================= Olmsted had no formal design training and didn’t commit to landscape architecture until he was 44. Before that, he was a New York Times correspondent to the Confederate states, the manager of a California gold mine, and General Secretary of the United States Sanitary Commission during the Civil War. He also ran a farm on Staten Island from 1848 to 1855 and spent time working in a New York dry-goods store.
His views on landscapes developed from travelling and reading. When he was young, he took a year-long voyage in China. And in 1850, he took a six-month walking tour of Europe and the British Isles, during which he saw numerous parks, private estates, and scenic countryside. He was also deeply influenced by Swiss physician Johann Georg von Zimmermann’s writings about nature’s ability to heal “derangements of the mind” through imagination. Olmsted read Zimmermann’s book as a boy and treasured it. =======================
[+] [-] j_baker|15 years ago|reply
This is what happens when you identify with your chosen profession too closely. Psychologists refer to it as a persona: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persona_(psychology)
It's tempting to believe that others have placed these kinds of restrictions on you, but the truth of the matter is that we put these restrictions on ourselves. That's the truly important discovery: you have control over the mask you wear (albeit not unlimited control).
[+] [-] fbnt|15 years ago|reply
This is my usual line when somebody ask me what I do for a living.
Still, I can see in many people's eyes (especially girls) a spark of prejudice: ( IT Guy = pragmatic, heartless, frustrated, framed boring nerd )
[+] [-] dasil003|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tritogeneia|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dkarl|15 years ago|reply
Heh, this realization does change your life... very, very slowly. Catching up on all those hours invested is hard. Making them pass pleasantly is also a challenge. Spending all day and half the night doing something is easy when it's a source of pride and your refuge from all the stuff you aren't good at.
I spent years aspiring to be good at music. I took piano lessons for years as a kid, even after my parents told me I could stop. I played saxophone in junior high orchestra band and junior high jazz band. I wised up in high school, but then in college I wasted a few hundred bucks on a guitar. I sold it after a month, but then later I started going to the music building several times a week to play the Hanon piano exercises. I actually kept it up for several months before I stopped. No real music, just Hanon.
Music was a waste of time for me because I absolutely hated it. There was the generic pleasure of improving at a skill, but that was the sum total of the pleasure I derived from it. My entire goal in learning music, from the time I was a child until I wasted that fifty or so hours in college, was to play music that I liked hearing and that other people would like hearing. Of course, I was so far from that.... I remember as a child being conscious that my older sister's playing bugged the crap out of me. The mistakes, the awkward tempos. And she was much better than me, five years ahead and also better for her age than I was. The entire payoff for playing music was always years away, even assuming I suddenly became extremely dedicated. Every hour between me and my goal would be me enduring the misery of producing noises that I disliked and was ashamed of. I thought that was just the way it was. I flagellated myself for not being disciplined and far-sighted enough to pursue that distant dream like so many other people did. I knew some kids just enjoyed making bad music, but I didn't think they were the ones who would be good at music someday. I just thought they had horrible taste. The ones who were actually good had clearly been tougher than me; they had fought through all the shame and humiliation of playing badly. They were fierce and ruthless with themselves, and finally, after thousands of hours of hardship, they were able to enjoy the fruits of their labor.
Nowadays I know that's not how it works. I'm more realistic with myself. I could be a great dancer before I'm forty, except that I don't really like dancing. I could be decent at drawing, except that I don't really like to draw. Every couple of weeks I get a great idea for a cartoon and wish I could draw it, but I really don't want to sketch crummy cartoons every day so I'll be ready when I get a good idea. Programming, though.... Fire up gdb and look at a core dump? Why the heck not? Install a new library and play around with it? Fun! Read through some code, figure out how it works, and be on the lookout for a memory leak? Ooh, kind of exciting, I might be the one who finds it.
Those aren't especially stimulating activities, and there's no glamor in them. They're nothing I could brag about to my friends or show off to a cute girl. (I'm working on HTML and CSS now to fix that :-P) They're just something I usually don't mind doing and often find pleasurable. I never chose to be good at programming, and I actually took a pretty snobbish and dismissive attitude towards it until I found myself making a living at it. (Looking down on it was probably what enabled me to believe I could be good at it. Pfft, I can do this, any idiot can do this, especially if he's half-autistic like me.)
