On Living Below Your Potential
novelog.com
novelog.com
When I graduated, I had some minor successes with my independent programming projects. Revamped the software for FictionAlley.org. Wrote a fairly popular Haskell tutorial. Ported Arc to JavaScript. All of these got me attention, but they weren't really things that people used, they were just idle diversions for some niche communities.
It's only in the last couple years that my career took off. We revamped the Google Search page in 2010 - the first successful major visual redesign of websearch in 10 years. Identified authors for a few million pages on the web. Made perhaps a billion people happy for a few moments with various doodles & easter eggs. And helped out with the GFiber launch last week.
What made the difference, I think, was that I stopped caring so much about living up to my potential and started caring more about being a part of important things. Basically all of those world-changing projects that you see in the news are team efforts, which many people contribute to. And we hunt for the individuals behind them because we want to find heroes, but really, there are no heroes. Only groups of people working their asses off to make things happen.
Maybe the secret to reaching your potential is as Randy Pausch said in his Last Lecture: realize that to accomplish anything worthwhile, you'll need help from other people. And then focus on being the type of person that other people want to help.
It also seems to be a lot more fun this way.
(As a side note, it strikes me how awkward the English language is when trying to describe group efforts I've been a part of. I want to use "we" to describe these efforts, because it's inaccurate to say "I redesigned the Google Search page" or "I launched Google Fiber last week" - there were a whole bunch of other people involved too. But at the same time, it's inaccurate to say "we", because there was a different group of people involved for each of those, and I'm really describing my career arc through a variety of these projects.)
It seems to me that landing a nice job at Google, more or less directly out of college, has probably contributed more to your feeling good about yourself than the way you think about potential.
By the same token, the OP's useless feelings probably have more to do with having little to show at the age of 30 and currently being unemployed than in lacking some "secret".
If OP gets a nice job with Google then I am sure it will help to realize that accomplishing things requires help from coworkers, but for an unemployed person without connections it really means nothing to practice "being the type of person that other people want to help."
You have done some things right and have also been fortunate, that doesn't mean that people who don't have what you have just failed to be "the type of person that other people want to help."
Also FWIW, the degree to which I enjoyed those employers correlated very little with the amount of external success they had. I really liked working with my friends on the dot-com, even though our funding got pulled after 3 months and our net new userbase (we started with an existing website) was negative. I really liked working on FictionAlley, even though as a volunteer project I never made any money off it and as a Harry Potter fansite it's not like it resulted in much prestige. I really hated working on financial software, even though it paid well and (to the outside world at least) seems complicated and prestigious.
There are definite perks to working at Google. But in the grand scheme of things, from the inside, getting paid well and having your work viewed by billions of people are relatively minor ones. They're akin to the free food and outrageous company outings: they make you feel good and remove some stress from day-to-day life. The perk that makes the biggest difference in my life, I've found, is working in a friendly, trusting culture with good people who get shit done.
You can replicate that in a niche community much smaller and less influential than Google. Hell, if it hadn't meant living with my parents, I would've been happy to work on FictionAlley indefinitely.
If so, what advice would you have for a person who isn't working at the Googles or Twitters of the world (read: bleeding-edge hip tech companies) but at least has the same sort of mentality?
Basically, the cause was my startup. It'd been my dream to found my own company since I was about 15 years old, then the stars aligned when I was about 25. I had a cofounder that was very into the idea, my previous skillset was a good match, I had money in the bank to fund myself, and my parents were supportive. So I went full-time & full-speed on it, thinking "This is it. I'm going to make my dreams come true."
The honeymoon lasted for about 2-3 months, and then I realized I was miserable - miserable enough to feel my sanity fraying, in fact. I was doing basically nothing but coding, and it felt incredibly lonely & isolating. I thought that was exactly what I wanted to be doing, but...apparently not.
