Key passage: "When you find a writer who really is saying something to you, read everything that writer has written and you will get more education and depth of understanding out of that than reading a scrap here and a scrap there and elsewhere. Then go to people who influenced that writer, or those who were related to him, and your world builds together in an organic way that is really marvelous. Whereas the way these things are taught normally in college and school is a sampler of what this one wrote and that one wrote and you’re asked to be more interested in the date of the publication of Keat’s sonnets than in what’s in them.”
I think many of us have deployed this graph in our own lives. I watch movies this way - watch more movies made by a director I like. Then watch movies by the people this director likes. Its a wonderful exploration.
I wish there was a version of IMDB that allowed this meta exploration of movies - i.e. exploring the influence-graph for movies (or any art as a matter of fact).
There is a wonderful documentary called Connections [1] that explores this in the world of science, technology and engineering -- it traces the sequence of inventions and inventors that had influenced each other. I strongly recommend viewing it. You may find it very inspiring!
> I think many of us have deployed this graph in our own lives. I watch movies this way - watch more movies made by a director I like. Then watch movies by the people this director likes. Its a wonderful exploration.
I use https://www.metal-archives.com in this manner. The number of dimensions on which you can find connections and similarities makes finding new music a joy. A version of IMDB based upon the ideas in MA is what you seek.
This resonated really well with me. I know people ask you to try and do the opposite (which I guess won't hurt from time to time), but I also think it's really awarding to do exploration this way. I think it may apply better to arts and culture than it does to science and history.
Not sure if it's exactly what you're looking for, but I'm really happy with Taste.io for browsing personal movie recommendations. I think you should give it a try.
last.fm used to be amazing for making these leaps to new artists based on library overlap.
Spotify acquired them, and the new UI/UX makes it much harder to find musical "neighbors" and see what they're listening to, but I'll still check out what my neighbors are listening to once in a while if I'm looking for something new. I find it to be 10x better than Spotify's discover weekly playlists.
Not sure why nobody has done the same for movies yet - track and rate movies, find your "film neighbors", check stuff out based on what directors they have on heavy rotation.
I think you could approximate this for movies using a social graph - I had a hobby project when I got back into programming a few years ago which attempted to generate recommendations based on the director's and actors' "creator" social graphs. It worked surprisingly well for such a hack.
Sounds interesting. How would one build it for 'influence'? E.g. I would imagine it to be vast and utterly fascinating to map the influence graph of Tarantino :)
I am no expert, but extracting data related to the word influence from IMDB for Tarantino (or any actor/director) is quite doable. Even by employing rudimentary NLP techniques using NLTK and Freebase/wordnet APIs I can gather all Tarantino related documents in which the word influence(or its many synonyms) have appeared. Then I can look for proper nouns in the vicinity of the word 'influence' which will give me a list of all people who have influenced Tarantino.
Doing the next level analysis is hard, finding the degree of influence, building a timeline graph of how Tarantino was influenced over a period of time etc.
I find the topic of extracting such graphs quite fascinating. I was thinking of doing the something similar for Prof.Snape in the Harry Potter series.
Yeah I've done this for almost a decade now---read everything by an author I connect with then move on based on that experience---and I can't recommend the habit enough! It was a bit problematic in grad school since I'd spend all my time on one person at the expense of much else I had to read, but long term it was absolutely the better move.
Why is this practice so effective? I think it's partly because when we read we basically let another person directly poke at our mind for a while. And when you have a rich and subtle writer who really gets in there, over time you build up a whole different perspective. And when the writers you obsess over are all connected in some way, you can assume the same "perspective" (the same basic assumptions about what is significant, what is not) and naturally deepen your understanding in one area or another in a fairly unified way.
An additional tip is to actually start building a graph to connect the ideas together which you can then use to summarise an authors work or an entire field of study.
Routine is simultaneously marvelous at producing results and a prison of one's own making. I'm into archery and at a certain point I was shooting everyday. My groups got tighter. Then, at a certain point a good shot lost it's wonder and became expected. I didn't feel anything except disappointment when I made a less than perfect shot. I then stopped and better understood why those that are better are better. There are no heroes, no calls to adventure or treacherous journeys - just a dull ceaseless repetition. Like a hammer driving a nail.
« You’ll win a championship in Boston.
You’ll win another in Miami.
The personalities on those two teams will be different, but both teams will have the same thing in common: habits.
Boring old habits.
I know you want me to let you in on some big secret to success in the NBA.
The secret is there is no secret.
