Quarter life crisis: A question to those at the top of their respective fields. | Hacker News Reader

Quarter life crisis: A question to those at the top of their respective fields.

1 pointNovaS1X3 comments

A short background paragraph is in order. I'm suffering through what I believe is a quarter life crisis. I have either lost, or never had, the ability to recognize my own intelligence or that of others. It has lead me to be incredibly insecure about my own ability to perform in both the career path that has evolved from my passion and my ability to be a good human being. The additional true understanding of my mortality that I never had as an adolescent has also caused me to think about death on an almost daily basis. All of this has caused me to come to a silent panic and feel lost with... everything.

Now on to my question.

To all those at the top of their fields, be it STEM or otherwise. To those who help drive change, discover, and develop what we did not have before: How did you get there? How did you manage to become a part of a force that pushes humanity forward? How did you deal with your own shortcomings? Did you ever feel like you simply did not have it in you? Was there ever any significant emotional challenges that you had to overcome? How did you overcome them?

What I am asking for is not unlike those who ask where to start studying but I ask a different question: How did you manage getting there? Share with me a bit of your autobiography in hopes that I can find some common ground with the people I look up to.

One simple way to look at it is to ship things. Get your work in front of eyeballs. You can endlessly debate the value or the intelligence of your work when it's behind closed doors. Getting this work in front of other people simplifies this a bit I think.

Writing which never sees the light of day becomes far more valuable the instant it is accessible to others. The same is true for anything you create. Simply creating a blog post produces value when others read it. The key here is creating and shipping. Otherwise it just rots unseen and it might as well be some virtual thing in your head driving you crazy.

Often just doing something helps a lot. I have a friend who has horrible at photography eventually become an awesome professional photographer. I watched his progression on Flikr over the years. He started out taking a crazy number of the worst pictures I have seen. He took pictures of anything and everything and posted them all. As time went on, he posted fewer pictures but with increasingly better quality. Today, I find his pictures to be stunningly beautiful.

I have seen the same with writers and of things I do every day as well.

Just create stuff. Get it out there and don't dwell too much on how good it is. Let other people do that for you while you continue building. It's a release. You feel better getting it out there. You know you have done something because your creation is at a point where people are consuming it. If you don't think it's valuable enough, then build something else. Just keep going. Don't hold it in your head or you will go crazy.

That makes quite a bit of sense. Thanks.

great advice! :-)

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