Google came around through an incredibly random series of chance meetings. I decided my startup wasn't going anywhere in Jun 2008 (my cofounder had quit in April to go to business school), when a YC startup contacted me looking for a cofounder. They ended up offering me 25% of the company, and that was when I knew I wasn't ready to be a cofounder - here was everything I'd dreamed of, and I just couldn't do it. Applied to FriendFeed, but was rejected, then figured maybe I shouldn't discount big companies - after all, virtually all of FriendFeed's team cut their teeth at a big company (mostly Google). Talked with a friend at EBay that summer just to get a sense what life at a big company is like, it didn't seem too terrible. TipJoy contacted me about being their employee #1 right around the time of Sequoia's "The sky is falling" memo, which I actually entertained serious thoughts about (I liked the founders), but I was like "I need to see what else is out there". Ended up being referred to Google by a friend from the HP fandom, and started there in no small part because they were the only ones hiring.
The irony is - I went to Google thinking that my dreams of having a big impact on the world were completely on hold, but at least I'd have weekends again and would probably learn a whole lot. But the more I relaxed and stopped worrying about making a big impact, the bigger my impact actually became. There was a time, shortly after the visual redesign, where I started reverting to my previous lone wolf attitude and started a couple projects all at my own initiation, where I was the sole/primary developer. Both were canceled, and many of my other 20% projects never went anywhere. When I started asking around about what else was going on at the Googleplex, I ended up as an early engineer for Google's Authorship efforts (which at that point was nothing more than a dream), and consulting for the visual redesign of 2011, and doing a few of the homepage doodles. I never planned to be a part of the GFiber launch; I had other plans going on at the time, but they needed an engineer, and it seemed cool, so I just dropped my plans and volunteered to help out.
I'm still not all the way there yet - I still have occasional dreams of doing something great and want to just work all night to force my vision through. I suspect that if I could actually banish them, and accept what I am as completely enough even if I never accomplished another thing in my life, I'd be ready to found my next startup.
So, if you don't work for Google or Twitter but want to be a part of cool things, I'd start by keeping your eyes open for cool things. Ignore the tech press; they're usually the last to know about anything cool, and they usually go for the appearance of cool over actual coolness. Judge with your own eyes. Look for offhand mentions on forums, and then follow-up and research anything you see where you don't know what it is. (I found FictionAlley this way - a bunch of people were dissatisfied with fanfiction.net closing their forums in the summer of 2001, and said "We can do better", and a bunch of the writers I followed started mentioning them in review threads. I found Lisp and Haskell this way too, Lisp off Paul Graham's writings and Haskell because comp.lang.lisp dismissed it as just another "weird language"). If you have a pain point in your own life or your friends' lives, go search online to see if anyone is working on solving it, and if they are but it's not quite there yet, offer to help. Most people love offers to help on their projects.
Any advice on how to overcome the lone wolf attitude? I read your prior comments on this thread and found them very insightful, but I also figure a more pointed question could get me a more pointed answer. It feels like I'm almost there, but not quite...
Largely, it's about taking a leap of faith and trusting that you can still do great things even when they're not solely your great things. Who are you more likely to have heard of, Paul Buchheit (one of many who worked on GMail) or Fredrik Lundh (sole developer of PIL)? Tim Berners-Lee (one of many who developed the web) or Daniel Veillard (almost sole developer of libxml)?
It can also help to just think of it as an experiment - "Okay, I am reasonably financially secure for now, what happens if I stop caring so much about glory and start looking at the world around me? Will I become a complete slacker and end up doing nothing, or will I end up becoming even more successful?" And then just try it - you have relatively little to lose, after all - and see what the results are. It's also quite possible that for some people, giving up their ambition really does leave them with nothing and they sit around and play video games all day, and those people should probably stick with their hunt for glory. For me, though, I found that when I cared less about how successful I could be, I started becoming curious about what else was going on around me, and that gave me more information for better decisions, and that made me more successful anyway.
It's not about ego for me, at least I like to think it's not. I have a persistent worry that other people will screw up my great ideas, and I will spend more effort convincing them of superiority of my ingenious designs than I will ever get back. The anxiety is mostly unfounded, but it's there nonetheless. I suppose I am far too deeply convinced that my ideas are best ever. :)
Well, for that, it's probably worth remembering a finding from psychology: everybody likes their own ideas better than someone else's, simply because they're their own. And it takes a particular kind of skill to recognize the good in other people's ideas, and it's really that skill that's what makes you good at working in teams. Some of my managers have been really good at that, and they've been responsible for some great things as a result.
