
Write?  Write.  Sleep?  Sleep.  Read?  Read.  Don't fight it. -  lucumo
http://sivers.org/dont-fight-it
======
daveungerer
This reminded me of a great quote of John Carmack, which says the opposite:

 _Putting creativity on a pedestal can also be an excuse for laziness.  There
is a lot of cultural belief that creativity comes from inspiration, and can't
be rushed.  Not true.  Inspiration is just your subconscious putting things
together, and that can be made into an active process with a little
introspection. 

Focused, hard work is the real key to success.  Keep your eyes on the goal, and
just keep taking the next step towards completing it.  If you aren't sure which
way to do something, do it both ways and see which works better._ 

~~~
d3d2
I don't consider Carmack to be an expert on creativity, of all things. 

His game ideas can be summarized thusly: DOOM. 

The best id game, the original Quake, had both John Romero and American McGee
as designers, among others, AND Trent Reznor on sound effects. 

Without them, id did... DOOM 3. 

What Carmack is really referring to is the gruntwork of things like writing
multiple rendering pipelines to support the nightmare hodgepodge of consumer
3D hardware, trying out WELL-KNOWN rendering techniques (invented for film) in
games as hardware improves, and so forth, which sometimes is just tedium and
sometimes requires hackery like fast stencil shadows/sqrt/bit-twiddling
tricks.  Trying a bunch of methods to see what works on limited hardware is a
process of discovery. 

You cannot brute-force creative ideas in general in that manner. 

~~~
daveungerer
He is an expert on creative problem solving.  I doubt you are in a position to
dispute that.  And how long do you think consumer 3D hardware has been
mainstream?  Carmack's career spans a lot longer than that. 

I wonder if you would accuse an artist who spends lots of time exploring dead
end ideas of doing grunt work?  Would you dismiss an artist as adapting WELL-
KNOWN ideas if they allowed you to view someone else's work in a brand new,
unexpected light? 

------
joshu
No. 

You have to work, every day, whether you are too tired or not.  You must push
yourself, every day, and have discipline. 

Extraordinary results require extraordinary efforts. 

~~~
ellyagg
Yeah, for some people, the advice in this article will lead to disaster.  For
example, I would rather be reading than doing, all the time.  Reading is pure
candy for me, instant gratification.  To become (reasonably) successful, I had
to stop reading. 

~~~
mattm
I recall a study where researchers wanted to see how "natural" work was.  They
took a class of young children and told them they can do whatever they want. 
So the first day they all ran around outside and had fun.  I think by the third
day they were all begging to have class again and have some work to do. 

~~~
ellyagg
That reminds me of a portion of a letter Ben Franklin wrote to Peter
Collinson:

"The proneness of human Nature to a life of ease, of freedom from care and
labour appear strongly in the heretofore little success that has attended
every attempt to civilize our American Indians. . . .  They visit us frequently
and see the advantages that Arts, Science and compact Society procure us; they
are not deficient in natural understanding and yet they have never strewn any
inclination to change their manner of life for ours, or to learn any of our
Arts. 

"When an Indian child has been brought up among us, taught our language and
habituated to our customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and makes one
Indian Ramble with them, there is no perswading him ever to return.  And that
this is not natural [only to Indians], but as men, is plain from this, that
when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the
Indians, and lived awhile among them, tho' ransomed by their Friends, and
treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the
English, yet within a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of
Life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the
first good Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is
no reclaiming them." 

~~~
coffeemug
Is there a published collection of letters you're quoting from?  I'd love to
read it - what book is this from? 

~~~
ellyagg
I originally read a reference to it in Huck's Raft: A History of American
Childhood.  Actually, looking it up again made me interested to know if a
collection of Franklin's letters has been released in a mainstream volume,
too.  His Autobiography was awesome. 

------
edw519
This isn't good advice.  It's self-gratification. 

You have work to do.  Do it. 

Sitting at the terminal, but not sure what to type?  Turn off the terminal,
grab your source listings, scratch pad, and red and black pens and go to the
other room.  Or the library, Or starbucks.  Work the problem that way and soon
enough, you'll be dying to get back to the terminal. 

Sitting on the sofa and analyzing that function with pencil and paper until
you've worked yourself into a logic freeze?  Get up and turn on your computer
and code the simplest case.  Before you're done, you'll find some
enlightenment. 

Have trouble doing either?  Review old code, examine apps written by others,
refactor something (you always have _something_ to refactor, right?). 

But do what you feel like?  No. 

