Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, and I really wish somebody had told this to me.
All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But it’s like there is this gap. For the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good. It’s not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not that good.
But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you. A lot of people never get past that phase. They quit.
Everybody I know who does interesting, creative work they went through years where they had really good taste and they could tell that what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be. They knew it fell short. Everybody goes through that.
And if you are just starting out or if you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month you know you’re going to finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you’re going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions.
I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It takes awhile. It’s gonna take you a while. It’s normal to take a while. You just have to fight your way through that.
> But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you. A lot of people never get past that phase. They quit.
I find a lot of people who should quit don't. Their taste becomes compromised and they fall in love with their own work. I have high school friends who have dedicated the first 10-20 years of their adult lives to artistic pursuits. Some have succeeded and some have failed. What's interesting, to me, is that it was already clear who was going to make it in high school, but some people just didn't know when to quit. The common factor among those who failed was that they felt their work was good, i.e. it met their "taste", when a neutral observer could plainly see it wasn't very good.
I'm very surprised by all of this and understand none of it.
> Some have succeeded and some have failed.
By "succeeded", do you mean something like "well liked by other contemporary artists" or "made money"?
> What's interesting, to me, is that it was already clear who was going to make it in high school
Was it clear to you or even to most people? In what way was it clear, why? I'd expect the ones with more business acumen to "make it" as artists.
> The common factor among those who failed was that they felt their work was good, i.e. it met their "taste", when a neutral observer could plainly see it wasn't very good.
I don't know about neutral observers. Successful artists often make kitch that sells. Would you say Vincent van Gogh failed in his artistic pursuits?
In my view there's little corellation between whether someone makes good art and their outward success.
> By "succeeded", do you mean something like "well liked by other contemporary artists" or "made money"?
The definition of success was "earned a living wage" but some were much more successful than that. I was thinking about this particular issue recently because a good friend, one who falls squarely into the "should have quit" category, has recently become homeless.
> Was it clear to you or even to most people? In what way was it clear, why? I'd expect the ones with more business acumen to "make it" as artists.
It was clear to most people. The best way I've seen the feeling described is the scene from The Sopranos when Hesh says: "There's good and there's not good ... Talent is talent ... a hit is a hit" [0]. The point is, you can recognize talent, but that doesn't mean you can necessarily articulate what makes it good. There is something tautological about taste: it's good because it's good.
> I don't know about neutral observers. Successful artists often make kitch that sells. Would you say Vincent van Gogh failed in his artistic pursuits?
Perhaps this is a just a form of bias. What you saw:
- People with early success also have later success.
- People failing keep failing
What you objectively didn't see: "it's not worth persisting if others think you're not good". I'm sure there are loads of people who have been told by others that they won't succeed, but despite judgement from others, still succeed.
IMHO, your opinion above is a manifestation of the judgement: "if I think they're not good now, they aren't ever gonna make it".
Everyone starts off a beginner, and they get better with effort.
I was recounting a situation as factually as possible. I don't think bias played a role. I do think, though, that your argument is based off a particular world-view: you believe anyone can achieve something if they try. I'm not going to comment on whether or not I believe that, but I think responding to an anecdote with "your anecdote is wrong because you're biased. I know this because [totally subjective world view]" is a bit weird.
I don't think "anyone can achieve something if they try" - primary because we don't get equal opportunity for reasons: income/wealth, culture, discrimination, education, luck, (genetics?). However, everyone starts as a beginner. Expressing view points like yours actually discourages people to strive for the best - my point is to share my perspective and make it clearer your sentiment seems to be to be the definition of "judgemental". I wouldn't achieve what I have today if I listened to the people who thought I wasn't good, or didn't have taste. Usually, these people with the strongest opinions are the one with NO knowledge, passion or interest in the field. When persuading you to drop something, they might actually be justifying why THEY chose not to do it. I think this a glass ceiling for a lot of people who don't have good role models.
"Dad" - "Forget kid, you tried for 2 years to a be a programmer and you suck". Does "dad" have taste in programming? Says the dad who works in test automation and couldn't break into other jobs. Another example for music: Imagine "rock music" doesn't exist yet. Someone literally invents it and plays it, and I persuade him to give it up and work at McDonalds because he doesn't have taste.
Even if one agrees with your sentiment, there are a few questions:
- How long should someone keep trying?
- What do you do when these taste-gods (judgemental people) have different, conflicting tastes (opinions)?
- What makes someones taste "bad"? Their resourcefulness? - they haven't seen what/how it's done better? This is obvious in programming. Your code quality increases as you make mistakes, read more code, or otherwise learn. I prefer to think in terms of principles (or lack thereof).
> The definition of success was "earned a living wage" but some were much more successful than that. I was thinking about this particular issue recently because a good friend, one who falls squarely into the "should have quit" category, has recently become homeless.
How do you account for artistic disciplines where virtually nobody makes any money? Most poets will never earn a living wage from their work, however beautiful and well made it is, because the market just isn’t there. Does that make them failures?
Yes of course. Most people making a living selling their art for whatever high prices are worse than van Gogh. I'd guess the people you know who "made it" are probably worse than van Gogh. Still, they made it, and he didn't, right?
I believe this is where the highly self-critical perspective has its roots. From the outside, it looks like a bunch of compliment baiting, but actually it seems to be a necessary. Without that intense scrutiny from yourself, how are you supposed to grow when you don't know what you did wrong?
This is also partially why some creatives stop making progress even if financially successful to a degree. They get enough fans, they make enough money, so they stop looking for things to nitpick and start blindly believing. See Rob Liefeld, who notoriously has received a lot of bad feedback about his work but way after he was successful in the 90s - to the point where he's gone on record saying he doesn't know why he's so "controversial".
But on the other hand, if at some point you become unable to respond (artistically) to your biting self-criticism, there's the danger of ceasing production entirely. Then five years go by.
Very true. It's very difficult when your self-criticism turns into self-hatred. It's the merging of identities, you can no longer separate yourself as a person from your creations.
There's this sense of clinging too tightly to your work that you never get far enough away from it to learn from it. It consumes you and leads right into that merging of identities concept.
A related idea is George lucas's dis-satisfaction with his own work. He spent so long working on it he can see where he fell short of what he wanted to do and how it's held together with duct tape and glue.
He has a low opinion of his own movies. When I know the tradeoffs I make to get the project finished, I come to similar feeling.
When I'm working just for my own pleasure/hobby, sometimes any old thing will work to make me feel good about it, even when it's not great.
I also have a low opinion of most of his movies and find that in reworking them, he has overworked them. My favorite remains THX-1138. Just bare bones and mostly quiet performances.