It also helps to rigorously test your ideas against the outside world - for me, it was the experience of doing (and failing at) the startup, over and over again, that taught me that maybe my ideas weren't so hot. In practice, there're usually lots of good ways to do something; it's often easier just to go with whatever someone else proposes simply so you can make forward progress.
The spectrum of life lived, experiences had, and lessons positively learnt aren't wide, or often enough.
Without meaningful mentors, free of personal agendas, helping you push you push yourself, self-development can slow down.
The thing is, innovation and creativity live in the mindset of possibility, not doubt.
Building one skill trumps all others: discipline. First a healthy inner-dialogue, and improving discipline every day in every way.
We easily become undisciplined, so we seek the discipline of others instead of finding our own. Some march to someone else's orders, and follow the direction of others. Everyone's doing this framework? Everyone's building this? What am I missing out on? We feel left behind when our own feet aren't moving, let alone away from time wasting, resultless things like entreporn.
It takes a lot of self-directed effort to get in, and stay in a mindset of possibility, while not getting washed away in the self-doubt of others, or the blindness of your own.
Becoming and staying self-directed and relentless is a challenge, focussed on the right things even more, everything in life will want you to fit in if you let it.
All I know is if I'm doing what everyone's doing and using what everyone's using, I'll end up like everyone else.
Perhaps this is what the OP, and the rest of this generation, is feeling: A constant nagging feeling that we are not getting everything we should be from life and that we are succumbing to societal pressures, letting ourselves become slaves to the Man for a measly paycheck every month?
A lot of studies have pointed to this phenomenon, f.ex. that students these days expect nothing less than the perfect job where they will completely realize themselves and be very comfortable financially at the same time.
I know that I have some of that feeling too, which is why I sit night and day in front of this screen and keyboard hacking away at my escape plan from the life of a corporate drone. I do sometimes wonder if I'd be happier and healthier taking a reality check of my ambitions, and what will happen to me if I fail and have to clip the ID badge back on and check in Monday morning at BigCo.
We are not suppressed like our hippie parents, but suppressed by our own expectations, which I consider far worse. We no longer play against 10-100 people in our field of expertise (locally), but against millions of people (globally).
Remarkably, it was my grandfather that pointed this out to me. He'd seen both world wars and was a really smart guy. But he'd never gotten any formal education, and was very far removed from the constant struggle to get ahead that most people today face.
I'm guessing you're pretty young. Here's a tip:
If someone knows something you don't, it's not a reflection on you. It just means they spent time to learn something different than what you learned. Don't worry: there are things you know that they don't.
The world is too big for you to know everything.
Learn what your strengths are and what your weaknesses are, so you can see how others can help you.
Believe me, when you and the guy who knows cryptography both appreciate what each brings to the table, you can create something great.
It gets harder to investigate your passions as you get older because you have more responsibilities to others, but the best thing to do when you don't know where your passion lies is to try as many different things as you can. Generally you can volunteer for things to get access to activities for which you want to go in with an attitude of if this isn't it then I'm going to do something different. You can volunteer through the various sciences, animal shelters, data gathering, politics, medical help, public service, television and radio, community service, environmental concerns, fishing, arts, etc. The nice thing about volunteering is that you can do your best and its always good enough because hey, its free for them right?
And while you're on this journey of self discovery you have to be aware which is to say you have to ask yourself at the end of the day, "How do I feel about the work I did today? Was it good? Was it great? Was it meaningful?" Listen to the inner you, shut out the voices of the world telling you what you should be doing, and find your center.
When you find it, build your life around it, make it your own. There won't be any more 'mediocre jobs' there will only be "This lets me work on this amazingly cool and important thing."
Thanks for your feed back.
Our "potential" is determined by our genetics and environment. I believe each human does his "best" and by that I mean, does what he thinks he needs to do to get the things he wants, based on his own priorities. For some people, this is sitting at home and playing games all day. For some it's writing an operating system. For some it's going to the moon.