It’s just boring old habits.
In every locker room you’ll ever be in, everybody will say all the right things. Everybody says they’re willing to sacrifice whatever it takes to win a title. But this game isn’t a movie. It’s not about being the man in the fourth quarter. It’s not about talk. It’s getting in your work every single day, when nobody is watching.
Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce, LeBron James, Dwyane Wade. The men who you are going to win championships with are all going to be very different people. What makes them champions is the boring old habits that nobody sees. They compete to see who can be the first to get to the gym and the last to leave.
Your peers who think this is a cliché, or who think this doesn’t apply to them because they have God-given talent, will play their whole careers without winning an NBA title. »
No no. The routine is a space for unstructured improvement. Nor is there such a thing as repetition in learning. Every attempt at gaining skill is at least slightly different and is made under at least slightly different conditions. Progress being the slow accumulation of mastery over many details. If it feels dull then either a plateau has been reached or the ambition itself is an unworthy one and should be abandoned in favour of something else.
I don't believe this is true, or at least it depends on the kind of thing you're learning.
For example, when you want to become an outstanding guitar player, you'll need to go through many, many hours of dull and definitely boring training in order to perfect your playing technique. Without that training, you can become a good or a creative guitar player, but not a genuine master.
I presume that it's similar with many other instruments and related skills like archery, gymnastics, dancing, or skateboarding.
Counterpoint: I can’t imagine a guitar player, dancer, skater, basketball player, mechanic, or whatever, actually achieving greatness without having spent a significant amount of time ‘just playing around’.
I’ve heard plenty of guitarists and classical músicians who were extremely technically proficient with their instrument, but only other musicians would appreciate them.
If Joseph Campbell had not pursued this relatively ‘unstructured’ way of honing his craft, and stayed within the regimen of traditional academia, I highly doubt this thread would exist because Joseph would have only been known within the small academic circles. He transcended.
When you have put in the monotonous work of practice, playtime only gets more exciting.
Active engagement in what you are doing is a sign of arousal and dopamine release, which are critical in learning. If you're "going through the motions" or you're bored you are going to learn very slowly, if at all.
If you want to master the guitar, instead of boring repetition, you need to find ways to train your technique that engage you and are rewarding. People quote the 10,000 hours figure, as if you just needed to put in the time, but in reality those are 10,000 engaged, focused hours where you push yourself. It doesn't matter how many disengaged hours you put in, you'll plateau at "decent" and never become truly excellent.
Maybe that's your opinion and the perceived opinion right now, but your claims directly contradict what many successful teachers state. (But see below, maybe we don't disagree.)
In Germany, for instance, there used to be these little "ETP books" for guitar players called Tägliche Übungen zur Entwicklung einer Technischen Perfektion that involved lengthy and absolutely monotonous finger exercises that really had nothing to do with music. Everybody praised them and everybody said that these and similar exercises are essential to become a world-class player. There is hardly any way around it, they said, you cannot become that good by merely playing music. I still have no reason to believe they were wrong. It would be surprising if arguably harder instruments like classical piano didn't involve similar monotonous exercises and the same couldn't be said about ballet, world-class athletes, etc. A friend of mine is a professional jazz saxophonist and while he was studying saxophone he had to practice scales up and down for hours and hours every day.
You've got to put some serious effort into it, you agree with that, right? So maybe we agree in the end, because you use vague word "engage". Of course, nobody denies that you need to find a way to motivate you to get through these exercises or to stay "engaged". I didn't deny that. All I'm saying is that a lot of "mere repetition" is needed in many disciplines in order to reach a really high level while staying motivated.
Extensive practice is essential to getting one's self to the point where creativity can take over, where the muscle memory can 'meld' with one's expression of whatever emotions are being communicated via music.
There are certainly counter-examples, musicians who compose from day one, and don't really focus on melodic theory, running scales, and all of the other pieces of the neuro-muscular puzzle that go into making one technically 'good', and some of them do well.
There are those that allot all of their time to becoming technically proficient, pianists who spend endless hours working up Rachmaninoff's 2nd concerto, only to get so lost in the technicality of their discipline that they become cold and mechanistic, but, again, are so proficient that they find work their entire lives.
But true greatness needs both. You have to, as one artist put it, be able to 'forget' all that you have learned and compose and/or perform from the heart, letting all of that training do what it will naturally do, resulting in a transcendent expression of artistic grace.
That's what makes Campbell so accessible. He speaks and writes as though he is talking about the weather to his best friend, but his erudition provides such a solid foundation in the topics he expounds upon that one hardly notices that one is being educated.
