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Hello Lain. I often hear of a quote that says "practice doesn't make perfect, **perfect practice makes perfect**". That looks good on paper but I wouldn't know how to apply it in real life. Let's say I want to start learning Lisp (which I do), do I just try solving the problems that give more of a challenge? Is that enough to exploit it? I heard that when learning brings discomfort is when you're learning more, because it opposes more of a challenge to the mind.

eh? i've only heard of "practice makes perfect." i think different people know different ways of learning, but practicing on something is quite helpful for virtually everybody. i guess if i were you i'd just go through SICP and NOT go through it all the way but just take a lecture or part of it a day (with a break maybe one day a week) and do the exercises. after that, i believe i could make some small programs. i dunno. i'm not really much into programming unfortunately, so i'm just taking PY4E now. i'm a bit interested in OSDev already, so i found nand2tetris a bit fun. anyway... i assume many other lains here just learnt stuff by themselves or through "rawdogging", i dunno. it's okay if it's a bit messy though, since nothing's really perfect. just aim at being good enough. what do you think? what do other lains think?

Don't get hung up on finding the 'optimal' way of doing something. All that matters is that you are practicing at all. You will be better after 1 day of sub-par practice than you were the day before.

>>95198 I have seen people 'practicing' for 100's of hours and achieve less than those who did for 10's. It's the quality of practice that matters. If you aren't big brain (like most of us) good step is to learn from someone who knows their stuff. Than it's a roulette if they are a good teacher. Good teacher will teach you how to learn and think, not what you want to learn (At least if you aim to be top of the top, if you want to be able to do X just fine than normal knowledge sharing is enough).

>>95198 >That looks good on paper but I wouldn't know how to apply it in real life I think the meaning is not to confuse effort with outcome: that if you're practicing wrong in the first place (like, for drawing, doing the same box rotation 2,000 times instead of, say, drawing figures since that's what you actually want to do anyways) then your efforts will not translate to developed skills or knowledge. Basically, be sure you're actually going about doing things the right way, and not in a way that is comforting but doesn't actually develop your skills or knowledge. >I heard that when learning brings discomfort is when you're learning more, because it opposes more of a challenge to the mind. This is good. We should strive to be challenged and to be discomforted because that leads to development and progress, and an insistence on orthodoxy is a slow decline into mediocrity.

as a competitive player in both real live sports and gaming: you can hit limits with no improvement because you practice the wrong method falsely assuming this is how its done and don't question that assumption blaming other factors as the reason you can't reach the better players performance. Someone telling you "dude thats now the way try this" gets immediate improvement in a hour adjusting outperforming previous months of stagnation. In terms of coding its like imagine trying to improve your linked list for a problem that really would need a binary tree or a suffix tree. Or maybe you got IO bottleneck and tried everything outside considering a different api that easily solves it. perfecting practice means getting rid of your blind spot, the things you dont question as true which then allows you to improve further.