I find it's much more effective to think of yourself as a secret agent, superhero or a magician. When you can catch a flying plane a bit of calculus is a small hurdle, when you can cast arcane, mystical spells, struggling with the borrow-checker in Rust is just a temporary setback.

I think that "secret agent" analogy is very deep. Secret agent must monitor what he is doing and the results of his actions and make his actions either the best possible (wash a dish in a best possible way) or most compatible with ways of others (put washed dish where other think it should belong).

Deliberate practice grows here naturally.

And this attitude extends everywhere, not just to programming and/or washing dishes.

Yes, deliberate practice is my favourite topic.

I find ego to be persistent, expansive and not very deliberate. Mythical or fictional identities are deliberate, perhaps through their ephemeral nature, limitless yet constrained. For me it's a way of tapping into a play/flow state and compartmentalising away stress and uncertainty. As a teenager the mythic entity was my self; as an adult I have had to turn elsewhere to find that spark (this was a very painful lesson).

There's so much in this little paragraph. Thank you for sharing it.

I wasted years of my life believing I wasn't "good at math" or whatever platitude was popular with everyone. I rediscovered math long after school and it has been a marvel. I really wish I wasn't so convinced by a faddish belief that most people can't do math. It was just an excuse to ignore, and then of course you won't know what's going on. That's not you, that's your past ignorance.

It just took one person to speak up when everyone was jokingly trash-talking their own math skills. One normal-looking guy, not bookish or anything but tatted up and heavy-set with a big biker beard, broke in to the conversation and said "I actually really like math." All of a sudden I just felt so stupid and realized what I'd been doing to myself. High school me was literally a moron. At least I still had time to catch up.

Good! I always cringe when I hear people deprecate themselves as not being a "math person." Math and abstract thought is what separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. Also, math is a very creative process and allows us to model the Universe we live in.