~~~
timr
_"You have work to do.  Do it."_ 

Oh, come on.  Says who?  You only "have work to do" to the extent that you need
to survive.  Beyond that, it's optional.  It's equally bad advice to suggest
people should force themselves to work when they don't want to, simply because
they "have work to do." 

The only insightful comment you can make here is that one-size advice doesn't
fit everyone.  Some people are workaholics, and should try harder to take
breaks.  Others are complete daydreamers, and maybe need more discipline. 
There's no one right recipe.  The world is not binary. 

------
khafra
A Zen student once asked his teacher, "Master, what is enlightenment?" 

The master replied, "When hungry, eat.  When tired, sleep." 

~~~
bitwize
Counterpoint:

"Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.  After enlightenment, chop wood,
carry water." 

There are plenty of things you just have to _do_ if you want them to get done,
enlightened being or not. 

~~~
unalone
Countercounterpoint:

"There are two ways to wash the dishes.  You can wash the dishes so the dishes
or clean.  You can also wash the dishes to watch the dishes." 

The moral I got from your koan when I first read it is what the difference is
not in reality, but in the mind.  That _doesn't_ mean working when you don't
feel like working.  It means feel like working, or don't work. 

------
petercooper
I lived (and sorta still do live) by this advice.  It's good, if you have the
lifestyle and means to support it, _except_ for the sleep advice:

 _But if you're tired, don't fight it.  Sleep._ 

This worked out to be an absolute disaster for me (if you take it to its
logical conclusion, if you're not tired, don't go to sleep, etc).  I ended up
free wheeling around the clock, sometimes getting up at 7pm, sometimes 2am,
sometimes 11am.. it was nuts.  And that sort of sleep pattern really messes
with your head after a while. 

~~~
warp
This works fine for me, but my body has this habit of waking up when the sun
is up -- even if I've only gone to sleep a few hours ago.  That also isn't a
problem in itself, as I will fall asleep around 16:00 on those days and catch
up whatever I missed the previous night, and still be tired enough in the
evening to go to bed at a normal hour. 

It's a sort of built-in automatic circadian rhythm reset mechanism which kicks
in after just one late night coding session. 

------
snitko
I have a feeling most people here saying it's a bad advice, didn't get it in
the first place.  I think the key is that you got to give yourself a little
freedom in the short distance, but be disciplined in the long run.  For
example, I think I'm going to get some sleep now and work in the morning, not
tonight.  But I'm still going to do the job.  The only difference is: I'd be
more productive. 

It's like (a + b) is still the same thing as (b + a).  But because 'a' is the
first letter of the alphabet (for most of us) it's more natural to put it
first. 

And another short thought that I think is relevant: discipline is not about
forcing yourself to work when you don't want to, but it's about managing the
time and finding the best spots for your work to be done.  Of course, self-
employment is best for this. 

------
TrevorJ
This completely abstracts the mind from the concept of self-control, and
that's a logical fallacy.  Conscious executive decision making originates in
the mind as well.  The reason you go do something is because you made the
choice to do it.  Period.  Sure, we do things we don't 'want' to do in a narrow
sense, but in the broader sense when we choose to do an unpleasant task we
have decided, based on outside forces that this task is what we need/want to
do. 

This isn't to say that there is no merit in working with your mind and being
productive when your mind is ready, but the notion that you must not bring
willpower to bear on any task is taking things a bit too far. 

------
kwamenum86
I like the sentiment but this does not really work for us "normal" (non-self-
employed) folk.  If I sleep/work/eat/learn whenever I feel like it then
something will surely suffer. 

~~~
unalone
That's why the idea is to get your life to a place where other people don't
control you. 

~~~
username
Or work at Gap. 
[http://www.businessweek.com/careers/managementiq/archives/20...](http://www.businessweek.com/careers/managementiq/archives/2009/09/gap_to_employee.html)