Essentially I believe that any of us, at any given point in our lives: could not have done any better than we did. I believe we will always do what we want to do, and that's that. That will, that desire to do something by the way, it's just an illusion. It's an abstraction built upon the deterministic movement of physical phenomena.
I was told by about a million teachers in high school "oh you have such great potential, if only you applied yourself"
It took me until my mid twenties to realize that I was applying myself. I have a limited capacity for application.
Even if you aren't ultimately limited by your cleverness, your limitations in capacity for execution can thwart your career.
Thus I'm 25, no degree, hack for fun, contract work here and there, and otherwise I could care less. I can execute uninteresting work, but I have a limited tolerance for it. Perhaps its more of a blessing than I think though, because it's really cemented in my mind that I must make and sell my own products.
I want a degree. Maybe I'll get one someday.
For 99% of people out there, a degree is a institutional stamp of approval that employers seek because it's what every other employer out there does. People get a degree because it is necessary for a BigCorp job, it's a self perpetuating cycle.
But it sounds like you want to learn and research to satisfy your a curiosity within yourself which is the only case I would say an academic degree is a good thing to strive for.
The author states: "I wanted to be doing something greater, something more, that childhood emotional memory was back again, begging for more". I am all for aiming for the sky, putting in the hard work, getting out of the rat race, raising capital, becoming a billionaire, whatever. But then I step back and see the bigger picture; I try to suppress that emotional memory, try to stop being depressed because I am not swinging for the fences as I should (?) be doing. I stop comparing myself to the top 1% that frequents HN.
Then I become happy and content. Because I am alive and healthy. Because I don't have to slave away to secure my food. But this only lasts for a tiny bit and I again swiftly swim in my self-perceived ocean of mediocrity.
Help?
"As I’ve said before, we’ve learned many lessons during our time here, but if there is one I could share with you, it would be the difference between greed and happiness. It is alright to make your own happiness a priority in your life—actually, it’s quite healthy. It’s not greedy to try to make yourself happy. You just have to properly understand the difference. Greed is the acquisition of enjoyment by taking what you do not have. What most people forget, is that when you get whatever it is, you’ll only want more. Greed only begets greed. Happiness is enjoying what you have. Happiness is learning to be content with that which is good about your life. There will always be something you don’t have. There will always be something you could have done better. There will always be things you fail at. Being happy is remembering that despite this, there is still plenty to enjoy in your life. If there’s anything I can ask you to do with your short time on this Earth, it’s to be happy."
Further, from a piece of writing I did:
"I have seen many people who fail to prioritize their own happiness. I work very closely with someone who does so. They work tirelessly doing something they love, and they are quite good at it. They help countless people, and they do a fantastic job achieving everything they want. But they are miserable. In everything they do, they only see failure. They see what they have not done, and what they did not achieve, and they see the same in the actions of others. Despite their successes, which they readily recognize, they fixate upon that which they did not do. And so, no matter how much they achieve, nor how successful they are, they will always have a reason to be miserable. It’s horrifying. I cannot imagine living my life in this manner. It would be a life without purpose."
And so, try to remember, there will always be more. There will always be something you didn't do, or could have done. But focus on what you did do. How you have succeed. Accept it, and enjoy it. There is no greater standard to live up to. Love what you've done, and be happy :)
I fall into the same category as the OP and many others who replied here: I'm in my mid twenties, have all my needs covered, yet feel as if I've been missing out on some greater destiny that has been set for me.
My life is good, I have accomplished many things and I can and should be happy about them, but I find myself being "greedy" for more. I find myself looking for happiness in things (experiences and accomplishments in this case) that I don't actually possess rather than just enjoying the things that I do have.
Thank you for the insight.
The only part I didn't get was the end of the second text: > It would be a life without purpose.
I understand, that this might not seem to be a fulfilling life to you. Though, these people can still have a purpose. It doesn't have to be happiness. As an example, take the nurse or doctor who works unbearable hours in an emergency room, or the soldier who sacrifices his life for others. Some of these people might never be happy, but I would suggest, that their life has a purpose.
