Doing A Thing Puts You in The Top 10% (And That Sucks)
I’ve gone snowboarding about 30 times since I started learning a few years ago, but every time I’m on a lift, most of the other riders have been out 90 days just this season[1]. In fact, almost everyone I see has been skiing or snowboarding for decades, and comes out almost every day.
It’s hard to stay motivated when I’m the worst snowboarder on the mountain.
This might seem like a big coincidence, but I’m also one of the worst runners I know AND one of the worst writers that I’m aware of.
I’m even a terrible hiker. Half the people I hike with casually summit 14ers[2] on the weekend while I can barely do an easy 1,600 ft climb[3].
Doing A Thing Puts You in The Top 10%[4]
Oh wait, I forgot about all of the people who don’t snowboard at all. Only 10 million of the 330 million people in the US ski or snowboard. So, actually I’m better than 97% of all skiiers and snowboarders in the US. Yay!
I’m also in the top 15% of runners, the top 20% of hikers, and a top 9% blogger.
So, Where is Everyone?
I’m a way above average snowboarder, top 3%! So why does it feel like I suck? Where is everyone else who sucks more than me? Why can I see 100 other snowboarders on a run but don’t see 97 of them falling down?
I guess the problem is.. they’re not there at all.
The 97% of the population that doesn’t ski.. doesn’t ski. And of the remaining 3%, most of those who don’t ski most days didn’t go skiing today. And of the people who have ever tried skiing, the ones who did it last year but not this year aren’t here this year. And the people who are so much worse than me that they injured themselves[5] are still recovering.
Most of the people I see on a day of skiing are the people who ski every day and are good enough not to hurt themselves.
And That Sucks
It sucks that whenever you start doing something hard, most of the people you see are going to be way more dedicated than you. You’re only barely dedicated enough to do it in the first place, so if they weren’t more dedicated than you, they probably wouldn’t be doing it at all.
But, uh.. feel good about yourself for trying or something? When you stand at the top of a small hill drenched in sweat while literally everyone else is fine and talking about their stupid 14er this weekend, remember that the average person couldn’t hike that hill at all, and most of those who could didn’t show up today. And then still be annoyed because people who are good at things are jerks.
I think you are missing out on a key second half to this story, which would make your motivational take at the end (“uh.. feel good about yourself for trying or something?”) a lot stronger:
When you go to a ski resort, or a gym, or etc, it’s not JUST that you only see the people who ski, work out, etc, while not seeing the 90% who don’t do that activity. You see people WEIGHTED by the AMOUNT OF TIME they spend doing that activity, which skews heavily towards the most intense practitioners.
For example, suppose your local gym has 21 patrons:
- 7 have lapsed in their actual workout habit; they never show up to the gym even though they keep getting auto-charged the monthly fee because they’ve forgotten to cancel their membership.
- 7 manage to keep up a healthy but not outstanding workout habit—they each manage to do a one-hour workout once a week
- 7 are total gym bros who get in a one-hour workout every single day, stacking those gainz
On a typical day, who visits the gym?
- zero of the lapsed members
- on average, just one of the once-a-week members (7 * 1⁄7 = 1)
- all seven of the hardcore gym rats
So, it’s not just that you never see the lapsed members (or the people who never signed up in the first place). It’s also that you get an extremely skewed view of who “goes to the gym”—visiting the gym and looking around makes it seem like the clientele is 87.5% hardcore gym rats, when the true proportion is actually just 50%. (Albeit that 87.5% of the “total time spent in the gym” is spent by gym rats.)
You even mention this in some of your anecdotes, like “most of the other riders have been out 90 days just this season”.
For me, this fact is heartening. For something like a gym or a ski resort (or the blog posts in your feed), comparing yourself to the people you see around you is actually setting a really high bar, since the people you see around you are weighted by the time they spend doing the activity (and/or by the number of posts they write). A gentler, more intermediate basis of comparison is to all the people who do “go skiing”, but don’t go every day—the huge shadow mass of people who ski a couple times a year, whose population is probably way higher than the “I have a cabin next to the resort and buy the season pass every winter” contingent, but who are in the minority every day on the mountain.