I once met a PhD student in mathematics who was working on the mathematics of string theory. We went out for a beer in one of the standard, alternative places for going out in the 90s in Berlin. He was unusually happy about it and told me why. For the past four years he was never going out, got up at seven o'clock in the morning, drank only moderate amounts of tea (never coffee), and studied and worked on problems until the evening. He had only a short lunch break, he told me, and avoided anything that would make him loose focus. He lived together with a flat mate who did essentially the same thing.
Needless to say he was insanely smart, maybe the smartest person I've ever met.
Anyway, he was overdoing the daily routine, he confessed to me, and missing out on too many other things. I wonder whether he stayed in mathematics, but don't remember the name.
Moral of the story (I suppose): If you want to achieve great things early in your life, routine and a distraction free environment is important. But keep it in a sane equilibrium with social life and find people to occasionally talk about other topics than your work.
There is a case that can be made in which we should spend more time learning new skills, improving on those new skills, than mastering the same skills over and over.
Presumably, he must have had a good public library nearby in order to find enough reading material for that time frame, and also to be able to afford those books without a job.
Learning is a luxury, and reading is key to it. That said, if you think about fields like mathematics or even programming, reading about them will hardly lead you to mastery: you need to sit down and get your fingers dirty, trying to do it yourself. Have you ever had this happening to you: when a teacher shows you a new method to compute something, it all sounds perfectly clear and simple, until you sit down and try it out on an unseen problem yourself?
If you're on Hacker News (which you are) chances are you love reading to -- after all, it's a site that provides links to articles (sometimes videos). But increasingly, I realize that my time is better spent building something myself. Being a "hacker" (in the original sense of the word) implies doing something actively, while (to me) reading is a rather passive occupation. Enjoyable, yes, but at the end of the year, I'd like to look back and say "this year, I made X and Y" rather than "I read about X and Y".
Has anyone actually read Campell's classic "The hero with a thousand faces"? I did when in college, but to be honest, I found it too dry to make it to the end. But I still have my copy of the book. Maybe I should get it out of the shelf and give it another try.
Not for 9 hours of the day though. There's code that wants to bet written...
> I'd like to look back and say "this year, I made X and Y" rather than "I read about X and Y".
A false dichotomy IMO. What I want is "this year, I understood X and Y", and understanding a thing involves both making and reading (most of the time).
It's not a false dichotomy, it's an opinion - mine. An opinion about personal satisfaction. To me, reading and learning is great. I do it for a living, basically. But building something is much, much more satisfying for me. Not because I might have to understand something new along the way - that's an added bonus. But even building something new for which I didn't need to acquire new knowledge will give me a better feeling. It's about "creativity" in the original sense of the word. Perhaps it's because creating something is harder than reading something that makes it that way, although even reading something very difficult and finally getting it still can't beat "making".
I find that a combination of reading and doing does the job. Do, until you hit a wall, or you realize that there must be some way to do things better. Then read, and try to see if somebody else has found that way. Obviously, sometimes also just read because it sounds like you would like to know what the book says. Rinse and repeat.
By the way, books are easy to get for free these days on the net. I remember 20 years ago when I would spend crazy money on books ... No more! Also, these days I read more papers than books. Which are also easy to get for free.
> Have you ever had this happening to you: when a teacher shows you a new method to compute something, it all sounds perfectly clear and simple, until you sit down and try it out on an unseen problem yourself?
Yes! I think it's the raison d'etre for sites like StackOverflow.
Somebody once told me that since make was created, nobody has written their own makefile. All makefiles are decendants of the ur-makefile.
> But increasingly, I realize that my time is better spent building something myself.
> Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.
-- Albert Einstein
I think you can also read in various ways. You can just absorb it uncritically, or try to find flaws or supportive anecdotes for it, or just freely associate about the thoughts and emotions it makes one aware of etc. But he and you do have a point, there's got to be a balance. Second-hand expertise is valuable, we can't all find out which berries are toxic individually. But with many things that aren't quite so critical, learning through mistakes can be quite empowering, and sometimes you find out it's not a mistake, but something new and good outside of the usual rut.
I agree that practice is equally important, but you certainly need to have an understanding of the material and what is going on prior to implementing something or working through a proof.
Thank you very much for this. It is serendipitous. I wish I had the fortune of simply talking to or being in the presence of a man of such calibre. Such men are indeed rare and often their compassion and humble wisdom is easily drowned out by the noisy loud-mouthed advice we often get from so many self-help gurus.
