The thing that doesn't click in articles like this is the advice section afterwards. Do you think the people described thought about how to increase their practice surface area? No, they were simply /interested/. And part of the reason they were interested was because of natural talent! Do you want to know how to increase your practice surface area? Find things you're interested in.
But the reality is that many people just aren't as interested in anything as some people are interested in something. And that's okay. The real advice is to learn to accept yourself as you are, whether you're an obsessive or not.
The article’s advice section is actually quite practical, and directly addresses your point:
> It should go without saying that the best way to increase your practice surface area in a given field is to be obsessed with that field. Obsession makes quick work of formal and bounded training sessions, and it doesn't need "tips" on how to do so.
> So the question then becomes, "How do I increase my practice surface area if I'm not already obsessed?"
> Do you think the people described thought about how to increase their practice surface area? No, they were simply /interested/.
In fact, many of them did think about it. Many of them designed, tested, experimented, and tweaked their approaches to their crafts endlessly throughout their lives.
It can be comforting (because it lets us off the hook) to think that masters of their craft all follow the "just do it" ethos while simply "accepting themselves as they are," but usually the opposite is true. At least at the margin.
Accepting yourself as you are is the worst poison to tell to your child or someone you care about. Life is about in inventing yourself through craft, doing, trying, discovering, challenging, achieving goals and self improvement.
Interested is the wrong word. Motivated is a better one, with interest being a subcategory of motivation.
The kind of intrinsic practice is even easier today than it was back then because we carry powerful computers in our pocket. If, like Orwell, you want to be a writer, you can literally work on it anywhere at any time. If you want to learn a language, you can spend time practicing it. If you want to learn music or art, the tools for explicitly practicing those things are in your actual pocket.
“Talent” is a myth. We all have our aptitudes, but in most subjects that only gets you a small advantage. Maybe you can remember Spanish vocab better than me, but if I practice every day and you don’t, you’ll reach the limits of “talent” quickly. Putting in the reps is the most important part of learning anything. The irony is that when you DO get good at something people forget that you were ever bad at it, and they will quickly dismiss your hard work as talent.
In high school, I had an ongoing argument with my dad about this. I got really into music and practiced daily for hours, wanting to be good enough to play in a band. By the time I graduated, I wasn’t bad. My dad would pontificate about which relative I had inherited this talent from, and I would get annoyed because it undermined the 100s of hours I spent locked in a music room. It did NOT come easy; I wanted to be able to do something and worked my ass off to get there.
I've been reading about expertise and deliberate/purposeful practice, starting with "Peak" by Ericcson.
Experts, as a rule, augment their practice with a coach, and they never stop doing that. The quintessential example is the olympian.
So, that is how they increase their practice surface area.
I think interest is also generally relevant, but it's not the core in established fields: coaching is.
I am interested in unestablished fields too, which may be fundamentally interest driven. Although IMO that interest may be more about establishing frontiers than the specific topic.
Man, talk about out the opposite of a growth mindset. What's that called? Stagnation mindset? Mediocrity mindset? How depressing.
People can change and get better at things. They do it all the time. Plenty of people _do_ actively think about things like how to increase their surface area to improve, because _they want to get better_.
Nice succinct read outlining something I think a lot of people are aware of, but don’t often describe. It’s my first time reading Indie Hacker, and I think there’s nice balance of quality, depth, and brevity that you’re trying to strike?
I recently watched a YouTube on cultural communication pathways, and there was a comparison of “engineered communication” being a top down approach, as opposed to a gardening approach to communication being a bottoms up approach; one being predictable with measurable outcomes, and the other being organic and unpredictable. In gardening we plant seeds, help them germinate, watch them grow. A lot of the articles on Indie hackers seem to be planting seeds, which I appreciate. I wish HN would see value in a range of articles, and not skew to preferring engineered rigid predictability. Pardon the overstatement but you get my drift.
I wonder how the indie/entrepreneur space is doing nowadays. I tried to do it myself but never really got anywhere this was back in 2016. Whenever I go on sites/subreddits around this topic a lot of the posts just seem to be about generating clout/some fake revenue numbers/screenshot of earnings. It's like entrepreneurs selling to each other.
I suppose nowadays it's probably around LLM wrappers, photo generation, video generation services... there were those niche ones in the past like the teacher with her bingo cards maker
It's still in my mind as I don't like waiting for a paycheck, just wondering how the space is doing nowadays
It's doing better than ever! LLMs offer the equivalent of $500k+ in outside funding if used correctly, so there's a huge uptick in # of new bootstrapped startups.
In fact we (the Indie Hackers founders) are bootstrapping a new B2B app now that Claude Code & Codex CLI (etc) are on the org chat.
