Comment by habosa | Hacker News Reader

Comment by habosa | Hacker News Reader

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If the OP wrote the pastebin content and is reading this, don't be so hard on yourself. The self-awareness on display here alone is a sign of high ability, and it's something many people lack. I go to a top-10 school and it's clear to me that intelligence ≠ grades in a lot of cases.

Also, you can't be "a fool" for believing in yourself. Confidence, false or earned, is incredibly useful in motivating yourself to push limits and achieve great things. I have found that as long as I tell myself my goals are achievable and do my work in that mindset, I can do many things I thought were out of my reach. It sounds like "The Secret"-esque bullshit, but it can help.

There is no reason to push yourself to the point of "breaking as you describe. When you get there, take a step back and think about why you're at school and why you're chasing x or y career goal. The point of work is to purchase leisure, but if you're letting work consume everything then you'll have a hard time being happy. I think many people forget that work is, in many cases, a means to an end. Slow down until you're at a point where you can enjoy your time, and don't worry about the pace of everyone around you. Again this might sound like cliché nonsense but I take a lot of comfort in thinking about the big picture when pressure builds.

If you weren't looking for advice, forget everything I said. Also I congratulate you for "letting it all out", it's not easy to compose one's thoughts into such a rational assessment of a bad situation.

I too went to a top 5 school and took some of the hardest classes in a school which is famous for its hard classes. And yes, it becomes pretty obvious quickly that grades are not a reflection of intelligence. And when the threshold intelligence is high in the sample size, say at a good school, grades and intelligence may be very weakly correlated, if at all.

Personally, I do have the ability to be extremely focused for long hours. But I don't think that having that ability counts for a lot in real world. My cofounder is borderline ADHD and there are things he can accomplish that I just cannot.

> Personally, I do have the ability to be extremely focused for long hours. But I don't think that having that ability counts for a lot in real world.

As a person who recently discovered that he doesn't have this ability and can't focus for more than 10 minutes unless it's a hobby project or one is in a really good mood, I can tell you that this ability does count a lot.

Happily, you can train the ability to hold your attention on whatever you desire, just like you might train your biceps to be stronger.

If you're interested, look into "mindfulness meditation". If you're immediately repelled (as I was) by the idea, know that there are several serious engineers who now swear by this technique. There is a guy at Google who teaches mindfulness meditation in a series of classes to other Googlers, and he can't keep up with demand. Look at siyli.org for some introductory videos (especially the ones showing a physiological effects of having done N hours of meditation).

Thanks for your advice and reassuring references. I actually stumbled upon mindfulness meditation several times on HN, and after first being repelled, I ended up up reading "Mindfulness In Plain English" recently, and now I'm about to start practicing it.

Basically, I got fed up with this state and decided to solve it once and for all. I've managed to make some progress on it and I feel better/more productive at work now, so I have high hopes it'll get even better. Mindfulness is what I'm trying now, and the next book to read is "Feeling Good" (similarly, heavily recommended on HN), a basic Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy book.

While I agree that this ability may help in certain kinds of development/ coding work, I do think they are various cognitive niches that different people can occupy well.

For instance, I think people with functioning ADHD do pretty well as dealmakers, traders and maybe even certain kind of managers. I suffer from a mild form of bipolar, and it allows me to be very creative & productive in my manic phases, but I cannot always be as consistent as an ops person.

I get what you're saying and why it has to be said, but I want to add that I think it's reasonable to work for reasons other than buying leisure.

In particular, I believe that it's important for me to be useful to society, and I also consider my work to be personal, like an art. As a result, my happiness is tied to how well I think I'm working. I don't think that's crazy.

I'd like to add to this too:

There are two kinds of false confidence: the kind you believe to be true and the kind you don't. Both can cause trouble when you can't deliver, but when false confidence is expressed in good faith it's hard to really lay too much blame on the person in the short term; it was simply a mistake. If failure acts as a "market correction" and the person amends their behavior in such a way that they improve (always in many small increments, never in one swift move of grandeur) and subsequently gains a new high confidence that's backed by something real, the failure was a good and worthwhile one.

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