I still get off on stupid tangents, though. I took a vacation several years ago and was extremely frustrated with the performance of my point-and-click digital camera. I ended up buying a DSLR, and suddenly I felt the pressure. I had to become a good photographer. My friends were taking pictures and putting them on Flickr (now on Facebook) and I had to keep up. I couldn't suck at taking pictures. Especially not after I bought the DSLR. I bought a crapload of books and read at least a third of the ones I bought. I read on the web. I took classes. I took my camera with me to places and took pictures instead of having fun. The fact that I was taking shitty photos became a huge monkey on my back. Still is, kind of. Last fall, I took an amazing trip to a place I'd been wanting to go to for years, and I obsessed over the quality of the pictures. When I got back I immediately looked through them and couldn't find a single one I liked. For weeks I procrastinated processing them. Finally I did. They sucked. It was awful. Now I don't even know if I should take my camera with me on the next vacation I take.
So please, let me indulge in the misconception that I am just a "technical type." That way I can take pictures in peace, without knowing that it is really my fault and my shame if they suck, and that I should be putting in the hard work so that one day I will be competent and my friends will not have to endure my shitty photos. No, my shitty photos are not my fault. I am just not a creative type. I am a techie. Leave me alone and stop reminding me that all my artistic deficiencies are just one big character flaw!
[+] [-] potatolicious|15 years ago|reply
- everyone sucks at taking pictures. The difference between a good photographer and a bad one is largely how well they curate their work. Don't go to the MOMA and get depressed because the walls are lined with incredible works by incredible photographers - realize that it's an incredibly selected subset of everything they've done. After all, you're taking decades of a career and choosing only the finest, oh, 50 photographs?
- your keep rate shouldn't be much above 1%. 99% of the pictures you take will be shit, and that's just the natural order of things. Throw these out - preview them at home from the SD/CF card, and make sure none of them ever survive to your HDD. Treat the remaining 1% carefully (back them up). Spend time editing them and looking at them with a critical eye to see if they can be better.
- slow down, think more. New photographers mash the shutter release as if it dispenses candy, particularly in the digital age. Put a jar on the kitchen table at home - put a quarter into it for every single picture you take (or $0.50, or $1, depending on what is good for you). Donate this jar to charity or something - the point here is to force you to take fewer pictures. You will work harder for each one, and think more before each shot, and these will make your work dramatically better. Personally, I do this by shooting film. I rarely leave home with more than 50 exposures or so in the camera/bag. On a good day I'll shoot maybe 15 pictures.
- go shooting more. What work inspires you? Ansel Adams? Winogrand? Cartier-Bresson? Look at lots of photographs and think about what makes them great and what you like about them. Then go out and try to "see" the same images in real life. A photographer's eye is far more important than their ability to operate a DSLR.
- join a critique group. Yes, this will suck for your ego, but it is extremely helpful for your development. Join a small group (5-10 people max) so it's not a complete zoo. These people will tell you how to make your pictures better and give you actual directionality in your improvement.
Lots of people in photography are hackers. If you're ever in Seattle, give me a shout and we'll go shooting. Otherwise, keep snapping.
[+] [-] wazoox|15 years ago|reply
Your example of music : though I've been a professional pop musician 20 years ago, I'm currently learning Beethoven's 8th sonata. I don't plan to ever play it in a manner "competitive" with any classically trained pianist; I do it just because of the pleasure I get from playing it. I don't give a smoking fuck of what any potential listener would think of my (pretty poor) interpretation.
I've never stopped making music. I understand that people who've been constrained to learn some piano when young abandon it later, because they never really wanted it anyway; but apparently you decided to learn it yourself, then simply throw it away later judging you're not worth it? Doesn't make sense to me.
[+] [-] pestaa|15 years ago|reply
It was because I made my skills compete with each other.
Even the assumption I can draw as nicely as I code is ridiculous. Lately I've tried to put less highlight on the outcome and enjoyed the process in its own beauty.
[+] [-] teyc|15 years ago|reply
In the light of your lack of progress, I wonder whether it is because you set standards that are too high or your dislike of music made the work harder than it has to be?