You should quit posting online. It's clear that you've been doing it for a very long time, and honestly, you're not improving. You've fallen in love with your own opinions, but your "taste" is just not very good. You're never going to make it at this rate, so you should really just stop.
That's not snark. Just honestly holding up a mirror for you.
As for my own opinion: you're applying a utilitarian razor to hedonic pursuits. Hedonists aren't going to pay you any mind, so what's the utility of expressing this particular viewpoint? You recognize that some artistic greats died in obscurity, but your reply is that your friend is no van Gogh. From a utilitarian perspective: does the world need another van Gogh? I say no, he did his work and moved on in good time.
I agree with you most of the time, but nearly all truly original work will be generally unliked initially, because it's unfamiliar. The other problem is success often comes by struggling forward even when you don't have support.
This checks out in my life. Much of my favorite art, especially music, is stuff I flat out disliked when I was first exposed to it. It was only after repeated exposure that I learned what was awesome about it.
I learned a long time ago that I am the worst judge of my own work, technical and artistic. So much so that if I think something I've done is great, I take that as a red flag. It's a sign that I should put it away for a while and reassess once it's grown cold.
It took me 8-10 years of programming and literally hundreds of projects before I started being happy with the end result of what I was doing. Never ashamed though, I look at my early projects like how you'd look at a child's "paintings", with this sort of feeling of innocence and naivety. It's still different, because a child's painting has no higher goal, while I was trying to build something good and just couldn't, but still there's no shame in learning so don't punish the younger you. And I do remember I was always happy doing it, even though I wasn't proud of the result back then, the challenge and the learning felt like my brain was expanding.
And talking about taste, as a frontend dev you need two: the usual actual design taste and the code organization taste. Which are more similar than dissimilar in my experience, but still two totally different beasts and I didn't even have a proper design taste and had to learn that as well. Or at least, I had to learn how to put my innate taste into practical rules to follow, things like https://lawsofux.com/ were massively useful for that.
Or working with better people, particularly those setting the requirements. The worst code I've written/worked with has always come about because of unclear/unstable requirements.
Important aspect of this model is that sense of taste is not static. Two things:
As skill is improved, taste may also improve at the same rate. When your taste gap doesn't close, it can seem like you're not actually improving. Constant frustration that you're not as good as you want to be, despite actual progress. Comparing your work over time is a good way of grounding yourself.
Skill is capped by taste level. If you don't see how your work could be improved then you're not aware of how your skill can be improved. Expanding taste is as important as chasing it. The gap is good.
I saw a great visualization of this long ago. It plots two curves of ability, one for execution and the other for evaluation. They both increase with sinusoid curves shifted so that when one plateaus, the other is at an inflection point at highest rate of increase.
Technique and critique don’t necessarily advance smoothly at the same rate, leaving a variable gap over time, so sometimes you feel better about your work and sometimes you think it’s trash.
Does Ira Glass have a follow-up to this about people with good taste and dream projects? What to do when you have a project you don't/can't do twice yet you know your under skilled to produce it?
There was a designer back when I was in college that talked about this, and I don't know if he was summarizing another quote or giving his own, but I remember him describing the problem of dream projects (roughly) this way:
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Sometimes if you're a creative person, you have a vision in your head about what you want to make. The problem is, you also can see when the things you make aren't quite measuring up to that vision. And so when you make things, you look at them, and they don't match the vision in your head, and you get very discouraged.
The danger is that thinking about the things in your head becomes more attractive than building them. The danger is that you never actually try to build the things because building them is miserable and thinking about the theoretically perfect dream in your head becomes more satisfying then engaging with the messiness of actually trying to construct it; particularly if you know that what you construct won't perfectly match that vision. When you know up-front that the thing you want to make is going to be messy when it's in reality, it starts to feel safer to just not have it be in reality, to only think about the theoretical finished product.
And if you fall into that trap, you'll spend a lot of time thinking about what you want to build, and no time ever building it.
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That could be a longer conversation, but the short version is, I personally think there needs to be a mixture of "I'm going to produce something imperfect and I'm OK with that" and "I'm going to produce a lot of imperfect things and get better at this so it's less theoretical."
There are problems that can be solved by looking up resources or practicing, but there are also problems and skills where you won't even know what to practice until you start doing the thing and identifying issues that you didn't know existed. In particular I think about stuff like writing; if you have a theoretical idea for a novel but you don't think you're a good writer and you don't know how to publish -- those are not easy problems to solve unless you sit down and write things and try to publish things, and make mistakes and start to understand what specifically you need to practice.
Maybe that means taking a shot at the project with the expectation that you're going to fail, and then saying, "well, okay, I've learned X, let's repeat and try it again." Maybe it means tackling different projects and building up to the dream project.
But the trap is where actually working on the project or taking steps to close that skill gap becomes harder than doing nothing. Even small steps make long walks. In some ways, the problem can be looking at the distance and saying "I need to figure out how to cross this distance in one leap." Well, no. What are the skill gaps you have, or what general areas are they in? How can you practice that skill? Do you not really know what the skill gaps are? Okay, fine. Build some terrible stuff and after a while you'll learn what your skill gaps are. Then repeat.
I love this quote by Ira though I believe the article linked and this quote aren't really discussing the same thing but certainly have overlapping themes.
I've been struggling with this a lot recently, but what I've been trying to do lately is dissect that exact question and sort of question the axioms it's based on:
- is it actually impossible for me to critique myself and enjoy the things I've made, or is that a restriction that I've just made up in my mind?
- is it actually necessary for me to think something is high quality to enjoy it? Is it OK for me to enjoy something even if the flaws are obvious to me?
- is there a process here that's enjoyable independent of the output, regardless of whether or not what I make is good?
- is my 'cringe' about the things I make primarily motivated by my internal taste, or about my worry that the things I make won't meet other people's expectations? Is my desire to create things that look good to other people different from my internal pride about my own work, and should I treat them differently?
- is there an enjoyable aspect to stretching myself even if that means I fail more often? If I put a game to a higher difficulty, do I have less fun just because I'm being challenged more and die more often? So similarly, if I explore a medium or try a programming task that I'm not great at, should I be getting so discouraged about occasionally "failing" at it?
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I think that it's not necessarily the case that enjoying something needs to be linked to its overall quality. And especially with creative work, I've been trying recently to get better about releasing things that I think are explicitly bad, and saying, "okay, I stink at this and the end result is terrible, but that doesn't necessarily mean I should feel bad looking at it or showing it to other people." And I'm not sure that getting rid of all the criticism centers of my brain or convincing myself that I'm a genius is necessary to get to that state. I think it's possible (albeit very difficult) for me to look at something I've made and see 100 flaws and still say, "I like the parts of it that aren't flaws, and I think those parts are cool."
