The hardest part about professional music, is that you have to perform at a schedule. It takes a lot of effort to perpare your body physically and mentally for peak performance ... and often-times you just fail. Have a bad day. That happens.

There will be many concerts, where you are just at 70% of your peak ability.

As a professional musician, you have to make sure your 70%-version is good enough that people gladly pay for seeing it.

>As a professional musician, you have to make sure your 70%-version is good enough that people gladly pay for seeing it.

Or you just do electronic music, so that's not an issue!

A lot of live electronic music performances involve some pretty serious showmanship.

One of my favorite "laptop DJ" moments -

I saw Brock Hampton at a festival in 2018. Hadn't heard of them before, and they were described to me as a boy band so I had low expectations. Their performance was bizarrely wonderful - they were all painted blue and wearing orange jumpsuits. Anyways, they have a DJ with a Macbook and a bunch of rappers. At one point mid-song they have a bar of silence, and I swear I saw the DJ lean forward and hit spacebar to pause the track and then resume it after.

Showmanship, yes, which is different that musicianship and needing your "70%-version" of the musical performance to be "good enough".

Also, a lot of other live electronic music performances have almost zero showmanship, so there's that too.

(Speaking as an electronic musician)

to be fair, a lot of them are just pushing a play button as well

my personal favorite (which I don’t know where I picked up from is): the difference between good programmers and average programmers is in how they cut corners. average ones will mostly walk themselves into a corner where the amount of effort required to fix it means it will never get fixed. good programmers will leave it such a way that it can be improved/fixed given more time.

There is a statement very like this, about construction workers--masons or carpenters--in Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language.

need to check it out. thank you.

This is similar to skateboarding. If someone wants to go from zero to landing one kickflip in a couple of days, he can (albeit a terrible one), yet while the best skateboarders may very well miss their tricks more often than videos would make you think, but their overall consistency is incredible. When one lands a trick for the first time, the saying goes: "Two to make it true".

Really awesome seeing someone talk about skateboarding here on HN as it relates to the subjects covered by Knuth in this article. I grew up skateboarding and I credit the years those years with a huge amount of learning I didn't even know I was doing.

To expand upon what you said: it's amazing when you take that trick, a kickflip for example, and you're so confident in your consistency, that you apply it to something new. Kickflip to rock to fakie, kickflip down a set of stairs, kickflip to 50-50, and so on. The consistency you gain from that trick opens up the door to a whole new world of combinations.

There's so much about skateboarding, the culture (or counter culture in some cases) around it that translate so well to programming/hacking (and life in general). The trials of learning something new. The acceptance and overcoming of failure. The respect you shown and earned when you're at the park and you or someone else puts down a sick trick.

One of my favorite creative minds in skateboarding, Rodney Mullen, talks a bit about the relationship between hacking and skateboarding in his TED talk. [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GVO-MfIl1Q&t=683

Amateurs focus how to get things right, Professionals focus on how to make sure things aren't/don't-go wrong.

That’s still saying talent is awesome. A metaphorical chess player who can beat you half asleep probably has both a high minimum and maximum.

Actually that makes sense with extreme sport even more so.

"An amateur practices until he can do a thing right, a professional until he can't do it wrong." -- (probably by) George W. Loomis