[+] [-] jrwoodruff|15 years ago|reply
Before you give up, try this:
Next time you're out taking photos, commit to throwing away 75% of what you shoot. Now, relax, have fun, and shoot with the goal of filling up your flash card. Forget about everything you've read about aperture settings and exposure. Leave that stuff for the people that depend of their photos for their income.
Shoot in auto mode. Do stupid shit with your camera. Anything that you think will make you look like an idiot will probably make a better picture. Lay on the ground and shoot pictures of people's feet, hold it over your head and blindly snap portraits of your family. Get in people's faces to the point where they are uncomfortable. Switch to aperture priority and set it wide open. Take 20 pictures of the exact same thing 12 different ways.
Then go back home and throw 75% of them away. Most likely, you'll still hate 99% of the ones you saved. But come back to them in a year, after you forgot you shot them, and you'll find you love them.
But more than anything, relax and have fun first. Because ultimately, no one really cares if you can take Pulitzer-winning photos or not, they just want to reminisce about that trip the family took to the Smokey Mountains and joke about that horrible hat they were wearing. And if you can have fun doing that, then you can get better at taking photos.
[+] [-] UrLicht|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] radagaisus|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] erikb|15 years ago|reply
Other than that I also get the feeling these days, that you can't be a good coder without any ideas about design. To understand how we construct software we all naturally learn the interface to processors, electronic waves and so on. Why should learning about the human interface not be as important for understanding how we should design our software. Also we all need to express what we have in mind, which also needs some design abilities to create appropriate ppts and prototypes.
[+] [-] udoprog|15 years ago|reply
I don't design. I could, but I know that the time I would spend designing would be twice the amount compared to a skilled designer. Instead I ask someone who loves design. collaborate with them to create something awesome. We bash and we chastise, but always realize that its about the work, not the person or his/her skill level.
This does not translate well to corporate, but for the better it really should.
[+] [-] niccl|15 years ago|reply
The real dichotomy that this article is getting at might be effectively described as artistic versus non-artistic, but even that is not a complete description of the distinction. Maybe it comes down to the old left-brain/right-brain thing?
I used to call myself non-creative, until several good friends united to point out that I do create things, just not things that you could plausibly turn up in art galleries.
[+] [-] Hawramani|15 years ago|reply
A good definition I found somewhere is that creativity is the ability to create solutions for a problem, any kind of problem. A lot of creativity (if not all creativity) is the ability to assemble large objects from smaller ones, such as writing symphonies, designing a motorcycle engine, or building a computer program.
Creativity is the ability to create new things. It is the ability to hear 100 jokes and make a really funny new joke, or to bring a number of words and use them in a new manner to create a creative poem.
I find absolutely nothing inherently creative in a person's ability to follow musical notes and thus play the violin. The same goes for painting, and any number of other 'creative' professions. But to excel at these fields creativity seems to be necessary. Writing a novel without creativity will only produce a dull one that nobody wants to read, and the reviewers will say 'there is nothing new in it', because the author hasn't used creativity to produce new material.
Programming is one of the most creative professions, it is hard to think of a better example of a creative profession, because programming is problem solving, which is creativity.
Bad programmers either lack the skill and experience to build solutions, or are simply not creative enough to do it. A person's creativity is limited by their ability to hold complex problems in their brains, and different people seem to have different capacities of this brain 'RAM'.
After loading a complex problem into our heads, we then need skill to manipulate the objects to make something beautiful out of them, and this ability can be severely limited by the lack of knowledge of the field. It will be hard to create elegant mathematical solutions to programming problems without some knowledge of math.
[+] [-] johnfn|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|15 years ago|reply
I think of it as the ability to see the unseen. A very non-crisp way of describing the ability to see a solution amongst a pile of symptoms or pain points. A sculptor sees the figure 'inside' the stone, an engineer sees the solution 'amongst' the available resources.
Now if I could reliably interview for it I'd be all set :-)
[+] [-] DrHankPym|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gaustin|15 years ago|reply
At this point, I can hardly make nails. But stretching myself in such a dramatic way has really fueled my creativity, even when it comes to developing software.
No matter how much I struggle, I know that in 20 years of systematically pounding away on evenings and weekends, I'll have enough skill to make some good stuff. I'm confident that I can become a ABS Journeyman, and perhaps a Master if I live long enough.