I'm not sure that it's healthy as an artist to even focus at all on whether or not you're good at something, just focus on getting better regardless of what your current skill level is. "Good" is kind of a wishy-washy term anyway. And I'm not sure it's healthy (at least for the way I work) to couple my enjoyment of the things I do to whether or not I think I'm good at them.
But :shrug: I'm not sure. I do think that the original quote is less about "here's how you should think of your work, and is more about "you probably already have a tendency to think about your work this way, so don't feel so isolated about that or get too discouraged." Because it is discouraging and I think a lot of artists and creators struggle with the fact that they can see very clearly where they want to be and where they are, and they're not where they want to be -- and speaking personally, it's not something I had ever really vocalized to myself before originally hearing that quote, and I remember it being very cathartic to realize, "actually yeah, this is why I'm frustrated about everything I'm doing -- because my ability to critique my work is more developed than my ability to make it." It's not really saying that's the ideal, it's just describing a thing that happens to a lot of people.
The original quote I heard was in a slightly different context: it was a game dev who brought up the same idea and then cautioned that the way a lot of developers internalize that mental conflict is that they never implement ideas or finish projects, because thinking about the theoretically perfect version of the thing in their head is always easier than looking at the objectively less perfect, sometimes kind of terrible thing they've made. His advice was, if you're in that position, recognize it and try to take steps to get more comfortable with messiness and imperfections, because it can be a huge barrier to ever actually implementing and practicing ideas.
Epictetus has a wonderful quote. He is talking about moral / philosophical improvement specifically but I find it more broadly applicable when overly high expectations paralyse me from doing a thing:
"What then? Because I have no natural gifts, shall I on that account give up my discipline? Far be it from me! Epictetus will not be better than Socrates; but if only I am not worse, that suffices me. For I shall not be a Milo, either, and yet I do not neglect my body; nor a Croesus, and yet I do not neglect my property; nor, in a word, is there any other field in which we give up the appropriate discipline merely from despair of attaining the highest."
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in 2004: "You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time." (The troops who got blown up due to lack of armored vehicles might not have fully appreciated his brilliance.)
That quote is damning to his legacy, whatever it might have been: we went to a war we started, that was unnecessary, and which will taint every history of the Bush administration.
Troops enlist knowing they may die, not sure what your point is. There is no army that fights a prolonged conflict without loses, no equipment is perfect.
At the time there was a distinct shortage of armored vehicles in Iraq and Afghanistan. Many troops were dying in IED and RPG attacks, and they were forced to improvise additional armor in the field out of scrap metal. There are always risks in combat and casualties are inevitable, but in retrospect the Defense Department leadership could have done a lot more at the time to accelerate production and deployment of additional armored vehicles and kits.
I'll add to this a general take I have about "improving" the world: there is a metric ton of stuff to do in the world, and there aren't enough people to do it, and being the best at what you do is in no way necessary if your goal is to be useful or to produce meaningful things that make people's lives better.
There are so many problems in the world that aren't solved literally because nobody has solved them, because the scope is gigantic and the people available who want to work on them or who are willing to work on them is very small in comparison.
Many of those tasks aren't sexy, and they might not have broad appeal, but... I mean, I ported another person's gameboy emulator to a format that worked in NodeJS and had basically one API change so that you could run the project headlessly without a graphics stack, and so you could advance the emulator frame-by-frame after inspecting memory. It's a garbage project, I have no idea how emulators work. And yet, I've had people contact me on Discord and ask questions about it and go through support chats and thank me for building it.
Was I the best suited person to do that? No. Could pretty much anyone at all with any experience build a better end result then I did? Yes. Heck, it would be trivial for someone to jump in, fork my project and improve it. And yet. The very specific niche case I coded it for didn't have a solution, and then it did have a solution.
Sometimes that's enough. People underestimate how easy it is to be useful and to make the world better in small ways. It does not require you to perfect a skill, it just requires showing up and putting in some work and doing the best work that you can. And sometimes it means not asking "what's the biggest impact problem in the world", and instead asking "what's any problem that's close enough to me to solve that nobody is paying attention to?"
Stoicism in general has aged very well. When I read Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, I was amazed at how relevant the thing still is, even though it’s 1.8K+ years old at this point.
It’s funny, I’ve always heard great things about Meditations but I found it to be one of the least approachable books on stoicism. Perhaps I didn’t like the terse note format. On the other hand Seneca’s letters are extraordinary
Hum... It didn't age any well before it got a chance to age well.
It's coherent with modernity because we have are in a time where that mindset is popular, and since there are only a few alternatives, we are prone into cycling between them at random and revisit each one from time to time.
Eventually, it will pass, and it will become old and unfit again.
It's often claimed that the Meditations are actually Marcus Aurelius's own words. When I traced the lineage of the text, the best I could find was something like several hundred years back with the primary text being possessed by the church. None of this takes away from the relevance of the text—it stands on its own.
Does anyone know of an accounting of the primary text which shows that it wasn't written by a monk or priest of the Catholic church?
I'm definitely no textual criticism expert, but I do have a book recommendation.
The Inner Citadel by Hadot is a great analysis of the Meditations. It explains extracts from the Meditations – such as references to certain people in Marcus's life – with facts we know about Marcus from other sources.
For me personally... While it could be an elaborate imitation, it would raise the question why Marcus espouses views that don't necessarily tie with Christian doctrine. Obviously something about the Meditations appealed to Christians of the time, but if they were inventing it whole cloth, they probably wouldn't have included only one reference to Christianity, which is arguably negative. (Book 2, chp3)
Just because you were of the cloth didn't mean you were a raving fundamentalist. Who else was going to house, feed, and protect you and allow you to read and think all day?
It gives you a really solid framework for not worrying about why things happen and who they happen to. A very valuable skill indeed in our world where everywhere you look there is preventable misery. Modern indeed! It's no wonder it's so popular with tech workers.
He has some Epicurean influence as well. In the early days they were both popular, then changes in religious sentiment and denunciation of Epicureanism as sensualism changed that. Stoicism is ingrained with comparatively more spirituality and austerity.
If you find a good modern translation (Robin Hard is good), I emphatically recommend reading the discourses. Don't cheap out and suffer through some stuffy 19th century translation.
At the other end of the spectrum, I've suffered through some overly-simplified/modernized translations of fiction (e.g. Dostoevsky's the Gambler) that was complete butchery, but I guess this is less likely to occur with non-fiction.