I don't want to use the word "grift", but it really seems like we're scraping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to new ideas for products a lot of the time. Go and read this month's HN "Who is hiring" thread for an example. It's all either fintech crypto crap that never seems to come to fruition for anything normal people want to use, weird microloans, and products for extremely small niches like using AI to help with gift-giving and so forth.
It's honestly hard to imagine wanting to work 12 hour days to advance some of these interests. We're seeing some of the greatest minds of our generation lost to these kinds of ephemeral, short-lived projects that flame up, consume VC, and mostly burn out uselessly, having created a bunch of IP that is shelved never to be seen again. What's the point?
Maybe we really all ought to just get drafted. At least I'd be able to explain to my kids what I do for a living.
quite sad, the space had inspirational stories. & IndieHackers brought those stories to the masses to inspire.
but later 'fast money / influencers' entered the space. It has become a mini ponzi sell a starter pack / template to wannabe indiehackers, sell a course to wannabe indiehackers.
For solo founders I guess if you wanna get all meat no bones stick to MicroConf
I was gonna say. I did it with French some years ago and it worked like a charm.
Later I became obsessed with Argentine tango. Unfortunately, I thought, "comprehensible input" won't work with dancing, especially not a couple's dance. Nevertheless, unable to dance every day due to my local scene being quite small, I instead consumed a boatload of YouTube videos during my spare time. Instructional content, performances, class summaries, and what have you. And I progressed super quickly.
First off, as a leader, it is good to have seen competent dancers with good musicality and how they choose their steps to fit with phrases of songs. That much fits in parallel with input-based language acquisition techniques. But I also think I gained a good amound of intuition about how to move my own body. Not perfect intuition, but more than nothing, which was very much my starting point.
There is a book called "Talent is overrated" it essentially says, you need to 1) invest time, 2) do targeted practice, and 3) have a mentor, who helps you in targeted practice. Practice alone is not enough, it must be targeted at 1) what is relevant and/or 2) where your biggest weakness is at the moment.
A lot of the article goes into trying to "multitask" your practice - building it into some minimal viable practice routine.
I would urge caution around this - in fact - deliberate practice is probably worth 10 times this. There's a reason people tend to plateau early in their efforts to master something. Once your brain figures out how to put the skill on autopilot you're going to find your rate of improvement significantly slower.
It's not just about the time you put in - it's about the type of practice you put in.
I like the idea of the article. However, I wonder what are ways to increase the practice surface area for programming / software engineering?
I can think of various high-Level activities such as analyzing systems we interact with on a day-to-day basis. However, I cannot come up with exercises that would improve my code itself.
How is IndieHackers doing since being independent? I used to use it quite a bit but it seemed like recently it's focused more on articles, similar to Starter Story I guess, which makes a ton of money so I can't blame you for going that route, than the forum (which I can't even figure out how to get to anymore). But then again, the forum had quite a lot of promotion and spam that got boring to read after a while.
It's doing quite well. Thanks for asking. :) Good observation re the forum: folks find it novel and engaging for about a week, then get bored of the repetition. Not very monetizable for an indie team.
I'm currently building the product for my startup - I'm hoping to launch in the next few months. I'm very grateful to IndieHackers for showing me how to make that happen, but when I look at the website now, I can't help but feel that it's jumped the shark.
At the top of the page, there's a link labelled Starting Up that takes you to a page with links to articles that taken together form a Guide to Starting Up. Those links, and those articles, represent the entire value of the IndieHackers website. There's a lot of value in those articles, but the rest of the website provides no value.
Members of the IndieHackers community talk about their 'shovel companies' - typically things like AI-powered marketing services, or the like. This is nonsense: the real shovel companies in the SaaS space are cloud providers and payment processors. Indie hackers claiming to have made a shovel company aren't Levi Strauss selling sturdy trousers to prospectors, they're urchins offering to help dig in plots in exchange for a bit of bread.
IndieHackers itself has become one of these urchins, exhibiting increasing desperation to show ongoing relevance. Skill at software development isn't the thing that's holding most indie hackers back; what's holding them back is that they don't know any good problems to solve. There's an awful lot of money out there waiting to be spent on simple CRUD apps that don't yet exist. You don't need to push the limit of what's possible with computers to make money; you just need to go out into the world to find an actual problem.
Author here. I've spent a decade drinking my own "snake oil" (the advice in this essay), and I've only now committed it to writing so that others can apply it or ignore it as they wish.
I haven't burned out. Instead, I find my work fulfilling, endlessly novel, and valuable to others.
Does this do anything to change your mental model?
> The difference between being good and being great isn’t talent or formal training, but the invisible practice that happens when you're just living life.
Pure nonsense.
Necessary != sufficient, and honestly neither are demonstrated in the anecdotes.
