Venkatesh Rao

One of the projects I'm helping kick off at the @yak_collective is literally a 10-year project: the yak rover, with a goal of getting a rover to mars. And yeah, at this stage it is a borderline a joke, but there's a few of us actually getting started...

I have no idea how far we'll get. Certainly if we actually make it to Mars, far more talented people than me will have to get involved. I'm pretty much just futzing around with 3d printing toys and learning to control motors with arduinos. Hardly a space program.

But at whatever level of ability I can bring to the party, I've sort of decided I'm willing to keep tinkering and muddling through on this project for 10 years, while I have some good company. It's like deciding to write a difficult book as opposed to a quick-turn fad book.

I'm not very ambitious, and am pretty lazy and mediocre as far as average effort rate goes. But I do tend to stick with things for really long. Most of my current projects are years old. Some are over a decade old. So I'm optimistic :D

ie, it's not a sprint, it's not a marathon, it's not a "heavy lift" single herculean effort. It's simply the willingness to keep generally heading in a particular direction, at whatever pace/duty cycle (on-off pattern) you can manage, *for a really long time.*

Funny how sheer quantities of lightly committed "involvement time" can be a substitute for a LOT of rarer, more impressive traits like intelligence, peak effort, knowledge, insightfulness etc. More time substitutes dumb trial and error for basically everything.

As the saying goes, 80% of life is just showing up. And if you decide you're just going to show up in a certain activity for long enough, many interesting things can happen that you would have NO talent for under shorter time horizons.

Can't recall where I saw this, but aptitude can be defined as the time it takes you to learn something. It's not that a genius can learn things you can't. Most of the time, it just means it will take you 10-100x longer to get there.