Discipline meaning “branch of knowledge,” or “area of work/study,” in this case. In the other sense (obedience/adherence to something), motivation is often considered temporary or fleeting. “Motivation gets you started, discipline keeps you going.”
Oooooh, oups my bad, I realize now I am on edge and chose to interpret the word in such a way that it reminded me of another post and I triggered myself. Guess it's time to unwind for the week-end and call it a day :).
Currently in the throes of stepping back my career dramatically as I realise two things:
1. I genuinely miss working alongside people (6+ years now of hybrid but mostly remote working) and by that I mean actually working things out together rather than either being expected to know, learn solo, or book people's time to learn from them
2. the pressure of delivering the best of everything in an ultra-competitive tech space
Currently applying for jobs 1/3 my salary from last year, having already taken a step back to a role 2/3 my salary and still not able to take the pressure. Hoping I find peace in being "ok" in an "ok" job so I can focus on living life again.
It seems really prevalent in western societies (America in my experience at least) have a strong culture of career growth. If you’re not getting better paying positions then what are you doing?
I think a lot of people will claim they do this to have wealth reserved to be able to spend their time how they choose in the future, but they seem to me to just get lost in the cycles of wealth accretion and forget to live the life they have.
A friend recently told me that he wanted to stagnate more in his career and grow more in his life, and I think that’s a sentiment that should be shared more.
The problem I see in my western society is that career growth and personal growth are separated.
An individual falling into this divide will always feel conflicted. Unfortunately in todays climate with no social safety net for the individual few may have the privilege to hear their inner voice.
Definitely agree. Christopher Alexander's "A City Is Not A Tree" [0] speaks to this separation too in the context of our physical spaces (based on your comment I sense you may be familiar with this idea). It feels that western society promotes separation by default.
My memory is that it rang so true I didn't need to read it. I'm knee deep(decades)in trying to define an aesthetic for "Technology" so that it can be judged as a media. To put it another way a process for judging technical implementations based on universal human needs.
That's neat and makes me feel that if you independently came to similar thoughts then there is some universal thing here to uncover/define. Would be interested to hear more about your thoughts/journey if you have them written up somewhere!
I strongly feel your first point -- there's been a weird ethos at the FAANG company I'm employed at where you are encouraged to solo-learn, despite many others on the team who could share the learning and create camaraderie in far less time. But if you want to do that, you're seen as a "lesser" engineer -- so instead, everyone struggles for months (average onboarding time is 4-5 months) and it's often repeated that you won't know what you're doing for the first 3 years.
The very notion that you can’t lean over someone’s shoulder and say “hey can you help with something” is a massive failure of remote.
The subtlety of human communication and merits of simple vulnerability exchanges really detracts from team development.
And whilst I do get to see my team - whenever we meet it’s to discuss the “big” stuff and not actually do our daily work, thus we don’t get to learn from each other.
I feel this way too. My solution is that I started enrolling in lab classes at the local university (I've done two semesters of physics so far--oscilloscopes were involved--and this semester I'm starting biology).
It's really fun to be the code wizard in a room full of people who only kind-of need a code wizard. There's no pressure, but there's plenty of opportunity to help people, which scratches the itch for me.
This was me as well. For a long time I put off writing my blog because I wanted to write something impactful/meaningful/substantial.
However, I came across one blog which had numerous entries, starting from when the author was in college until today. The blog entries were about emacs tips and tricks, clojure, and other software engineering topics. I found it because I was trying to setup tree-sitter for clojure/clojurescript. I was grateful for the blog, learned a thing or two, and thanked the author.
Anyway, what stood out to me was how almost all the blog entries, at least the earlier ones, was full of spelling and grammatical errors. Then it hit me. I'll never start writing something if I don't accept that most of the things I write will probably suck and will be read by no one.
Since then I've written a couple of entries for my blog. And while I don't expect anyone to read them, it has been a cathartic experience for me. It's somewhat similar to meditation in that regard.
It's the blog equivalent of shipping an MVP. The sooner you get something out there, the sooner you can start improving. After writing 100 articles, you will absolutely have improved a drastic amount. You'll be much more fluent, have worked out the kinks in your writing workflow, and have built a habit. And that's before we even get into any benefits that may or may not come from people reading what you wrote.
The point of this blog is not that it gets read rather that it gets written.
That's what I wrote at the bottom of my blog when I started. Once that was there, I began to write what I wanted to write and not what I thought people want to read.
It is like meditation because it is self reflection in the form of writing, which it is equivalent to maintaining a journal, which science tell us helps in improving our emotions, and well-being.
Couldn't agree more. The last couple of years were the same for me: will not post until I have of something impact or will not share my art unless it is just the way I like it but this year, I have just started putting stuff out.
Whether it is of any use to anyone or whether anyone will find my art good is beyond my control. I have just started putting stuff out which interests me and which makes me fulfilled.
I self-published a book about becoming a solo 1099 federal sub-contractor.
It's about 60,000 words, full of typos, has a boring cover, and is on an ugly looking shopify site. Oh, and it costs $100.
BUT, I knew if I waited to catch all the typos, add in additional material that would be useful but not necessary, and build a beautiful website, it would never launch.
So I published it and just mentioned on the website that you shouldn't buy it for all the reasons I listed above and described exactly what was in it.
I've only sold about 50, but the feedback is good and already people are implementing the strategies and techniques in the book with successful results.
If you have something of value to offer, it's also easy to forget that someone else is potentially NOT getting that value now if you decide to perfect it and keep procrastinating on launching it.
The "About the book" page is below in case you want to see how I described the book and all its flaws:
I think people would prefer to watch the 1:45 Youtube video that shows in wobbly greenish mobile phone video exactly which bolt you need to remove to get the thing apart and how, than a slick 10:07 video shot in 4k with lots of "don't forget to like share and subscribe" that only mentions it for about a second.
Thanks for your post! I’m also starting the self-publishing journey this year. Trying to keep in mind the old Reid Hoffman quote, “ If you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late.”
I love that you’re a) charging a premium ($100 for a beta version), and b) explicitly calling out all the shortcomings you foresee so prominently on your “About” page. That combination of transparency and chutzpah is inspiring.
I’m a bit allergic to marketing that tries to cover up weaknesses and I feel much better just telling the truth. Then people can make their own decision.
As far as the price I agree it is premium but with such a niche audience and focused value proposition I thought it was worth it.
It is a barrier for some though but no one who was initially worried about the price and then bought it regretted it.
> As far as the price I agree it is premium but with such a niche audience and focused value proposition I thought it was worth it.
