A counter point, or maybe complementary point (b/c I agree w/ the quote). I killed myself trying to do more than 8 pull ups in a gym for ages; at times I'd be going to the gym 4x a week doing full body workouts, always working hard, always sweating, always gassed at the end; consistently doing pull ups to exhaustion on multiple sets. Yet 8 was a kind of ceiling. At some point I stopped working out, but got a pull up bar at home. I stuck it in my office doorway. I would do occasional pull ups -- never more than 2-3, usually only 1. But just casually a few times a day, nearly every day, when I walked by it. It was never hard, it never felt like work. It became more of a way to briefly relax, an alternative to the cigarettes I used to smoke. Well after a year of that when someone challenged me to a friendly pull up competition, I was shocked that I could do 15 in a row easily, I still had more in the tank even. That always stuck with me because it taught me that while hard work is important, consistency is _more_ important. Working "hard" as such is often not only not required, but perhaps often not actually the thing that will help.

For anyone not familiar with this methodology, it's called 'greasing the groove.'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmOEgK5o2yg

Thanks for sharing, cool to see it has a name. I definitely agree it is pretty miraculous how it works; to just never shoot for more than 5 and then "suddenly" one day I'm doing 15+ like it was nothing.

Actually, what you experienced is a well known technique to increase the number of pullups, the idea is that your previous training only allowed to get 8 reps, which is a low volume for a muscle, so you are not working optimally, by doing one by one, you can focus on giving maximum power at each rep, so if you want to increase even more, do series of 2-3 with explosiveness, pause 30-60 sec, start again, and try to reach a volume of 20 or something. It should feel easy enough to be able to do the 2-3 reps at maximum strength. If you are already at >15 you can increase the number of base reps, but the key is that each one should be kinda easy.

There is a related concept called grease the goove if you want to Google.

Now, regarding learning, while some parallels between muscle building and studying exists, I find it a stretch. Yes consistency is often key, but now suppose that instead of focusing for 1h every day on difficult problems I only do 5min, certainly it will work, I'll learn stuff, but not as much as someone doing consistently 1h study.

Recovery time is important in study and muscle though

Did you do them in full range of motion (starting from dead hang) and slow eccentric motion on the way down? Not all workouts which are equally exhausting are optimal for strength.

Were you completely resting between sessions? How’s your sleep?

I did do the full range of motion and started from dead hang; sometimes I did them slowly, but often just at a regular speed, though definitely never fast. I did not usually do multiple sets so usually was fully rested between sessions. IIRC was sleeping fairly standard at the time ~8 hrs. I don't carry a lot of muscle / strength naturally which may or may not be relevant; e.g. my untrained grip strength is very low, only slightly higher than my wife's.

A recent study that I read showed muscle strength is best developed by not performing the maximum number of <lift/exercise/whatever>. It showed that stopping somewhere around 90%-ish was optimal, beyond was suboptimal for strength.

For muscle size, going to maximum is optimal, but it's less optimal for strength.

Their example was: instead of doing 8 reps of bench press where you can barely get the final rep, do maybe 1 fewer. They were more precise in the point to stop, but it's not something avg person can detect compared to their analysis, so this is just ballpark-ish.

That’s a reasonably well known strategy to pull-ups. Start at one regularly and slowly build up once it becomes easy enough to do so.

I think learning is more like growing plants, you don’t need to get everything perfect, or even one thing perfect, but a set of things to good enough.

There are a lot of things that interfere with learning so the presence of those will inhibit learning regardless of effort.

This is called "greasing the groove" by some OG fitness gurus. It's the only way to break plateaus I know of.

how much weight did you loose during that time?

you either lost significant weight, or added significant muscle .. no other way .. the end result here is more significant than how you reached it

for pull up, loosing weight is usually far more important than adding muscle, so i am leaning toward you lost weight

Oh, I'm pretty lightweight / lanky (hover around 165lb, BMI around 20-21). I didn't see any significant weight change at the time, perhaps I transferred muscle if that's a thing since I was doing less general muscle building at that point - just pushups and the casual pull up routine, running (sprints) to blow off steam.

I can see weight loss being a significant factor for heavier people, esp. those that are heavy and strong. I am definitely neither (typical things like bench press / squat etc I used pretty light weights).

Eh, you can also improve your lifts by just not being exhausted every time you go to the gym. With lifting, more is not always more. Fatigue and failure to properly recover is a fairly common reason for plateaus, especially with full body pulls.

This is complete bs.

I've learned 2 languages to fluency by mostly watching movies. I've learned the linux cli by setting up a minecraft server for my friends in high school. I've learned programming by making IRC (and later Discord) bots for communities I was part of.

All of this was fun, and it worked better than staring at a textbook and hoping that my "effort" pays off.

I think there is some conflation in this thread between "learning" and "practice" which are fairly different things.

