Re:You probably won’t make it to the top
by strken on Friday November 23, 2018 @03:35PM
(#18518758)
There's a paragraph from a long-disappeared blogger about how to set life-long goals that's the exact opposite of what DHH says.
> One of the great insights of psychoanalysis is that you never really want an object, you only want the wanting, which means the solution is to set your sights on an impossible ideal and work hard to reach it. You won't. That's not just okay, that's the point. It's ok if you fantasize about knowing kung fu if you then try to actually learn kung fu, eventually you will understand you can never really know kung fu, and then you will die. And it will have been worth it.
It's virtually impossible to be the best, and it's actually impossible to stay the best, which is why it's such a good goal to chase. Trying to be the best programmer will fly you around the world, push you to talk to strangers, get you up in the morning before a conference or before work, fill your github with interesting experiments, top up your bank account, and mould your personality.
I know that DHH is saying something superficially similar about the journey being more important than the destination, but I wonder whether it's possible to walk the road without picking an impossibly distant destination to aim for.
> One of the great insights of psychoanalysis is that you never really want an object, you only want the wanting, which means the solution is to set your sights on an impossible ideal and work hard to reach it. You won't. That's not just okay, that's the point. It's ok if you fantasize about knowing kung fu if you then try to actually learn kung fu, eventually you will understand you can never really know kung fu, and then you will die. And it will have been worth it.
It's virtually impossible to be the best, and it's actually impossible to stay the best, which is why it's such a good goal to chase. Trying to be the best programmer will fly you around the world, push you to talk to strangers, get you up in the morning before a conference or before work, fill your github with interesting experiments, top up your bank account, and mould your personality.
I know that DHH is saying something superficially similar about the journey being more important than the destination, but I wonder whether it's possible to walk the road without picking an impossibly distant destination to aim for.