Ze Frank
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 7 months, 2014–2023
2:14 · 220K views · May 8, 2012
A short Ze Frank piece from his 2006 show about "brain crack", the rush of exciting new ideas that feel great but tend to fall apart once you start executing them.
Shared as reassurance and a reality check for people with idea overflow who keep planning instead of doing.
7 comments from Hacker News
one of my reference on the topic is Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective" I recently started meditating with Sam Harris's Waking up, which is really helping on bringing more awareness in my life Rolls up newspaper.. thawack Stop that. You don't need that shit. Listen to Ze Frank about Brain Crack (he is a very nice man from a long ago interwebs where people didn't try to sell you self help bullshit): this video
> Fast forward few more days or weeks, you're unexcited, you think this is hopelessly daft, you think no will care about it, and slowly de-motivation creeps in. Maybe the idea was not so good after all. That is not a bad thing. Keep on rocking. This guy puts it nicely I think: - this video ( explicit ) - [LINK] ( PG rated ) "Most ideas kinda of suck when you do them." That is perfectly fine, move on to the next.
Why remove downvoting directly? I'm not against the idea, I just want to understand the thinking. I wonder if the problem is the binary nature of so many things. 5 star/1 star reviews are the most common, we have up and down votes, but no real context for that. I wonder if the problem that needs to be solved isn't context, rather than directional. This is me spitballing, so feel free to IGNORE everything below. I was listening to the Freakonomics podcast on proper voting (e.g. elections) the other day - this one: [LINK] - and there was an idea called quadratic voting. [LINK] Anyway, the idea is that we all get X votes, and we can vote more on some things, e.g. if we REALLY want marijuana legal, I can vote 4 votes. The twist is that the cost of extra votes is the square of the number of votes, 2 costs 4, 3 costs 9 (we all get maths works). The theory is this lets people vote on what they care about, much less than simply voting equally. I was wondering there isn't some way to create a system where you earn votes, that you can spend in some similar way, e.g. you "earn" upvotes from others, and can spend them elsewhere. If everyone got a single vote, but you earned extra votes you could spend in interesting ways at increasing cost, e.g. you could heavily downvote an idea at an exponential rate, it might make people less a victim of common denominator views, give fringe views more airtime, and make people consider a vote more deeply. Not just yes/no but how much do I hate/love th
Ideas no, but I sometimes drag snippets of text to the desktop too and they get saved as `.textClipping` files. I think ideas are folder-like structures so I usually create a folder to store code/links/pdfs/clippings specific to that idea, then file away that Idea folder as one piece. My general advice is to spend less time planning and more time doing, else you might get stuck on what Ze Frank calls "Brain Crack" this video
So true. I have a similar story, and can add that people use all sorts of things to not work on the project. Smoking weed and drinking are common, but I have found analysis paralysis to be very common in smart people. Executing is hard for a number of reasons, and the hardest to get over is that you'll likely prove your idea sucks and was just braincrack [1]. [1] this video (contains cursing)