I hope my comment didn't sound like a back-handed compliment. I genuinely think you're making the right move charging a premium. I read a lot of posts from Patrick McKenzie (patio11 on HN), and he's always urging folks to charge more. It feels like very few people take his advice, so props to you for doing so!
> I’m a bit allergic to marketing that tries to cover up weaknesses
100% agree. I'm actually planning on releasing my full book in blog form on my site, a bit like Michael Hartl's "Ruby on Rails Tutorial" [1], so people can judge for themselves whether it's worthwhile to pay for premium features like a PDF copy or video screencasts.
> What’s the topic of your book?
The plan is to do a soup-to-nuts walk through of popular, lynchpin open-source codebases. I'll take newbie developers from "this codebase is too intimidating, only 10x engineers would grok it" to "oh, that's all there was to it?". I'm a software engineer from a non-traditional / bootcamp background, and I want to help people who are suffering from impostor syndrome to feel like they too can become 10x engineers. I'm starting with a Ruby version manager called RBENV and progressing toward open-source codebases from unicorns like Gitlab, and eventually even the Ruby codebase itself.
I've already walked through the entire RBENV codebase on my own, and written 500+ rough pages in a Google doc (over 100k words that I wrote during COVID lockdown). I'm slowly but surely editing it into something that I can show people, but my immediate issue is that a) I don't know anything about the skillset of launching a product, and b) I feel like I only have one shot at a launch, and if my thoughts and words are disjointed, people will write off not only my idea but also me as an engineer and teacher / mentor, and I won't get a 2nd shot at launching. My head says that's BS, but my heart isn't so sure.
I've always appreciated the approach taken by https://www.aosabook.org/en/index.html which has different depths of analysis and scope and gives the user the option of diving into different types of programs. I usually recommend it to friends /colleagues as a foundation when they've had to write networking or other tight performance applications. Evaluating design decisions and process of app evolution is just as important as where a modern piece of software is because it can help provide similar context around getting the product out there now, rather than perfect later.
Also the world is constantly changing so trying to make a perfect product is partially an evaluation of how long your solution will even be relevant or how isolated it is from external change.
I'm sad that grad school got really busy and I had to drop out from being an editor on POSA, but it was absolutely fantastic to work with so many fantastic developers and get into their heads a bit. I think Tavish might be hanging around HN too.
> a soup-to-nuts walk through of popular, lynchpin open-source codebases
This sounds fantastic. I'm a self taught developer in largely the situation you describe and this book sounds like something that would be amazing for someone like me. Please post it on HN when it's presentable!
Ambitious and cool project! Over my head as I’m not a coder but I think one bullet you should emphasize is the impostor syndrome part. I think that would resonate strongly.
You might like Rob fitzpatrick’s write useful books:
Some do! But the more typical route is people find me through a few articles I wrote for another website (job boards for folks with security clearances).
I tried Google ads but the terms I wanted to use had such low volume that I literally got 0 traffic from those.
The last few blog posts I've written have been very successful. The more that happens, the less desire I feel to write because I'll compare whatever I do next to that recent success. If it doesn't do as well, I've failed.
I've been doing improv comedy for the past few years. Improv is a pretty constant source of upsetting insight into myself. I've recently discovered just how much of my capacity for play and experimentation is locked behind a door called "Don't disappoint anyone" (Or they'll reject you forever). I know its silly - the more I'm afraid of looking like a fool, the worse my improv is. The less I write or draw, or experiment on the piano. I know consciously that playing it safe isn't actually helping, but I can't seem to shake the habit. Its been really devastating to notice the sheer amount of myself caught in this trap. I feel stuck.
Putting myself out there with my creative work - in any of its forms - and just letting the world judge me for me? Its terrifying.
I’m coming up on my 1-year anniversary of getting into improv comedy. I’m also a software engineer, which it appears we have in common as well.
For what it’s worth, I’ve found that the logical, engineer side of my brain is a HUGE asset to my improv. Coming from a game-based, UCB-style background, I’ve learned that the “unusual thing” (aka the game) can really only “pop” and get laughs if the “voice of reason” is really good at grounding the scene in a base reality. That’s where my logical, engineering brain nails it.
You’re doing a brave thing by putting yourself out there. Keep honing your craft, and don’t forget to have fun! Good luck.
I hear what you're saying. You're doing a brave thing too!
At this point I've done some UCB style classes and some slower improv where we play it more "real" and honest. I don't think I really like the UCB style anymore. The more improv I do, the more see the UCB approach as a bit of a trap for smart people.
The UCB style is alluring because it implies that you can think your way to being a good performer. But when you actually pay attention to what gets the biggest reactions from the audience during shows, its almost never the "clever" ideas. My favorite improv to watch is almost obvious - where the performers breathe and look at the audience and then do the "dumb" thing that you might never have thought to do.
Its hard to explain these kind of moments. I once saw a performer endowed as a "horse breaker" who needed to get to Mars by his 3rd scene. I was in the audience stressing out on his behalf - how can he get to mars? But of course, he's a horse breaker. He goes to Africa and "breaks" the best horse there ever was so much she could fly him to mars. Its all made up, so why not!?. The audience was in hysterics. But it didn't feel fast or clever - just a fantastic show.
"Poppy" performances bring me in my head to try and come up with the clever offer, but when I do that I sort of forget how to play and I disconnect from the moment. And I disconnect from my scene partners and the audience.
I did some clowning recently. My clowning teacher said in good clowning, the clown knows less than the audience about whats going on. And when we feel shame as a performer, we should practice sending it "out not down". As performers, our feelings are part of the show too. There's something for me in that. It feels more integrated somehow than just getting laughs on stage for being clever.
As I said, this whole journey has been full of upsetting moments of self awareness and learning. Its terrifying, but I couldn't recommend it enough if anyone is keen. Its definitely a good way to practice being brave.
I think adding a performative aspect to a lot of things sort of kills the joy in doing them.
For like a year I didn't really tell anyone I had a website. It was always fun to work on, because I did it for myself when I was inspired. Then it got out, and now there's a lot more pressure.
Writing because you feel you ought to because you haven't in a few months is about the least inspiring thing I know. That's just a chore.
I quite deliberately don't put like or comment features on my website to sort of prevent this. Means on average I don't get a lot of interaction, since the minimum bar to interaction is sending me an email.
Yes, I think there is a risk in doing things publicly. You can get stuck in this loop of topping your last performance. We may need validation or criticism to improve. But improvement is not the only thing that matters. For me, enjoyment is more important; I can be quite happy making things that I never show anyone else, and obligations can quickly kill the joy. On the other hand, sometimes enjoyment falters because of stagnation. It is a tricky line to walk, with traps on both sides.