It's possible to be great at something simply by practicing, assuming normal capabilities. But great here just means "better than virtually everyone". Being mediocre among people who practice regularly it makes you immediately better than basically everyone who has done it once or twice. By most definitions that's "great".
Median daily StarCraft ranked player? You're great at StarCraft.
Second, if you start young enough, you get the compounding effects of time. You're now "pretty good among lifelong daily players in their prime". That's Olympic/ world class.
Like that guy who had kids just to make them Chess masters. He did so by making chess part of the family life, so integral it wasn't working it just was. The guy from the original post actually.
So it's tempting to say things like TFA posits, and while I'm not sure it's 100% true, it's definitely not 100% false or pure rubbish.
This article might be interesting, and I'm not against AI use. I am not interested in AI slop though, and I immediately lost interest in the banner photo with nonsense text in it.
seaucre|5 months ago
But the reality is that many people just aren't as interested in anything as some people are interested in something. And that's okay. The real advice is to learn to accept yourself as you are, whether you're an obsessive or not.
thorum|5 months ago
> It should go without saying that the best way to increase your practice surface area in a given field is to be obsessed with that field. Obsession makes quick work of formal and bounded training sessions, and it doesn't need "tips" on how to do so.
> So the question then becomes, "How do I increase my practice surface area if I'm not already obsessed?"
ChanningAllen|5 months ago
In fact, many of them did think about it. Many of them designed, tested, experimented, and tweaked their approaches to their crafts endlessly throughout their lives.
It can be comforting (because it lets us off the hook) to think that masters of their craft all follow the "just do it" ethos while simply "accepting themselves as they are," but usually the opposite is true. At least at the margin.
philipallstar|5 months ago
Accepting yourself as you are is the opposite of practicing to get better at something.
begueradj|5 months ago
schwartzworld|5 months ago
The kind of intrinsic practice is even easier today than it was back then because we carry powerful computers in our pocket. If, like Orwell, you want to be a writer, you can literally work on it anywhere at any time. If you want to learn a language, you can spend time practicing it. If you want to learn music or art, the tools for explicitly practicing those things are in your actual pocket.
“Talent” is a myth. We all have our aptitudes, but in most subjects that only gets you a small advantage. Maybe you can remember Spanish vocab better than me, but if I practice every day and you don’t, you’ll reach the limits of “talent” quickly. Putting in the reps is the most important part of learning anything. The irony is that when you DO get good at something people forget that you were ever bad at it, and they will quickly dismiss your hard work as talent.
In high school, I had an ongoing argument with my dad about this. I got really into music and practiced daily for hours, wanting to be good enough to play in a band. By the time I graduated, I wasn’t bad. My dad would pontificate about which relative I had inherited this talent from, and I would get annoyed because it undermined the 100s of hours I spent locked in a music room. It did NOT come easy; I wanted to be able to do something and worked my ass off to get there.
beacon294|5 months ago
Experts, as a rule, augment their practice with a coach, and they never stop doing that. The quintessential example is the olympian.
So, that is how they increase their practice surface area.
I think interest is also generally relevant, but it's not the core in established fields: coaching is.
I am interested in unestablished fields too, which may be fundamentally interest driven. Although IMO that interest may be more about establishing frontiers than the specific topic.
_se|5 months ago
People can change and get better at things. They do it all the time. Plenty of people _do_ actively think about things like how to increase their surface area to improve, because _they want to get better_.
bitbasher|5 months ago
There's some truth there, but Charles Bukowski said it much better and more succinctly with, "Don't try." [1]
1: https://poets.org/poem/so-you-want-be-writer
raincole|5 months ago
> if it's hard work just thinking about doing it,
> don't do it
If it's hard work just thinking about doing it, it's a very good sign that it's something worth doing.
(I know I shouldn't take motivating quotes literally)
cm2012|5 months ago
BinaryIgor|5 months ago
When you become obsessed with A, your whole life becomes a practice of A.
listenfaster|5 months ago
I recently watched a YouTube on cultural communication pathways, and there was a comparison of “engineered communication” being a top down approach, as opposed to a gardening approach to communication being a bottoms up approach; one being predictable with measurable outcomes, and the other being organic and unpredictable. In gardening we plant seeds, help them germinate, watch them grow. A lot of the articles on Indie hackers seem to be planting seeds, which I appreciate. I wish HN would see value in a range of articles, and not skew to preferring engineered rigid predictability. Pardon the overstatement but you get my drift.
ge96|5 months ago
I suppose nowadays it's probably around LLM wrappers, photo generation, video generation services... there were those niche ones in the past like the teacher with her bingo cards maker
It's still in my mind as I don't like waiting for a paycheck, just wondering how the space is doing nowadays
ChanningAllen|5 months ago
In fact we (the Indie Hackers founders) are bootstrapping a new B2B app now that Claude Code & Codex CLI (etc) are on the org chat.
mikestorrent|5 months ago
It's honestly hard to imagine wanting to work 12 hour days to advance some of these interests. We're seeing some of the greatest minds of our generation lost to these kinds of ephemeral, short-lived projects that flame up, consume VC, and mostly burn out uselessly, having created a bunch of IP that is shelved never to be seen again. What's the point?
