Hacker News Reader

Excellent post. Since you took the time to write it, some advice:

When you have been in the field for many more years, you will hopefully come to see that there are an infinite variety of gradations between people's skills, interests, capabilities, weaknesses, and that all are contextual, circumstantial. Formative time in the competitive crunch of youthful academia being distilled into a number, comparing our numbers with each other, seeing higher numbers are better, calling them "smarter," etc. That creates an illusion, one nearing obsolescence. There is no "smarter." People, and the world, are three dimensional, not one. And everyone has a narrow band in which they can be a superstar, with luck generally dictating whether one gets to spend time there.

Re: one specific activity you mention- "reading technical books/articles..."- there is a BIG difference between "consuming" activities and "producing" activities. Consumption produces certain kinds of growth that can be exhibited in conversation, in context, but is not directly measurable as output. If it motivates you to work on changing your behavior, instead of reading every night, write instead. Find your voice. Build the capability for technical storytelling. If it is not presently a skill, it will at first be awful, and hard. But with practice you may find yourself with a habit that produces several pieces a week. To a first approximation, that's usually all there is about what you are seeing- someone who writes rather than reads.

Be well!

You need to get rid of the expectation of being exceptional. You can lead a good life without being in the top 1% of accomplishments and abilities, just need to rearrange your priorities.

One thing, like you said, accept yourself as your are, do not compare with people on HN, on Linkedin, wherever. There will always be people better then you, the reasons are in genes, nurture, connections, luck. There are lots of people who are less smarter than you as well - will you advise them to keep comparing themselves with yourself? Or rather work with what they have?

Ease your anxiety, find joy in self-development, do not just push yourself harder. You cannot replace your genes, focus on being better then yourself a year ago, not someone else.

Another thing, 10 years of experience - you may be around 30+. It's time to take care more about your physical and mental health, start a family, reflect. You may become more efficient if you start doing diverse activities: build connections, create, write, connect to your emotions. You may regret in future that you spent so many hours on consuming technical literature.

Critical for you is to create rather than consume - you may see it after many years of book reading. In the end, you will have a lot of knowledge in your head, but not much to show the world. You will have a lot of wide knowledge, but will lack the depth. So pick a topic, do not go deep into research - start building naive stuff, then read more, improve, write about it. Any topic you are passionate about.

Connect to people in industry who you like, ask for advice or collaboration.

I am a classical musician. my job is very much a job of delivering on a high level, because everything I do can be heard by at least 4 people (immediate colleagues) at best, and a couple of thousands (at "worst").

My talent has always been my ability to practice. I could spend more hours, more focused than most of my peers. I, frankly, have a talent for spending a lot of time in what Vygotsky would call the zone of proximal development.

Despite all that there are loads of better bassoon players. When I was 25 I had to take a step back and realize I wasnt one of those amazing players. No sane amount of practice would get me to their level (which they reached by practicing less than me!).

Whatever we read into the term "talent" I think we can all agree that it isn't fair. We all sooner or later have to chose between our own sanity and trying to push it further.

I have found that taking a step back has actually made me a better player. Getting a child and being forced to distance myself from what so long was a large part of my identity was all in all good for me. It just forced me to be a bit more fatalistic and accept that I won't become much better than I am today.

For sure, for any kind of skill, there are always going to be people who are better than you at it. It's just that I'm not sure that better is what matters anyways. It seems to me that what's fazing you is not exactly people's skill, but how they apply themselves: you're impressed by the stuff they output into the world. And the point is that you too have a unique perspective. Even if you don't believe it, I do. Because all this learning that you go through is filtered through your own experience, so you're bound to end up with viewpoints that differ to others', even if you study the exact same thing.

Which is why I'd say, stop reading and start writing. Of course it's not going to sound great at first: One, you're just starting; Two, the real work that goes into writing well is in fact editing. But stick at it (like that guy - hundreds of articles!), and sure enough, you'll find your voice.

At school, grades are the thing that pushes you further, and it's little wonder we get stuck in this pattern of comparing and benchmarking. But in the real world, a much better motivator is helping others. Somewhere out there is someone who's struggling on stuff you've long filed away as obvious. Think of the choices you've made over the years, about what works vs what doesn't. These are your thoughts, and - written down - someone else might find them extremely on point.

The articles and projects you see are nothing more that that - a manifestation of a viewpoint. Benjamin Franklin said: "There are three things extremely hard: steel, a diamond, and to know one's self."

It's probably not that so many people are technically better, but that you've not quite found what your schtick is. But everyone has it, it's just about finding it.

>I jumped to a personal blog of an engineer who was writing impressively deep thoughts about unit testing, dependency injection, Go, Java, hardware, architecture, backend, frontend, performance, ... Very, very thoughtful posts. I would not be able to reflect so deeply on those topics, even if I am relatively familiar with them. I have no other choice than believing I am stupid, at least in comparison to such person.