I've been kicked to curb this year with failures, with
skullduggerous cheats, with outright rejections and with rejections of no communication. A growing sense of a dark godawful dread has made residence in the core of my belly. I walk around with it everywhere I go. I feel more than ever that I have now truly and completely doomed my family's future. I should have instead remained, I now think, grinding at that safe but soulless day job before I even thought of cultivating that perilous and impossible journey - that falsely advertised dream to go out alone in consulting and into the business of enterprise bloody software. (A place where arse-kissing and networking matters more than your ability to produce software that is actually useful to clients!)
I was hanging by that last thread of once abundant hope. This dastardly year is coming to its ignoble end, and I continue to stare solemnly at the targets I set for myself in January this year. It's deplorable.
Campbell says "the real end is the journey" and that I need to possess the fire to drive me into battle fearlessly.
I have to summon that courage. But I have to summon the courage to be honest first!
Hang in there, buddy. It sounds like you've got a lot of actually useful skills and I think you and your family will do fine in the long run. Even if you end up going back to a "safe but soulless" job.
I need to have this on DVD. I may have "heard" of the man in the sense of having heard the name or having seen the face somewhere, but I had no clue what I was missing out on; thank you!
He's absolutely right, the only way to "save the world" is to be alive.. whatever additional possible useful interactions there may be, they have to come from and be in harmony with that. Most of the time, being open and constructive leads to things you couldn't have possibly foreseen or planned to achieve. Come to think of it, for the first time ever I don't feel 100% silly for sometimes feeling like "the universe" kind of "rewards" paying attention to it for the sake of the relation between it and oneself, not the relation of oneself and others. But it's not about this deity or that myth, at the very least, there indeed is consciousness everywhere we can look, so maybe there is even more where we can't look yet or ever. There sure is a lot we drown out with our own clanging of pots and pans, individually and socially... but like a plant turns to the sun, maybe the sun turns to plants, in a way. Meister Eckhart went so far as to say that you can basically "force" God to come down to you, into you, by making yourself completely empty, because he simply cannot resist humbleness. I always found that kind of a sweet and wise way to look at what others would describe very draconically, in the language of slaves rather than lovers, but more importantly it's really profoundly true. As a metaphor, as poetry.
> "You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet."
Whereas the way these things are taught normally in college and school is a sampler of what this one wrote and that one wrote and you’re asked to be more interested in the date of the publication of Keat’s sonnets than in what’s in them.
So instead of reading this sample of Campbell's work of on Hacker News, I should be following the advice contained in it? But then the advice is to favor a single body of work over such samples! So had I followed his very advice too strictly, I would never have had the chance to read it in the first place!
Unless, of course, if I already knew about Campbell's work because he was one of the authors I chose to read thoroughly.
That all said, Edmund Burke did say: "Between two evils, choose neither; between two goods,choose both". So maybe: spend some time reading Hacker News, and most of it ignoring the web and other shallow sources entirely.
Where did he get money for food and shelter? I would have loved to live like this in my 20's, and I'm sure I would have gotten a lot done.. sadly I was employed, and when you take away 8 hours of work and 1 hours of commute time, you're left with zero hours per day, rather than 9. It was a constant source of frustration to me that I had to spend my useful hours following someone's instructions, instead of learning about the world, forging personal connections, and building beautiful things- which is what I really wanted to do.
He only payed $20 a year for his shack http://edricketts.stanford.edu/Campbell_Ricketts3.pdf and also went up to expeditions in Alaska during this time which only cost 25 cents per day. I guess you could do this now, find a rural trailer somewhere and live as cheap as possible to read all day but not with school debt/insurance obligations.
Any article like this that doesn't discuss how people pay for things is bunk. Yes the method of self actualization great people use is interesting but it's not applicable unless you know how they achieved their basic needs. While Thoreau was living in the woods his mother brought him food. Churchill had the time to write because he was born into a wealthy aristocratic family. These details matter.
I kept saying to myself as I read the article: this was the Great Depression, when people starved because they didn't have jobs. If all you had to do was go live in the woods and read books, the Depression wouldn't have been a problem. There's the practical issue of needing food and shelter, which didn't fall from heaven, and in his case, buying enough books to read for 16,000 hours.
I wish I could read for even one 3 hour period each day. When I sit down with a book or my ereader and start reading, I start feeling sleepy after ten or fifteen minutes. I'll also find that I'm scanning the sentences, but not really absorbing, so I turn back a few pages and start reading again.