As an ADHD person, nothing shovels the dopamine into my neural receptors quite like going from zero to "knows enough to be dangerous" in a new hobby or field of knowledge. That's the fun part. But climbing the experience curve much further than that requires some amount of _deliberate_ study and beyond that deliberate _practice_ and experience in order to become something like an expert.

Chasing questions down rabbit-holes is fast and entertaining but only takes you so far. Deliberate practice (studying) is mostly less fun, even when that thing is your life-long passion and/or career. But necessary if you want to be highly skilled in that area.

I realized this about myself years ago, but I don't (think I) have ADHD.

I have always been able to learn faster than most people. No clear reason why. It appears I was just born this way.

But if the Pareto Principle holds, and I'm learning twice as fast as average (estimating for the sake of easy math), that means when I'm a beginner learning the 20% of the skill that gives me 80% of the results, I'm learning like 32 times faster than somebody learning at an average rate who's in the 80% of work that produces 20% of the results, even though they're better at what they're doing. I look like an absolute rockstar out of the gate.

Problem is that my ego has been tied up in that since I was little. Early life is all about learning high-leverage things as quickly as possible, and since that's also when you're forming your sense of who you are, it's a sticky trap. I have really struggled to build the patience for the rest of the grind, where even if I'm still learning twice as fast as average at the harder level, any average newbie is learning/improving twice as fast as me.

The end result is that I'm moderately proficient in dozens and dozens of things, but I'm not an expert at anything except obtaining moderate proficiency.

> nothing shovels the dopamine into my neural receptors quite like going from zero to "knows enough to be dangerous" in a new hobby or field of knowledge.

Man, this describes me to a T. I love that feeling of the "first 75%" (or whatever percentage it is). Then I tend to lose interest in the long tail.

>Then I tend to lose interest in the long tail.

What was your initial goal? Or maybe you didn't have a conscious one to begin with and had an attraction or something like a curiosity for the subject. Once you covered enough ground you satisfied your curiosity and your interest faded. I think this is a very natural outcome and depending how you approach your learning subject you can achieve different outcomes. Try learning in a class setting where there is a set curriculum and where you could approach your learning in regular and consistent chunks. It may be boring at first but it could get much deeper into the topic.

>I've learned the linux cli by setting up a minecraft server for my friends in high school.

What you've learned was "enough to set up a minecraft server", but definitely not as much as "learned the linux cli", and that's without even touching the obvious question "what does someone mean when they claim they learned the linux cli"?

I fell for this trap too: I watched a tutorial by Nick Chapsas, then made my own ASP.NET Core Web API for a personal project, and thought "Wow I know ASP.NET MVC time to get a junior developer job".

After a few resumes (there's .NET demand in my area) I landed an interview with a startup. The interviewer (who happened to be the cofounder and has 15 years of .NET experience, some working directly in Microsoft) started hitting me with questions like "what kind of objects can get constructed in a using block?", "what's the difference between readonly and const", "how can we identify that a payload comes from a mobile client if the endpoints are shared?", etc.

That's when I realized that I knew enough to make me go "woohoo I have a .NET Core web API" but not enough to get a junior job. In fact, he was honest enough to tell me "you're barely entry level, and this wasn't even the technical interview it's just the screener".

Off-topic but related with the event: I obviously didn't get the job, but he left me with an advice I'm actioning: "Stop jumping around and stick to one language, I don't know if that's gonna be C#, TypeScript, Go, Python, whatever. Deep dive something well. You're only hurting yourself in the long run".

Watching tutorials is exactly what I would consider "not fun", and I'm not surprised it wasn't successful. On my side I had no problem getting into a software engineering career, so my point stands.

Agreed, consistency is more important than doing a marathon session. Anyone who has learned a musical instrument can tell you this, far better to practice 10 minutes a day everyday than 1 hour once a week.

Trying to provide a perspective..

Let’s say because of your genetics, you can enjoy playing basketball, and you do that, and you have fun doing that, you get better at it… but that’s that, it won’t be that easy for you with other subjects or even get to next level at basketball. Then you need to submit to discipline… or are you willing to wait for things to become fun?

> pays off

That’s why it is important to chase things you are curious about, then you don’t need to wait for some return…

Yeah, but Andrej is talking about learning much harder things in much more depth. He's a world class research scientist and engineer.

Practically everyone on planet earth learns a language as a child. Learning how to use some commands in linux and and programming a bot are literally child's play. I learned to play soccer the way you speak of - i'm... ok at it. Messi did a different thing.

That wont work with real science. Math requires the process which he describes. As do algorithms.

In my experience it’s same with gym, lifting weights slightly too difficult.

The least productive method that Ive used with very little results is jumping to problems almost impossible for me. It did absolutely nothing.

He's also been struck with 10-100s of millions of dollars, an insanely successful career, and a good nature.

He was born in '86 in Slovakia, so he probably doesn't remember much of the late communist and early post-communist times.

Doesn't make it less true though.