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Comment by jagger27 | Hacker News Reader

What assessment is appropriate? I feel strikingly similar to the OP.

> I feel strikingly similar to the OP

I'm glad you said that. If you feel comfortable doing so, could you share an anecdote? If a few people describe this from different angles perhaps more will come out of the woodwork and offer some solutions.

I think the person you were replying to was gently suggesting to see a psychiatrist.

Sure. This is an extreme example. I'm just starting my third of university software engineering and I've been dreaming up a moderately ambitious (but technically straightforward) CRUD web app since early in my first year. Since then I've flipped and switched between countless frameworks and languages, shelved, reassessed, unshelved, reshelved, and scrapped many basic prototypes. Only recently I've made some progress towards a prototype I'm happy with, but most of the motivation for that came from a recent successful launch of a service spookily similar to my concepts.

Not sure how relevant it is, but I've also had to retake multiple theory courses in my time at school so far. Calculus, linear algebra, discreet structures.

In terms of seeking professional help, I'm seeking some myself this week, though admittedly for social and general anxiety (related or not to my productivity, I'm not sure).

See, I'm out in the industry now but back when I was studying I could have written almost exactly the same thing. I wish you all the best.

This is analysis paralysis. It's not a mental deficiency, but rather an anti-pattern usually brought on by insecurity and lack of knowledge about which decisions are actually important:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analysis_paralysis

The way out of it is just to pick something and see how far it takes you, accepting that you may have to backtrack and redo stuff in the future. There's this myth that experts got that way through good decisions; no, usually experts got that way because they made a lot of bad decisions really quickly and dealt with the consequences, and so now they know not to make them again.

Exactly. A quote I read recently: "Successful people are those that make mistakes when nobody is looking"

The way this works for me is that ideas in and of themselves are easy: you have a mental image of how it works (a web page!) and maybe articulated a few sentences about how the parts fit together. The thing is, implementation is much more complicated and tedious than this. "Oh, a site with users, posts, likes, tags, and search." Then you start getting into it and parts start taking you a week and then your brain starts tumbling over itself, conflicted between how easy the idea is to explain and how involved the production of it is.

Let's go to the redoubtable Yegge and his concept of "Shit's Easy Syndrome":

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2009/04/have-you-ever-legali...

Stick with it. The set-up is long, but it pays off handsomely.

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