That’s a really good point. I don’t want to do a big rewrite, but I did add a line to the conclusion because of this. Thanks!
I find it difficult to take pride in beating people at something they don’t care about and haven’t tried to be good at
I think whether this is a useful comparison depends on the context. If you want to be the best in the world, at some point you need to compare yourself to the best in the world.
My target for this post was people wanting to do something casually (or just starting out) and getting demotivated by seeing how much better people who do it all the time are (this post was inspired my a real hike). In my case, I don’t have the time or interest to become a world-class hiker but being in better shape than most people is actually fine (and finding the motivation to do it every week is something to be a little bit proud of).
This seems like an odd concern… if you take a walk around Stanford campus on a typical weekday you’ll almost certainly pass a few people much smarter than you likely were, or ever will ever be, at the same age, in every possible way I can think of. And that applies to nearly everyone on LW, yes even Yudowsky.
And clearly there’s no mass demotivation as plenty of smart people, but not literal super genius smart, continue walking around Stanford? (which after all must make up the bulk of the student population)
This case feels different since you’re intentionally selecting the smartest people. I also wouldn’t feel that bad if I was on an Olympic training course and found that everyone was better than me. I think the hard thing is when it’s random “normal” people, like the group I go hiking with.
Dan Luu’s classic essay 95%-ile isn’t that good nicely complements yours.
More links on this topic: https://gwern.net/note/competence
I’m coming at this from the point of view of implied opportunities. I want to improve in my hobbies, and I’d like to maximize the enjoyment I get out of doing them. The path of least resistance is likely to expose me to a peer group who intimidate me, and from whom learning will be difficult or impossible due to a large skill gap.
Peers in the same performance range are going to be more difficult to coordinate with, because they are only engaging in the hobby as often as I am, which is far less than the high performers I would be trying to avoid. Most enthusiast groups I’ve encountered are generally populated by the high performers as well. It feels like there is an underserved market for bringing together the mid-tier hobbyists who aren’t engaged by a beginner group and haven’t reached a level to be comfortable around the advanced practitioners who dominate typical clubs.
My own experience points towards outsized rewards from finding an very enthusiastic beginner to partner with. They provide the schedule flexibility, and you provide what mentorship you can. You know that they will surpass you in time, but you can build confidence and grow with them until they get to a point that you’re not in their peer group any longer.
There is a trick that I’ve found very useful when starting new hobbies: “embrace the suck.” I can learn to enjoy having no idea what I’m doing. I can learn to enjoy showing up consistently and being the worst serious person in the room. Even gym rats tend respect the person who shows up 3 days a week at the same time for 6 months, as long as they’re gradually improving.
Only tangentially relevant but had a discussion earlier today in which it was pointed out that spaced repetition learning like Anki decks are always miserable since you are constantly exposed to the things you are bad at and rarely see the items that are easy for you. More generally you might observe that it always feels like you suck at things you are trying to improve at because you are (presumably, ideally) challenging yourself.
I think you are a good writer. Thank you for reminding me that I am a good dancer.
It takes time to catch up.
This reminds me why I’m starting to believe it is useful to hack the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Being slightly overconfident as a beginner, believing you have a noticeable but not overwhelming natural advantage or talent. Like if it on average takes people 3 years to become a good snowboarder, believing you can manage it in 2.5, probably will make you more enthused and dedicated.
I don’t expect it to become an accurate self-fulfilling prophecy. But it will make you stick with it at all, it will make you persevere even as your expectations become revised by reality.
Stanley Kubrick said he was motivated to go into filmmaking simply because he saw the films in cinemas and felt “I can’t do any worse than these”. By all accounts his first two feature films were stinkers. Larry David’s first time as a standup has a similar flavour, he simply asked if he could go on because he saw what standups were doing and thought “I can do that.” Gilbert Gottfried’s entry to standup was similar—but he would say years later that it was “crazy” that he ever considered turning it into a career. “Even collecting cans for the deposit makes more sense!”