I fare much better if I take notes as I read. I'm starting to think that maybe writing a chapter synopsis after every chapter I read would fix my problem. Plus then I could put them online and maybe get some feedback from other readers.
I'm halfway through Cryptonomicon right now and find myself reading Steve Russillo's page on the book to remind myself what just happened. My brain might not be good enough for passive reading anymore.
Edit: BTW, Russillo's page is a warm reminder to me of what first made me fall in love with the web. Check it out: http://russillosm.com/index.html
Try 15-30mins on an exercise bike, or/and at intervals in the reading get up to do push ups or something. Same problem I end up mind wandering while trying to read and having to flip back pages but exercise solved that. Taking active notes helps too, I'll have emacs open and write down anything I'll likely use again, index it in org-mode then year(s) later I'll need to look up something like generating all n-tuples and have an index.org file that spans the three books I read on the subject.
I'm wondering what Campbell did achieve by doing all that reading and what made it the most important period of his scholarship and study.
The 10,000 hour figure (which is just an arbitrary number, not an absolute rule according to Anders Ericsson[1] whose research Malcolm Gladwell referred to) implies you can reach mastery with a lot of practice, given you do the right kind of practice.
Mastery is the ability to perform a skill, it's not about knowledge. You need knowledge to perform, but knowledge without being able to perform does not imply mastery.
If you are wondering what he achieved by all that reading, read his books or watch the man speak. I’d say at minimum he achieved a much greater contentment than most people I’ve ever encountered have, and at most has positively impacted literally millions of people’s lives.
Did he achieve that by reading for 9 hours a day or in spite of reading for 9 hours a day though? I'm aware of no research showing that reading that much would make you a happier person or more influential.
Love this. It´s amazing how he on his own maneuvered from a life with no order to creating his own order and sticking to it. I would wonder how he achieved that. I guess it was out of necessity.
For anyone that is planning to become more organized and get more done during the day, I´d recommend https://zenkit.com
Interesting choice for author of choice. I used to enjoy reading Tim Ferris' blog, read the four hour work week when it first came out, but over time I couldn't help feeling like he just wants to sell me something and it's given me a bitter outlook towards him. Granted he produces a lot of content at no cost, but his marketing tactics are very in your face.
Well, yeah that´s true in some way. I really loved the Tools of Titans though and I´m still listening to his podcast on a daily basis. Just so many great insights.
I also enjoy Tim Ferris, but other great alternatives are Mr Money Mustache and Cal Newport. Their particularly good as they concentrate on maximising money/happiness and time/concentration.
My uncle (a scholar in his own right) knew Joseph Campbell's family. They had a cattle farm (I'll decline to mention where), and mentioned their "Uncle Joe" had a room he came to stay in now and then. The family was completely unaware of the profundity of "Uncle Joe" other than that he was a professor and had written a few books.
1. Save up money as a student. 2. Hire an apartment in New York. 3. Don't take a job, just sit and play computer games all day. 4. Go out for dinners. 5. Get invited to cocktail parties ... Live like that for five years using the money you earned as a student. 6. Make a computer game. 7. Profit! ... Sounds like a plan!
I was sarcastic. Most people end school with a fat loan. And who is gonna afford an apartment in New York !? Then eating out and, going to cocktail parties - makes it even insulting!
This is really nice for a crunch time. It doesn't have to be 5 years I believe. Even 3 months is possible, and this can be discussed with the boss as well, if you have a job.
I think it's for a few reasons. Many of us are interested in biographies and what made famous people the way they are. Others would like to master programming, computer science, or some other field and look for how to achieve it. Still others are trying to figure out how to quit HN without losing any of the benefits. Finally, some users fall into all of these groups. :)
Joseph Campbell is a humanitarian who researches myths, also doing quite some interpretation and trying to relate the meaning to the human life at large. It has nothing to do with software development, but (apparently) many of us find his ideas applicable, perhaps especially on the startuppy side of things, where courage etc is required.
I think many of us have deployed this graph in our own lives. I watch movies this way - watch more movies made by a director I like. Then watch movies by the people this director likes. Its a wonderful exploration.
I wish there was a version of IMDB that allowed this meta exploration of movies - i.e. exploring the influence-graph for movies (or any art as a matter of fact).
There is a wonderful documentary called Connections [1] that explores this in the world of science, technology and engineering -- it traces the sequence of inventions and inventors that had influenced each other. I strongly recommend viewing it. You may find it very inspiring!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series)