This! Our society as a whole push us toward performing aiming to produce more, to consume more again and over again. We don't do things because we like them of we want to have fun. We do these things to perform, gain wealth, visibility, status. Such approach steer us away from the innate human need of exploring, playing and mastering for the sake of it, which, surprise surprise, it is what make human happy.
That so true but unfortunately it takes many freedoms to able to do this.
Freedom from financial worries, freedom from the worry of what others think, freedom from the worries of not knowing for what it will be good for (to explore).
We do this as children since all those freedoms are given. It is hard to do when one starts out in society that places so many expectations on one.
> We propose that one’s personal best, or past peak performance, acts as a reference point by inducing effort when current performance would otherwise fall short. Analyzing a massive dataset of online chess games, we find that players exert effort to set new personal best ratings and quit once they have done so.
There is no direct way of measuring the "Personal Best" in all areas of life (unlike Chess), but I believe that one can set benchmarks for oneself without articulating it: be it writing blog posts, making music, creating an OSS project, etc.
Then beating one's own benchmark, even just once, dulls the desire to continue putting in effort. So I can imagine a very similar blog post with the title:
> "I don't like making things which beat my personal best benchmark over and over again."
I'm not a huge fan of the book Atomic Habits, but James Clear does talk about something similar around goals. Effectively, one of the problems he brings up with goals is that if your goal is to run a 5k and then you achieve that goal, you're sort of "done." Instead he talks about building systems, and changing what you see yourself as. I.e. in the case of a 5k, instead of running a 5k, change who you are such that you are a runner. Then the 5k "goal" doesn't put you in the position of "okay, now what? Guess I'm done." type of mentality.
I've always kind of liked this. I doubt it's unique to James Clear but it was the book I read that made it sort of click so I always go back to that part.
This reminds me of the pottery class parable from Art & Fear. At the beginning of a pottery class the teacher divides the class into two groups. One group is to be graded purely on the quantity of pots they create, the other group solely on the quality (or, make one perfect pot). At the end of the class the group that focused on quantity had produced better results.
Somewhat counterintuitively those that riff and just try a lot of different things get better over time - exactly what the author says makes them happiest. But perhaps we're all just a little shy about doing that in public, and pushing past that can a challenge.
I put off starting my blog for so long because I didn't feel I was good enough. Each idea worthy of a post felt so inadequate when laid down, because of my weak writing. It's agonizing to reread the text and be bored by your own creation. Too much context, sloppy transition, feels like fake enthusiasm, and so on.
In the end, I partially solved it by separating "posts" from "notes". Posts are the nicely articulated ideas; notes: the one-shot, the straight-to-the-point, the bullet list, really anything with a bit of substance. It's liberating to have something out there, knowing it's not your best.
I'm going to writes notes for a while, until I find one that pleases me. And when it'll become a post, it won't be my only public expression.
I'm planning to potentially start separating my blog posts entirely from my website for similar reasons. I've been trying to think about why it's easier for me to write long replies on HN than it is for me to blog, and I think that putting posts on a pedestal and caring too much about formatting everything and making sure they're perfect is part of it.
My thought is, I might start writing posts and pushing each one to a completely separate subdomain or even completely separate domain entirely using something like Netlify. And separately maybe I start to grab some of them and compress them into an RSS feed or copy them to the main site -- but I hate trying to think up-front "how does this contribute to my 'brand'?" And I'm wondering if having more of a "throw it out into the void, link it on some social networks" attitude might help alleviate some of that problem.
I really like that way of framing the distinction. I may have to borrow that.
I've been thinking about reviving my blog by writing up some tidbits from my pen-and-paper notebooks as shorter form entries. I've usually preferred to post larger, more polished pieces when I felt like I really had something to say, but that also has meant sometimes going years between posts.
My best advice for writing more online is that it's crucial that you learn to hit publish while you're still unhappy with what you've written.
If you strive for perfection in your writing you will inevitably end up with a folder full of hundreds of drafts (I still have one of those) and a blog with no content.
A key thing to remember is that no-one else will ever know how great the thing you wanted to write would have been!
You might find your post thoroughly disappointing because of all of that missed potential... but other people who read it and learn something will be thankful that you posted it.
This is one of the big reasons I'm such a fan of the "TIL" (Today I Learned) format: it reduces the bar for writing about something to "did I recently learn a new thing?"
Yeah, if you only try to publish the 'best' things (as the author puts it here), you'll never get anything done. You'll keep striving for perfection long past the point anyone else would consider it good enough, then maybe scrap the whole thing because you're your own worst critic.
Plus, that route is a great way to get stuck in the mires of feature and scope creep too. It's all too easy to just add 'one more tiny feature' or 'implement this idea you've had just now that'll be so awesome to see in a tool like this', and get stuck doing the same thing over and over again until your project has been stuck in development hell for a decade. See for instance, Duke Nukem Forever. In the 14 years that game spent in development, we could have had 3-4 Duke Nukem games instead, and it's probable at least one of those would have been better than what we eventually got.
One of my favorite English words is: kakorrhaphiophobia
Abnormal fear of failure
Kakorrhaphiophobia is an abnormal, persistent, irrational fear of failure. In clinical cases, it's debilitating: the fear of even the most subtle failure or defeat is so intense that it restricts a person from doing anything at all.
> I used to love X, but now it's been a few years since I've done X. What changed? At some point, everything got serious. [1]
> I started to only want to publish the best things, so I didn't publish at all. ...
> When I try to make the best thing, I become less happy, actually I become paralyzed. ...
> When I try to make the best thing, it feels different. It feels like I'm trying to prove something to someone instead of trying to discover something for myself. ... I'm just me, so I should make me things.
Pleasantly surprised to have chanced upon this piece of writing which has, in a few short paragraphs, captured a series of complex emotions I'd think are common among creators.
Practically I think it helps to be in touch with a community of creators who can offer support, guidance and empathy.
Personally I am far from mastering my emotions to the point where I'm comfortable putting my not-best creations up for public criticism/discussion while simultaneously recognizing the need to build up courage and wisdom to do so. I think for some this aversion partly stems from their upbringing's (family, education system, peer expectations) lack of openness/encouragement to exploration and failure to tolerate failure (failure comes hand in hand with exploration).
While eschewing failure appears to be of little detriment to the "cog in the machine", cultures that have yet figured out how to discuss, accept, and tolerate failures are destined to avoid innovation. People who are serious about creating/innovating should find means of coping with people who are overly critical/ dismissive of "not-best" iterative attempts.