Orson Welles attributes all the innovations in Citizen Kane to the confidence of ignorance—he didn’t know what couldn’t be done—nor did he know the proper hierarchy on a film set. And graciously his cinematographer Gregg Toland allowed his crew to listen directly to Welles, and follow his orders, just to see what Welles would do. Bringing his knowledge of theater lighting to cinema.
So maybe, rather than guess you’re in the top 10% for participating at all. Just lie to yourself and say you’re destined to be in the top 4% - because what’s the worst that can happen? You stick with it and then revise your expectations back to top-10%? But you stuck with it, so now you’ve actually developed the skill.
At Planet Fitness? Ha.
But to be serious, if I understand correctly, Planet Fitness tries to make itself a place where the 97% feel comfortable enough to go to the gym. A place where the median person isn’t pushing 6 plates on the bench press and 14 on the leg press. It’d be cool if that sort of thing happened in more domains.
I’m bad enough at working out that people at Planet Fitness intimidate me.
This is not my experience, and I don’t know why. I am not more intelligent than the average LessWrong user, but when I play Go, I’m one of the strongest at the Go club; when I go running outside, I pass many more people than I am passed by; I started poker in February but rank in the top of the free bar league I’ve been going to. I am not trying to brag but there is no other way to describe how strange this post reads to me.
Maybe it’s because these things I do are niche? Go might be like this, but chess wouldn’t be? free bar tournament poker might be like this, but the casino isn’t? running around a neighborhood lake might be like this, but a marathon isn’t? Hm.
I think a lot of people who talk about being n-th percentile in some domain implicitly only include the set of people who participate in the activity at all. That’s a bit less clear-cut than “everyone alive”, but makes more sense to talk about and compare against imo.
Yeah, but my point is that the people who have filtered themselves out contain useful information. It’s not the case that if the other 97% of the population started snowboarding, it would be semi-random if they were better than me. Almost all of these people would be worse, and that’s part of why they don’t snowboard (they’re not in good enough shape, not coordinated enough, or for various reasons can’t or won’t practice enough).
Similarly, I suck at running because it’s pretty hard for me to run a mile at a reasonable pace without breaks (while the other runners I talk to will do 5 miles faster than me as a warmup). But most of the 85% of people who don’t run couldn’t run a quarter mile at any speed, and a non-trivial portion of them[1] would literally die if they tried.
There’s a separate question of “What if everyone became as dedicated to the sport as I am?” but I think the dedication itself counts for something and people should be proud of it.
Mostly elderly people.
Any speed? I’d be rather surprised if anywhere near 42.5% of the population (especially if also counting people outside the US) would be unable to “run” a quarter mile in 10 minutes if they tried to.
Personally I can run for one (1) minute before I’m too out of breath to continue; a quarter-mile is short enough that walking for a majority of the time would still finish it in under ten minutes, but I’d certainly struggle to run it.
I guess it depends a lot on how strongly motivated they are. You could probably force most people to do a quarter mile run with threats and violence. I was thinking of “If this person tried do a quarter mile run (with no walking) would they succeed or give up?”
I think this is interesting as both a semantic and empirical question! If we’re allowing people to walk, or to run a few steps at a time and then take a break, the number will be a lot higher than if we’re only accepting a gait that is a) continuous, and b) would merit disqualification from a walking race on ~every stride. Even on the second definition, I’d expect that a large majority of non-elderly, non-infant people could do it if they really had to. But I’m not sure how to come up with a good estimate.
There are increasing levels of involvement:
people who don’t do it at all
people who tried once, then abandoned it
people who do it once in a long time, just to remind themselves how it feels
people who do it as a hobby
people who are obsessed by it
people who do it as a profession
So maybe the first question is which group you identify with or where you want to get, and that determines who you should compare yourself to.