Do you write? Yes, your first draft wouldn't be as good as their 10th or 20th draft. No-one can write like that. No book or impressive blog post you read is a first draft. Try this talk on How To Write a Great Research Paper[0] (Good for any kind of writing, not just papers) He mentions how everyone feels their own ideas are pathetic. But you start by writing down the pathetic idea. That suggests other questions, connections.. It may develop into something not so pathetic. You don't write about your thoughts - you find out what they are by writing. I've written one academic-type paper, and 95% of what's in it, I learnt by writing it, and wouldn't have learnt otherwise. Which was a surprise! Whatever I wrote, there were some questions remaining, which were easy enough to answer (your brain does it automatically for you), and that continued until I was way past where I ever thought I'd be, or even hoped to be. Studying is great, but it's other people's thoughts. By writing you develop your own.

Just get busy doing what you're doing, stop comparing yourself with others. That's no way to live; it's torturing yourself. Learn to be kind to yourself. Would you continually nag a friend about how much more brilliant everyone else is? Sounds like you also eliminated fun from your life :-( Good luck!

Be careful of how you live your life, you may end up having to live your life that way.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WP-FkUaOcOM

Is it imposter syndrome? Or just being unwilling to come to terms with the fact that other people will inevitably be better than you?

Fair point, I changed the wording. Thanks.

You should try to make peace with it. It’s no way to live always being upset someone is younger and smarter than you. Keep working hard, but do it for yourself.

I am, myself, still struggling with how un-smart I am. Not stupid, but just so much to learn from people I meet (in real life, or online) yet so little spare time.

Same here buddy. I’m 30 and self teaching myself 2nd/3rd year undergrad math courses that I never learned since I wasn’t smart enough to pass the prereqs. I suppose like you I’m also considered competent at my job, but it’s not lost on me that people younger than me mastered this material a decade ago and are publishing cutting edge research. That’s just how it goes.

This past year I’ve had the misfortune of having an immediate family member suffer from a grave illness. It made me realize feeling bad about myself was just narcissism, and I need to continue to be my best but also spend less time feeling sorry for myself.

Best of luck to you in 2020 :)

Look at it this way. Your abilities/worth/knowledge/whatever are multidimensional and can be mapped on a "Radar Chart"(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar_chart). They can also be classified as "Inherent" or "Incidental/Accidental". Thus there can be no single "smartness" index defining a person.

Thus for example, i am "un-smart" on both Web Dev and Statistics/Probability axes. The former is Incidental and easily fixed in a couple of months of work but the later is Inherent and needs a lot more time for assimilation. Thus the same word "un-smart" actually conveys two different meanings in the two different axes and one should not conflate the two.

Thanks for this post it really resonates with me. I struggle with never feeling good enough. To be honest it has gotten progressively worse since transitioning to HN from other forums. Don't get me wrong the quality of content here is great, but the overall atmosphere here seems to be self-harming.

When comparing yourself with purple squirrels, you are comparing yourself with thousands of internet personas with differing ideas of what a good life is. It is hard to separate fact from fiction and excess from normalcy. The more hardcore people become, the more adoration they seem to get from the crowd. It is classic fanaticism.

The tech industry perpetuates self harming behavior: social isolation, perpetual dissatisfaction, judgmental behavior, envy and greed. It can feel like a death spiral.

For me I am looking to change my priorities in 2020. I would like to focus on what makes me happy in my professional and not what makes you happy.

Good luck to you.

You are being too hard on yourself.

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/03/04/self-doubt/

We all suffer from "imposter syndrome" (at least the self-aware honest ones) which exacerbates the above.

>I see people posting brilliant work,

Nope; much of it is buzzword-bingo, polishing of superficialities, changing of times, jumping on the current bandwagon and echo chambers. Quite rare to see any real "brilliance".

Think of it as a normal distribution curve which used to be tall and thin now having become short and broad. More people exposed to more ideas and therefore more output to be found but real value has diminished (and whatever little, lost in all the noise which has increased exponentially).

We need to distinguish between Knowledge for Knowledge-sake vs Job-sake and adapt our expectations about ourselves accordingly.

If you make the terrible mistake of going to graduate school and then study in any serious depth something that ends up becoming “blog/HN popular”, you’ll have (in my experience) the experience of realizing how many extremely interesting blog posts are just people mashing together one-quarter understood concepts. You’ll also realize some people are surface-level boring but extremely competent, and possibly become afraid of them and their powers.

As far as I'm concerned, you're putting in the work on progressing technically.

Being publicly seen to be productive is kind of a different skill. Probably good for fame and fortune, but most people probably just do good work without much note.

One thing I've discovered over the years, is that some people who are truly excellent technically have rather significant deficits in other respects that severely limit this advantage. If you're a reasonably well-rounded person and not an ass, I'll prefer you over the rock star.

Good post. Don't be so harsh on yourself. "A journey of thousand miles begins with a small step" - Lao Tzu. Just start doing something. Do not wait for the idea that checks all the boxes of perfection. It may turnout to be perfect.

Don’t play zero sum games, like defining your worth by “being the best”.

Play games where you can advance independent of other people’s advancements (like being healthy, or able to perform some skill).

As long as I can eat, who cares?

Someone being smarter than me is their problem.