Footnotes:
[1] Took the liberty of generalizing the author's post by replacing the act of publishing which was the author's original focus to "X" with the intention of having "X" being any activity.
Yes Iteration is great. That is the reason I love TDD so much. You can iterate, nothing you write has to be perfect but continuous improvement soon creates something that is much better than what I would have made if I had set out to write something perfect.
One of the worst things about the internet is the way it brings the top 0.01% of performers to your attention at all times. You will never be that good at everything you want to be good at, you might not ever get that good at even one thing you want to be good at.
I constantly fall into the trap of writing for others. It's so easy to forget I'm mostly writing for my own interest or to find out what I think about something. The act of publishing is a simple desire to share my journey with others (and hopefully engage them in conversation so I might learn from them as well).
Last year a friend shared a quote with me: "Writing is an act of ego, and you might as well admit it. Use its energy to keep yourself going." (William Zinsser, On Writing Well)
Or if you'd like a more esoteric source, how about the Tao Te Ching: "When you are content to be simply yourself and don't compare or compete, everybody will respect you." (Tao Te Ching, Stephen Mitchell translation)
I might be completely wrong, but these days I believe everyone is insecure to some degree and just create this “best” facade because don’t want to look worse than the rest that are bragging to be at least aiming for the best.
What is sad to me is that a lot of times I perceive that society lauds the bragging ones and overlooks who sincerely (and bravely) admit their “weaknesses”.
Hey I read your notes on Dr. Yapko's lecture on depression which led me to watch the lecture and I found it immensely helpful. Do you have any other resources you would recommend?
I'm glad you found it helpful. I have some one-off articles like this one: https://www.davidsongifted.org/gifted-blog/dabrowskis-theory... However, in my case I mostly connect it with neuroticism on which I have an immense bunch of information piecing it all together. It seems to be sensitivity and neurotic qualities that are most connected with what led towards a rather strong depression.
Adding to this, I also did a summary of a book from Ernest Becker way back in the day, and the section on neuroticism, or how psychology is taking over from religion, and such broader societal topics you can read about here: https://www.lostbookofsales.com/notes/the-denial-of-death-by...
It's quite some brutal and heavy reading, but then again, if it helps you understand the condition better then it's for the best I guess...
I'm not a native English speaker and I was wondering why he wrote "me things" instead of "my things" 3 times.
Is it some kind of slang ? or kind of informal, or funny, or childish, or empathetic way to speak ?
There is no will of looking down on what he wrote when I write childish in my question.
I just don't get the nuance associated to this expression.
"My things" are things that are mine, that I own or control. When I buy a book, or a car, or a spoon, it becomes my book, or car, or spoon. But that doesn't mean it was made with me in mind.
A "me thing", and this is just my interpretation, is something that is "about, of, or from me." If one tries to create the "best thing", it's impossible, because it's always possible to imagine another version that's somehow better. In trying to create a "best thing", I will strip or polish away aspects of myself that I see in what I create, because I'm chasing an ideal that is "outside of me", "objective", "universal".
If I instead choose to create a "me thing", that means accepting and celebrating that the thing I create will be a reflection of me, something that no one else can create, because it's imbued with the spirit of that who created it, namely, me.
Does that help, Laurent? It's not formal, grammatical English. It's not a common idiom, or a phrase I've seen elsewhere. But I think I intuitively understand what the author is saying, and I hope this explanation helps you understand too.
This isn't totally unique to software engineering (and broadly speaking knowledge, science and maybe even content in general) but I feel it's better placed here than anywhere else.
We're in a near global, near zero-marginal-cost environment.
If you build a broom that's mediocre, someone can still sweep with it and it's worth something.
In this realm though, if you build a mediocre version of something that already exists in a better form, it's likely worth nothing.
That shouldn't keep anyone from enjoying building mediocre things - which might be the only path to get into a position to build great things.
But it does make sense if your goal is to have an impact with the specific thing you're working on.
> In this realm though, if you build a mediocre version of something that already exists in a better form, it's likely worth nothing.
That is technically true, though realistically, many companies will spend money implementing mediocre projects. Alternatively, a company might lose their edge and slip into a mediocre mode after gaining great market share.
In other words, while in long-enough run, you are right that such companies will not "make it," they will happily pay mediocre salaries for mediocre programmers in the meantime. Consequently, "being a mediocre engineer" and "building mediocre things" is a sufficient and realistic career goal.
Depends on the marketing and advertising budget. Plenty of mediocre products have made their companies billions of dollars, and become hugely successful in their specific industries. It's very true that software engineering is a near zero cost, global environment, but that doesn't necessarily meant the best products win every time.
The author made a mistake. They defined "best" incorrectly, as something that is polished or up to some specific technical standard.
In terms of making things, the best should be more in line with being able to express yourself fully, not in terms of some pre-defined metric such as views or approval from the close-minded. Thus, a random spontaneous post can be much better than a well-researched one if it fulfils that criterion.
This can likely be related to us using our websites as a portfolio and a resume, too. And it does indeed become paralyzing if you want to always make a good impression and you can't goof around anymore.
My solution will be: have 2 blogs. One strictly professional where you post HOWTOs, and another one where you post anything and everything.
I went for that solution. Got a main blog were I post more polished stuff and a microblog. On the latter I can just post spur-of-the-moment content. Also significantly lowered the barrier of posting to the microblog by just typing in a Notion page that's rendered to html and rss every few minutes.
There are many different things that can be best because people value different things.
It's pretty easy to be best at one thing if it's not the currently most popular thing.
You probably don't even need to try to be best; as long as there is something you care about, you will probably be one of the best at that.
An example of that is that the computer I use is the best computer I have ever used but it's far from the fastest one (which most people seem to care about).
It seems like most things compete for the same type of best, which just makes everything the same, because everything is trying to be the same.
This is boring because I often want something else.
The best way to get anywhere is not to try to be the best, but to allow yourself to be another best.
I feel this. Often I work on one thing for a long time trying to make it the best thing ever. Iterations get slower and smaller or take longer and require more effort. Nice to work on new things carefree for the simple love of doing the work and enjoying early progress.
Had to start taking this approach with designing hobbyist vintage electronics related kits. Everyone has their input on what would be "the best," sometimes there's even broad consensus (e.g. Internet polls show a very clear "favorite option").
Trouble is, those things often weren't popular and ended up not being worth the time, money, and effort to do a run of kits. I still don't know if that's because I was more fired up for the things I wanted to do and less for the things everyone said they wanted...or just that what everyone said they wanted wasn't novel or different or whatever.