Maybe we really all ought to just get drafted. At least I'd be able to explain to my kids what I do for a living.
dzonga|5 months ago
but later 'fast money / influencers' entered the space. It has become a mini ponzi sell a starter pack / template to wannabe indiehackers, sell a course to wannabe indiehackers.
For solo founders I guess if you wanna get all meat no bones stick to MicroConf
AznHisoka|5 months ago
boerseth|5 months ago
Later I became obsessed with Argentine tango. Unfortunately, I thought, "comprehensible input" won't work with dancing, especially not a couple's dance. Nevertheless, unable to dance every day due to my local scene being quite small, I instead consumed a boatload of YouTube videos during my spare time. Instructional content, performances, class summaries, and what have you. And I progressed super quickly.
First off, as a leader, it is good to have seen competent dancers with good musicality and how they choose their steps to fit with phrases of songs. That much fits in parallel with input-based language acquisition techniques. But I also think I gained a good amound of intuition about how to move my own body. Not perfect intuition, but more than nothing, which was very much my starting point.
kalap_ur|5 months ago
unknown|5 months ago
[deleted]
vunderba|5 months ago
I would urge caution around this - in fact - deliberate practice is probably worth 10 times this. There's a reason people tend to plateau early in their efforts to master something. Once your brain figures out how to put the skill on autopilot you're going to find your rate of improvement significantly slower.
It's not just about the time you put in - it's about the type of practice you put in.
danjl|5 months ago
bdangubic|5 months ago
vstollen|5 months ago
I can think of various high-Level activities such as analyzing systems we interact with on a day-to-day basis. However, I cannot come up with exercises that would improve my code itself.
unknown|5 months ago
[deleted]
satvikpendem|5 months ago
ChanningAllen|5 months ago
cjs_ac|5 months ago
At the top of the page, there's a link labelled Starting Up that takes you to a page with links to articles that taken together form a Guide to Starting Up. Those links, and those articles, represent the entire value of the IndieHackers website. There's a lot of value in those articles, but the rest of the website provides no value.
Members of the IndieHackers community talk about their 'shovel companies' - typically things like AI-powered marketing services, or the like. This is nonsense: the real shovel companies in the SaaS space are cloud providers and payment processors. Indie hackers claiming to have made a shovel company aren't Levi Strauss selling sturdy trousers to prospectors, they're urchins offering to help dig in plots in exchange for a bit of bread.
IndieHackers itself has become one of these urchins, exhibiting increasing desperation to show ongoing relevance. Skill at software development isn't the thing that's holding most indie hackers back; what's holding them back is that they don't know any good problems to solve. There's an awful lot of money out there waiting to be spent on simple CRUD apps that don't yet exist. You don't need to push the limit of what's possible with computers to make money; you just need to go out into the world to find an actual problem.
wiseowise|5 months ago
Burn out speedrun 101.
If you want to keep your sanity, you need to find your own passion, not try to emulate others (especially with crazy routines like the examples).
ChanningAllen|5 months ago
I haven't burned out. Instead, I find my work fulfilling, endlessly novel, and valuable to others.
Does this do anything to change your mental model?
JackFr|5 months ago
Pure nonsense.
Necessary != sufficient, and honestly neither are demonstrated in the anecdotes.
jvanderbot|5 months ago
It's possible to be great at something simply by practicing, assuming normal capabilities. But great here just means "better than virtually everyone". Being mediocre among people who practice regularly it makes you immediately better than basically everyone who has done it once or twice. By most definitions that's "great".
Median daily StarCraft ranked player? You're great at StarCraft.
Second, if you start young enough, you get the compounding effects of time. You're now "pretty good among lifelong daily players in their prime". That's Olympic/ world class.
Like that guy who had kids just to make them Chess masters. He did so by making chess part of the family life, so integral it wasn't working it just was. The guy from the original post actually.
So it's tempting to say things like TFA posits, and while I'm not sure it's 100% true, it's definitely not 100% false or pure rubbish.
Zambyte|5 months ago
ChanningAllen|5 months ago
mirror_neuron|5 months ago
It’s valid feedback for the author, though. I had to read the article to understand the image.
AznHisoka|5 months ago
I thought it was some "Silicon Valley bro" that wanted you to drink kelp, and build your biceps or something
jannyfer|5 months ago