Thanks.
On Happiness: https://docs.google.com/document/d/11gFKnGCqW_vfp-vG_raj768Q...
Graduation speech: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1N1JYKJkEPp_ib6aB4sS_Os-z...
As the proverb went, It's bad enough comparing yourself to Isaac Newton without comparing yourself to Kimball Kinnison. Eliezar Yudkowsky, http://lesswrong.com/lw/y7/the_super_happy_people_38/
There are these sentences which you say to yourself as a child - mine was "little boy wants to have everything" (that's what I said, actually, my mother still often tells me :)). My life pretty much resembles that - I have much, I do much (too much?), but I'm still wanting (everything). I think it boils down to the question "What is life for, anyway?". The answer I like best (found it in some book) is "For feeling love and joy, in every moment". Sounds corny, but whenever I follow it, I'm feeling at peace and content.
Feeling unsatisfied with what you have is what drives you and the rest of humanity forward, but it's certainly not healthy to remain in this state constantly. I bet in most cases the root cause is a feeling of inferiority, instilled by our parents' believes (which we have adopted) or traumas in childhood. We do great things (or feel bad because we don't do them) to silence this nagging feeling. We ought to be great externally, because we don't feel great internally. We want to prove that we are no failures.
"I have the same feelings, and I suspect it's what makes many people keep reading sites like HN." Reading HN somehow makes you feel that you still have a chance, that you are still "training" with the best ones and feeling the "market competitors" (that are represented by HN readers). You didn't abandon the game and accepted to be a failure. You are not "competing" with a low rank community that you can find anywhere. Somehow in an unconscious way society around wants you to be a failure, or better they want you behind them, unless they see you as a god that they think that they cannot surpass.
"50 years ago - with our skillset (I assume the average HN reader), we would have been heroes in our local communities - teachers, engineers, perhaps inventors. There was so much low-hanging fruit for people with brains."
I'm not sure about what i'm going to say now but I think that in every community there is a limited need for people with brains. Few people with brains are enough. The problem is that nowadays there is a tendency to larger but fewer communities, meaning that less people with brains are needed, and to suceed you'll need "super brains". Not great words but I hope you (HN readers) understand the meaning.
Face it, if we're reading HN on a Saturday, probably thinking about work, we're probably saddled with the nagging feeling that we're not achieving enough. But achievement can become a dangerous addiction that makes us unhappy.
There are common themes in the book that come up in software engineering as well, like "perfect is the enemy of the good" and "the law of diminishing returns applies everywhere". It's a rational way to think about living.
And that I suppose is my point, if you don't have some Nobel cause then what drives you on? If the world doesn't provide some ready made cause then your motivation has to be intrinsic, the only problem is that depending on what your goals are (money, fame, being a better dad etc.) you can end up feeling a little grubby about your choices especially if you don't succeed.
Whereas today, we don't have a great war, or any cause that makes us feel as we're part of something greater than ourselves. We have to come up with our own things to strive for, and sometimes these don't go as planned, or depend a bit on luck and circumstances. I.e. starting a startup or finding love.
Ever since I was a young child I have always felt that there was something great I was meant to do, something beyond what I was doing at any present moment.
It's something you were meant to do, not something meant to happen to you.
But it's also pretty terrible that anyone expressing the slightest bit of self-doubt or unhappiness is publicly torn to ribbons, or at best mightily condescended to. So normatively, people must talk nothing but fake, egoistic nonsense like "crushing it" no matter where their head is really at. And severe cases of Dunning-Kruger take over the world just by acting dominant and lying about themselves, while people with knowledge and potential are left to rot just because they are shit at marketing. (Marketing is important, but it is not the only important thing)
You are right, getting what you want requires work. But please recognize that reality is not fair and is often unpredictable. So people who don't have what they want aren't just inferior people who didn't work. They are someplace you could have been with nothing but different rolls of the dice.
Even though it is whining, it is not at all unusual or impossible to understand. A little bit of compassion wouldn't kill us.