Yesterday someone posted[0] a project I've been working on, and, while it didn't get much traction, I did get a comment that struck me. They said what I made was "very advanced."
Like, holy hell, I'm just trying to keep the lights on by doing some small thing every day. Apparently it pays off over time though, and it's helpful to have someone point that out to you.
I think sometimes it's easy to forget how far you've come when you're in the thick of it day in and out.
The way we make large accomplishments is through a long series of small steps. How do you eat an elephant, and all that.
One of my favorite moments in a large project is at the end, when I'm looking at the completed project as a whole. It looks huge and enormously complicated and I can barely believe that it was me that did it.
This post is about the difference between art and design.
Artists make art because there is something they want to display to the world for their own reasons, irrespective of the desires of the world. That's not necessarily a bad thing. Great art is impactful to humans beyond the artist.
Design, on the other hand, is about influencing people first and foremost, and causing to take action in some way (could be a protest, or buying something, or simply clicking a button). Because of this, a designer strives to offer "the best", because that causes maximal impact.
I make software to help people solve a problem. It's not meant to be an art piece on display, and it's also not intending to influence them in any way. It's just meant to help them accomplish a task they were already doing, preferably without altering the way they do it.
I guess I do neither art nor design, but engineering.
For my own projects, that only I will ever use, I don't want or need them to be the best that I can do. 80% of the way is more than sufficient -- plus, I like the things I use to be imperfect, have personality, and not seem new and perfect.
When I'm working on a project for someone else, I want it to be the best that I can possibly make it. Even then, cost and time constraints make it rare that I can accomplish the best result possible -- but I can get 90% there.
This reminds me of http://reddit.com/r/windowshots , a subreddit created over a decade ago with the rule, "Post a photo taken right now out the nearest window"; the best part about it was how real and unstaged they all were.
Every now and then someone would post some beautiful vista clearly taken at a well-chosen time and I'd get all annoyed.
As a child and in my pre-teen years I've not been good at sports. I was also a little chubby until around the age of 12. I did some swimming, but I sucked at it so much that I eventually just quit. I also tried judo, then since the class was free on a condition that the students represent the class in competitions I had to compete in one. Had been beaten in a ridiculously simple way by my opponent in the first 10 seconds of the match-up. Then my opponent was also beaten by someone else, so I was out of the competition pool.
Towards the end of my second year of college I signed up for ballroom dancing class. College is about ten years too late to start a career in most sports, ballroom dancing is no exception. However, I persisted. The reasons were complex and it wasn't really the "character strength" or anything like that... until about four years in when me and my partner were representing the senior (yeah, in ballroom you are a senior once you are 18+) division of our dancing club we were competing in the regional yearly contest.
We ended up being in the 3'rd place out of 16 couples. But that doesn't even begin to describe what it was like to get there. For months, hell or high water we'd rehearse 2-6 hours a day. We'd sewn our own outfits. My partner cooked me lunches sometimes because she knew I skipped eating to get to the rehearsal. One day she sprained her ankle and I carried her downstairs and to the cab.
But it wasn't just "hardship". Two other couples from our club who were close with us would often go to a local pub after rehearsals. We'd dance in the pub, mostly to get free drinks, but really, to show off. We'd spend weekend nights at other (older) couple's place re-watching VHS tapes of Donnie Burns countless times. We shared small victories of getting a gig of teaching dancing in a local school, or mourned defeats when the leading dancer from our junior division broke up with her partner and they didn't go the the country contest.
Until that moment when we won the 3'rd place I had no idea what it really feels like to try to be the best. The brief moment when during the dance you look at the audience, and you see moms who came to root for their kids at the side of the dancing hall screaming at the top of their lungs "number seven is the best!", and you realize that you are the "number seven". Your coach getting overly emotional and then running to the dressing room to prep you for the next round. Partners younger sister spending an hour on powdering and painting your partner's face and then crying being overcome with emotion seeing her sister on the dance floor.
Never in my life had I felt so acutely the joy from doing something and being good at it. It's just a feeling that you'd never come across if you never compete against a lot of other dedicated opponents and with a good chance of winning. It's in the moments like this that you feel that your efforts were rewarded, hardship justified, that you accomplished something. I'm in my mid 40's, and those moments etched into my memories, they are as fresh as they were the day after. It's what in large part made my life worth living. I cannot imagine how someone could choose mediocrity to be their life goal when they could have attempted to be the best.
Damn, I tried really hard to be good at computers and only achieved mediocrity. It was lonely, made me miss lots of other stuff in life and now I can only try to just be barely competent. I am really happy for you, but it just reminded that I have almost surely missed my shot at life and at getting those kind of memories. Hey at least I get to live in interesting times.
I found that something to help is to just shamelessly share my stuff in tiny bits, and people who are interested will reach out, and others will say nothing. But I get a small bit of feedback and I get a small dose of accomplishment, even though the things I share I am not really that happy with myself and I want to do better.
I had some similar thoughts a few days ago. In personal projects, it's better to value the process rather than the end result. This way, you get excited by playing around with a thing and discovering new aspects about it. So what if the final result is crap? If you put the hours in and value the process, eventually the result naturally shapes itself.
I am a security engineer so the bar for acceptable is very very high. It can make it very hard to justify taking the easy route even for personal projects, because others will copy those bad habits into enterprise software.
> others will copy those bad habits into enterprise software.
Who cares? You can't martyr yourself to other peoples' ignorance. Right tool or technique, right place, right time: people bear their own responsibility for learning these, or for finding out about them when the need arises.
There's a comment somewhere else in this thread about how developers need to learn the difference between building a shed and building a skyscraper. I think that comment is spot on. Sometimes a shed is fine.
Got on reddit and took my activity as a part of learning process. Getting things out, discussing with like minded people is something I strive for. It got me into much useful mindset than "perfecting the products"
One can try to make 'me things', and strive to make them good enough, or good, or even to their best extent, but not necessarily the best out there, at least always.
For me the noticable distinction is between whether I want to create something to express myself (never works out) or for a practical purpose (works out more often than not).
Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, and I really wish somebody had told this to me.
All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But it’s like there is this gap. For the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good. It’s not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not that good.
But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you. A lot of people never get past that phase. They quit.
Everybody I know who does interesting, creative work they went through years where they had really good taste and they could tell that what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be. They knew it fell short. Everybody goes through that.
And if you are just starting out or if you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month you know you’re going to finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you’re going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions.
I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It takes awhile. It’s gonna take you a while. It’s normal to take a while. You just have to fight your way through that.
—Ira Glass