It depends strongly on the subject, I find. Sometimes this advice is right; sometimes it's very far off. I've made both mistakes, and it's hard to predict which is which. Sometimes you read forever when you should've just done something months ago. But other times you waste a lot of time badly reinventing a wheel and getting saddled with bad design decisions that should've been avoidable, because you didn't realize that what you were trying to do already had a name and a lot of smart things written about it (or realized but didn't want to read them). You might call that the "just get down to business and parse HTML with a regex" school of getting-things-done, to take an extreme but common example that might've benefitted from more reading. ;-) A lot of bad statistics are also in that category...
I think the 2nd mistake might actually be more common, given the amount of wheel-reinventing (and not always reinventing well) that goes on, but it's hard to say.
I have this fear literally every time I start on a new problem: am I re-inventing the wheel? Has this problem been solved already - maybe written about and discussed at length about in some paper/textbook/blog I haven't read? The more I learn the more I realize I don't know, which seems only increases my anxiety level. So that's one reason I can't stop reading this stuff.
Perhaps I'm wrong on what exactly he was getting at, but to apply it to myself I think it's more about wasting time in general. I know I look at HN for inspiration and to stay on top of what is new in my industry. Over time, though, that has turned into a lot of investment (reading/wasting time) with very little return (doing). It reminds me of the question someone asked here the other day about learning how to scale. The best answer was... you learn scaling when your site is over capacity. You can't read that on a site and understand it because the problem is never the same.
I do think it is ridiculous to not research an immediate problem like how to crop a picture in Photoshop.
Very true. I like this comment the best so far. There is sometimes that point where you feel like you got it and proceed with the just doing part and then you suddenly realize you should have read much more but only once it's too late. I recently tried to get a web app up and running on a VPS and I read a Tom about preparing, bootstrapping, configuring, and all about which stack components I should choose. In the end it wasn't enough and now I have to go back, totally reset the VPS to a clean slate and do it over. I went ahead and just did it after thinking reading could no longer help but I found an interesting thing. In some areas of what I was trying to do, it really was time to just do. I then got experienced with a few tools and learned that only then would further reading about how to better use those tools actually help. So it was sort of like "read, do, come back and read again".
Comments
It depends strongly on the subject, I find. Sometimes this advice is right; sometimes it's very far off. I've made both mistakes, and it's hard to predict which is which. Sometimes you read forever when you should've just done something months ago. But other times you waste a lot of time badly reinventing a wheel and getting saddled with bad design decisions that should've been avoidable, because you didn't realize that what you were trying to do already had a name and a lot of smart things written about it (or realized but didn't want to read them). You might call that the "just get down to business and parse HTML with a regex" school of getting-things-done, to take an extreme but common example that might've benefitted from more reading. ;-) A lot of bad statistics are also in that category...
I think the 2nd mistake might actually be more common, given the amount of wheel-reinventing (and not always reinventing well) that goes on, but it's hard to say.
To add onto this: when you do benefit from pre-researching sufficiently, you may think it was necessary only for that situation.
We only need to wear seatbelts on the days we'll get into an accident, right?
I have this fear literally every time I start on a new problem: am I re-inventing the wheel? Has this problem been solved already - maybe written about and discussed at length about in some paper/textbook/blog I haven't read? The more I learn the more I realize I don't know, which seems only increases my anxiety level. So that's one reason I can't stop reading this stuff.
Perhaps I'm wrong on what exactly he was getting at, but to apply it to myself I think it's more about wasting time in general. I know I look at HN for inspiration and to stay on top of what is new in my industry. Over time, though, that has turned into a lot of investment (reading/wasting time) with very little return (doing). It reminds me of the question someone asked here the other day about learning how to scale. The best answer was... you learn scaling when your site is over capacity. You can't read that on a site and understand it because the problem is never the same.
I do think it is ridiculous to not research an immediate problem like how to crop a picture in Photoshop.
Very true. I like this comment the best so far. There is sometimes that point where you feel like you got it and proceed with the just doing part and then you suddenly realize you should have read much more but only once it's too late. I recently tried to get a web app up and running on a VPS and I read a Tom about preparing, bootstrapping, configuring, and all about which stack components I should choose. In the end it wasn't enough and now I have to go back, totally reset the VPS to a clean slate and do it over. I went ahead and just did it after thinking reading could no longer help but I found an interesting thing. In some areas of what I was trying to do, it really was time to just do. I then got experienced with a few tools and learned that only then would further reading about how to better use those tools actually help. So it was sort of like "read, do, come back and read again".