> I’ve always been nagged by my conviction that I’m not working as diligently or effectively as I ought to be. Sadly I’m not getting any better at not letting that bug me.
Maybe this has been discussed in depth elsewhere, but my question in response to this is: how does one/how do we end up feeling like this? And how can you work toward not feeling this way?
It's a broad question because there are many underlying causes.
Some people have unrealistically high expectations for what can be accomplished. As engineers, it's easy for us to visualize the big picture of how things would look when they're finished, but forget all of the details and difficulties that must be overcome along the way.
Some people spread themselves too thin across too many projects, such that none of them see any rapid progress. I know a lot of brilliant people who could accomplish great things if they'd just make the choice to stop all of their side projects, learn to say "no" to new requests, and pick one initiative to be their main focus.
Some people think they want to deliver results and finish things, but when it comes down to it they actually prefer the craft part of the process rather than the finishing part. They'd rather write and re-write the same code 20 times until they've perfected it and generalized it for every possible situation, rather than ship an imperfect version that gets things done.
And some people genuinely aren't working diligently or effectively, usually because they haven't yet learned how. I see this a lot in younger people I've mentored: They aren't getting much work done, but they also can't figure out where all of their time is going every day. In one case, I worked with someone who couldn't figure out why they were so unproductive and exhausted every day until they enabled a time tracker on their phone and discovered that they were losing over 8 hours every day to playing on their phone screen. The worst part was that they weren't really enjoying it, either. They just got into the habit of wasting time on social media and it spiraled out of control. Needless to say, getting a handle on that was life-changing in terms of what they could accomplish everyone else in their lives.
I've resolved a lot of personal issues that are not supposed to be fixable and that makes it easier to feel like "Whatever I accomplish today, it's enough." I set goals for what I need to do next and I try to be realistic about how much I can actually do and I have made my peace with the fact that I'm only one person, I can only do so much.
Either the road rises up to meet me or it doesn't. There are parts of it I have no control over and if the world just doesn't want me to succeed at certain things, I simply won't through no fault of my own.
There has to be fertile ground for a thing. Thinking otherwise is often an oversized ego talking or some kind of baggage from broken mental models people get fed.
As a result there tends to be a mismatch between the expected and actual efficiency of the work. Even if the complexities are not one’s fault, overly optimistic expectations are. Furthermore, it’s simply frustrating that implementing seemingly straightforward ideas often takes so long. There is a conviction that there must be a better, more efficient way, and that one could obviously do better.
I suspect that there is a correlation with an affinity for abstract thinking, because abstracting from the details causes underestimating the required effort, perpetuating the mismatch.
Embracing the mismatch and giving up the expectations also means giving up one’s aspirations ("I should be able to do this") to a certain extent, which is hard if they are an integral part of one’s self-image.
This is also touching on burnout. There's just a kind of programming work that is mentally draining and unfulfilling because the underlying problems or mistakes are entirely self-inflicted. Spending time fixing shit that didn't have to be broken.
If you have some sense of your limitations, you no longer can really feel guilty about being lazy for this. It may be worse though, because then you can feel bad about your capability. Hopefully that is something you can just accept.
He was perhaps smarter than me and worked harder. I asked him what it was that motivated him, and he said that it was a sense of guilt that had been instilled in him by his parents. I told him that guilt is a destructive motivator, at least in the long run. He replied that it actually worked well for him and he was glad to have it.
I also am sometimes motivated by guilt. Does it bother me because I'm more aware of it, or am I right in thinking that there are better motivations within reach?
Time alone not working helps this, meditating helps, anything that gets you away from the fracas of life. But also the best way is to develop things you care deeply about that have nothing to do with your job. May be a sick family member, could be a community organization, could be time to play the piano.
For me personally, this feeling arises when I become overly focused on an end-state. My mitigation is focusing more on the process and trusting that, over time, the end-goal becomes a natural outcome of an effective process.
Maybe it's just that he notices, as any introspective person might, that you just start doing the same damn thing over and over after 20/30/40 years in harness.
He probably should take up the piano.
I just accidentally raised $1,931 yesterday for Tensorfork Labs, a non-profit I started ... also yesterday. https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1431462744906141696
I was blown away that everyone suddenly offered so much support. We have people filling out notion docs (http://wiki.tensorfork.com/) and an active Google Chat chatroom with 12 interesting people in it. And to top it all off, Nat Friedman (Github CEO) DM'ed me last night and I'll be talking to him in approximately three hours.
You'd think I'd feel thrilled and like I'm extremely effective. I am thrilled, but all I feel is that I haven't done as much as I could. Talking and walking are two different things, and now that we've talked, it's time to walk the walk. But the truth is, I felt guilty sleeping most of today while everyone else has been talking excitedly. I felt that if I pushed myself a little harder, I could've been more effective, or more diligent, or lived up to my responsibilities more.
But that path leads to burnout. Good work is a marathon, and things take time. (Unfortunately it sometimes seems ~impossible to internalize that, and the temptation to sprint is always there.)
If you're looking for a mental hack to make the feeling go away, the only thing that helps me is to remind myself that even small deltas have value. My personal goal is to make imagenet2012 accessible to every programmer. It's a small, obscure itch that I am scratching for myself. But it's mine, and I can fix it, which is good enough.
So just do what you can, where you can, and be authentic. No one can know how things will play out. Doing your best is all you can ask of yourself.
I find there's a perpetual equilibrium between feeling confident in your output / yourself, and recognizing that much of what you do will likely be incomplete, messy, sub-optimal. This seems to be a fundamental part of being human as it extends across all types of creation.
Authors have stream-of-consciousness to overcome writers' block. Athletes get the 'yips'. Developers have probably heard "if you're not ashamed of your MVP, you took too long to ship." (does anyone know who originally said this?)
Doubt is a massively powerful and underrated tool that tends to signify the presence of many new variables. It's like a beacon saying "hey this is unprecedented" and the pursuit of any challenge will naturally yield unprecedented outcomes. In your context, you went from "hey let's do a thing" to "the Github CEO wants to call me and talk about this thing and there are multiple people that want to do this thing" and that is pretty damn unprecedented.
I've experienced >3 truly remarkable situations like you, and wandered between inflated ego, utter confusion, guilt, and pure existentialism. Honestly, I'm glad I felt such a spectrum of emotions because in retrospect those lenses provide me a lot of clarity when I invariably encounter another entirely baffling scenario.
I think your self-assessment is as balanced as it can be, and I'm certain that as you continue, you'll adjust the weights (heh) and become more comfortable... or maybe not. Maybe a hallmark of being a creator, founder, leader, is to double down on the discomfort, and rest later. Kind of like a marathon.
I'm following along. Good luck.
P.S. if you see this in time can you ask Nat what he thinks of the federated wiki? https://github.com/WardCunningham/Smallest-Federated-Wiki