[HN Gopher] Schlep Blindness (2012)
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Schlep Blindness (2012)
Author : enigmatic02
Score : 48 points
Date : 2022-02-03 23:06 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.paulgraham.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.paulgraham.com)
| [deleted]
| MikeDelta wrote:
| According to the article, ignorance (of the complexity) is one of
| the best conditions when starting large projects.
|
| I have heard anecdotes from people finishing large projects that
| they would have never started had they known how hard it would
| have been.
|
| Not everyone can turn their ignorant mind on and will always
| think about all sorts of problems at the start of a project, but
| perhaps it helps to not get intimidated or blocked by them and
| get into a mindset that "we'll cross that bridge when we get
| there".
| fristechill wrote:
| Start with ignorance, but then make the schleps as conscious and
| explicit as possible?
|
| People literally assemble jigsaws and exercise on treadmills in
| their spare time. Repeatedly! So it seems that even the most
| apparently mechanical tasks can be made interesting with some
| creative engagement.
|
| _In every job that must be done, there is an element of fun. You
| find the fun and - SNAP - the job 's a game_ -- Mary Poppins
| nicbou wrote:
| There is an army of people with weird hobbies that keep this
| world running. The people maintaining OpenSSL, the Open Street
| Map contributors, the people who maintain lists of countries
| and time zones, and so on.
|
| Blessed be their souls.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| I think that the pendulum has swung too far the other way:
| Startups that get funded are disproportionately trying to solve
| some annoyance. There's no room for whimsy or lovable products
| (like Apple and Blackberry were early on). There's no room for
| disrupting an entrenched player with an agile team. No. Solve a
| pain point or no funding for you.
| hprotagonist wrote:
| embrace the grind: https://jacobian.org/2021/apr/7/embrace-the-
| grind/
| bitcharmer wrote:
| Wow, this was a great and somewhat eye-opening read. Thanks for
| sharing!
| lioeters wrote:
| > People said I did the impossible, but that's wrong: I merely
| did something so boring that nobody else had been willing to do
| it.
| mikesurowiec wrote:
| I really enjoyed this, thanks for sharing. My takeaway is don't
| be afraid to put an unreasonable amount of time towards
| something.
|
| It reminds me of PG's essay "The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius",
| which is like a hack on this idea. If you're obsessively
| interested in something, you're bound to spend an unreasonable
| amount of time on it.
|
| Taking it even farther, there's a Revisionist History episode
| on the song Hallelujah, who's original version took over two
| years to write. The two components to "experimental" genius:
| time and iteration.
|
| http://www.paulgraham.com/genius.html
| https://www.pushkin.fm/episode/hallelujah/
| stevespang wrote:
| Simon_O_Rourke wrote:
| So, to turn it around, what in the current day is schlep work par
| excellence? A few things stick out like very sore thumbs.
|
| * AWS permissions management, and IAM in general.
|
| * Data cleansing and data governance at scale.
|
| * IoT costing and specifications.
|
| * Rural broadband, in all its forms and associated problems. This
| one is especially close to the heart for me in Wisconsin.
|
| * Negotiate best offers on service renewal.
| bcgraham wrote:
| As far as I can tell, reading documentation - not in snippets,
| to remember the details of something you know how to do, but
| top-to-bottom, to learn capabilities you didn't know existed.
| martinrlzd wrote:
| This question is so important: > "what problem do I wish someone
| else would solve for me?"
|
| Otherwise you might fall in the trap thinking just because a
| problem is hard, it's worth starting a startup to solve it.
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