Dave McClure's "late bloomer, not a loser (I hope)" is a great recent example. http://500hats.com/late-bloomer/
Add to that pathologically stupid stupid advice it evokes, and you would have to be pretty desperate for attention to post your private problems on the internet.
Haters gonna hate, but I usually just ignore them and choose to engage with the people who choose to engage with me.
I think life is too multi-dimensional to successfully become the Übermensch.
Greatness and potential are very individual and 'multidimensional'. Not everyone who will be a great person eventually will be a great entrepreneur.
"What you want is passion. It is beyond interest. You need 20 interests, then one of them may grab you more than anything else and then you may have found your greatest love in comparison to all of the other things that interest you, and that's what passion is"
http://www.ted.com/talks/larry_smith_why_you_will_fail_to_ha...
I am reading 2% of War and Peace every day. Made it to 75% by now, and every day that I read the book I have something to look back to. Contemplative reading has second order effects as well - I feel I can concentrate better, which is very helpful given that the internet has taught our minds to jump all over the place like a monkey. I set aside an hour in the evening and do nothing but read.
Try it. If nothing else you will have read a great book. And then you will become acquainted with one of the books key characters l'Russe Bezuhoff, who seems to have had all of the same doubts that you do, only exactly 200 years earlier. :)
As to the book itself, I am the most intrigued by very detailed descriptions of the character flaws of various people. Each person in the book serves to demonstrated a certain set of weakness of the character, framed in a suitable circumstance. In each one I recognize myself (and sometimes people around me), and this creates a strange feeling - on one hand it's somewhat disturbing and disgusting when laid so baren in front of me, on the other hand it's a relief to know I am not the only one to feel or do X/Y/Z. It's also humbling to know all these things were there 200 years ago...
So, in that sense I care about all of books characters. :)
Another thing is that you're probably overwhelmed by the sheer number of characters in the book, I know that I was. Concentrated reading makes it easier to remember most people, so that helps a bit. However when it's time to re-read the book I will probably take a piece of paper and write all characters and their relationships down. Writing things down while reading a book is something I think I will need to learn to do also for other books, as well as for reasons other than following the plot development.
"I'll do whatever it takes not to move towards success, because then I will never have failed." - you, right now.
you disgust me.
For a moment I thought the post was an original call for hiring.
I'm not an expert in such things but the idea that he would do great things doesn't sound like narcisism. Narcisism is beeing in love with oneself.
What the OP describes is an internal drive to push oneself forward when the oppurtunity is given. A seed of entrepreneur, hero, leader,.. I guess not everyone has such strong incentive. He expect it and will find it normal if it happens. Which is good thing.
He expressed his frustration that it didn't happen yet and start to wonder if he is not wasting his life.
I find it very interesting from an AI perspective. We can clearly see a fundamental drive of the human behavior.
It's not much different from the love drive we have when young. We are also frustrated when we have to wait for it to happen. This frustration is shared and contributes to overcome all our fears and natural protections. Instead of waiting overwelmed by the frustration, one should prepare oneself for this moment to be attractive and make it a success.
So to the OP I would suggest to use the frustration as a push to prepare yourself to do great things. He experience a valuable and positive drive. It's normal. He should now prepare himself for that to have the maximum competence when this happens. He should also keep in mind that the great thing that he is expected to do may happen when he is 50 or 70. Thus don't wait for it to happen, because it might not be soon. It's like love. Finally he should also keep in mind that he'll also have his part of the job to do for it to happen. I.e becoming President of the uSA. It doesn't fall upon you like that.
Stop whining. Just do whatever you want to do.
As a question to everyone else here: why upvote this shameless self-pity?
Similarly, advising an alcoholic to "just drink less or nothing at all", or an obese person to "just eat less and move around more", will accomplish nothing of value.
What you did is only a hair better than advising a legless person to "just walk". One is the handicap of the body, the other is the handicap of the mind, yet both handicaps are perfectly real to the person so unfortunate. Both problems can be ameliorated with due effort, but the glib advice will only make the adviser feel good, while making the advised feel worse. The due effort lies elsewhere.