Re:Ask HN: What was your biggest failure in 2019?
by yesenadam on Wednesday January 01, 2020 @01:39AM
(#21926951)
>I jumped to a personal blog of an engineer who was writing impressively deep thoughts about unit testing, dependency injection, Go, Java, hardware, architecture, backend, frontend, performance, ... Very, very thoughtful posts. I would not be able to reflect so deeply on those topics, even if I am relatively familiar with them. I have no other choice than believing I am stupid, at least in comparison to such person.
Do you write? Yes, your first draft wouldn't be as good as their 10th or 20th draft. No-one can write like that. No book or impressive blog post you read is a first draft. Try this talk on How To Write a Great Research Paper[0] (Good for any kind of writing, not just papers) He mentions how everyone feels their own ideas are pathetic. But you start by writing down the pathetic idea. That suggests other questions, connections.. It may develop into something not so pathetic. You don't write about your thoughts - you find out what they are by writing. I've written one academic-type paper, and 95% of what's in it, I learnt by writing it, and wouldn't have learnt otherwise. Which was a surprise! Whatever I wrote, there were some questions remaining, which were easy enough to answer (your brain does it automatically for you), and that continued until I was way past where I ever thought I'd be, or even hoped to be. Studying is great, but it's other people's thoughts. By writing you develop your own.
Just get busy doing what you're doing, stop comparing yourself with others. That's no way to live; it's torturing yourself. Learn to be kind to yourself. Would you continually nag a friend about how much more brilliant everyone else is? Sounds like you also eliminated fun from your life :-( Good luck!
Be careful of how you live your life, you may end up having to live your life that way.
Do you write? Yes, your first draft wouldn't be as good as their 10th or 20th draft. No-one can write like that. No book or impressive blog post you read is a first draft. Try this talk on How To Write a Great Research Paper[0] (Good for any kind of writing, not just papers) He mentions how everyone feels their own ideas are pathetic. But you start by writing down the pathetic idea. That suggests other questions, connections.. It may develop into something not so pathetic. You don't write about your thoughts - you find out what they are by writing. I've written one academic-type paper, and 95% of what's in it, I learnt by writing it, and wouldn't have learnt otherwise. Which was a surprise! Whatever I wrote, there were some questions remaining, which were easy enough to answer (your brain does it automatically for you), and that continued until I was way past where I ever thought I'd be, or even hoped to be. Studying is great, but it's other people's thoughts. By writing you develop your own.
Just get busy doing what you're doing, stop comparing yourself with others. That's no way to live; it's torturing yourself. Learn to be kind to yourself. Would you continually nag a friend about how much more brilliant everyone else is? Sounds like you also eliminated fun from your life :-( Good luck!
Be careful of how you live your life, you may end up having to live your life that way.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WP-FkUaOcOM