You are in a cycle of slave-driving yourself. You remind me of Jiddu Krishnamurthi's assertion that "Influence acts strongest when you don't realize that it is acting". I would venture that most of your accomplishments are a result of being told what you should do, what you should be.
You will NEVER have the energy that the people whom you compare with have. Because they are being themselves, and are connected to the natural wellspring of motivation that comes from genuine interest, while you are the salmon swimming upstream, aping societal ideals and trying to be someone you are not.
Choose the opposite for a while : stop doing things that don't motivate you. Find out what motivates you. Be spontaneous. If you find a small plant at the roadside that you want to water, do it. Observe that absolutely no effort was required in this action. This is the mark of genuine flow : you will not feel the effort. If you chance upon some project which you execute in this natural state of interest, you will not feel tired.
Almost no one takes my advice because it's so threatening to be natural. What if you are not naturally ambitious? That's a horrific thought to have while being in the company of achievers, isn't it?
>> You will NEVER have the energy that the people whom you compare with have. Because they are being themselves, and are connected to the natural wellspring of motivation that comes from genuine interest, while you are the salmon swimming upstream, aping societal ideals and trying to be someone you are not.
>> Almost no one takes my advice because it's so threatening to be natural. What if you are not naturally ambitious? That's a horrific thought to have while being in the company of achievers, isn't it?
Awesome. Yes, this is pure Jiddu Krishnamurti. Basically, comparison causes conflict, conflict causes anxiety, anxiety causes fear, and fear makes mind dull. There's no intelligence where there's fear. Key here is to eliminate comparison. I keep reminding myself often :)
> Basically, comparison causes conflict, conflict causes anxiety, anxiety causes fear, and fear makes mind dull.
Unfortunately, I can report that I have done all of my best work in my career when I was extraordinarily anxious, feeling like I was holding to the side of the cliff with just my fingernails. Whenever things have started to get too comfortable, I found that hubris has disrupted my successes.
It's a sad thought, but I see absolutely no reason to believe that the natural state of humanity is to be happy (or, more specifically, content). The Environment of Evolutionary Adaptiveness [0] seems like a pretty harsh place, and that's also where I've found most brains function best.
>I see absolutely no reason to believe that the natural state of humanity is to be happy (or, more specifically, content)
What about the fact that stress is tremendously destructive to our health? It is directly a threat to the survival of both individuals and the societies they live in. If being in an anxious state for extensive periods of time were the most advantageous to survival, then evolution seems not to have noticed it. The structure and functioning of our endocrine system heavily suggests that humans were built for occasional short bursts of high stress, not extended periods of constant high stress (as we have designed society to require of most people).
Looks like there are multiple paths for success :)
Human being is such a complex machine, I don't know why people think that there is only way to succeed - _genuine_ motivation for the job. What is genuine and what's not? If the job is getting done, who cares!
Sometimes its just good enough to be like cockroaches to survive and succeed.
When you say you were anxious and holding to the side of the cliff with fingernails, were you also particularly busy?
I ask because I can recall several times in both school and career when I was much more productive because I had to be due to time constraints than when I had ample free time and was not as burdened. I'm wondering if you are describing that as well.
>Basically, comparison causes conflict, conflict causes anxiety, anxiety causes fear, and fear makes mind dull. There's no intelligence where there's fear. Key here is to eliminate comparison.
It's like a cross between "Fear is the mind-killer" from Dune, and something Yoda would say.
And to actually add something useful to the discussion, I'll add that I think the key to dealing with fear, and distressing emotions in general, is not to try to get rid of it, but to learn to function effectively in it's presence. Sometimes fear is a valid response, and should be respected. A lot of the time, fear is not a useful response. Sometime, when fear isn't seen for what it is, when I'm acting out of fear but not aware of it, fear can be quite destructive.
I disagree with it. The fires of conflict forge the deepest bonds.
I find I don't end up being comfortable with someone until we've argued about something. One of my favorite ways to become friends with someone is to find something we disagree on and debate it.
That particular sort of disagreement is underlaid by much more fundamental agreement. If you did not share a tremendous amount with the person, such a debate would not be possible. Debate is not a competition in situations where the participants agree upon the fundamental means of determining truth, it is a collaboration. All participants are attempting to reach the truth through contributing facts and reasoning. A conflict would be if one person was of the belief that truth is determined by the intuitive feeling of correctness and another believing it to be determined by rational soundness and correspondence with reality. In that case, neither can contribute anything which helps the other person reach understanding, giving rise to competition.
This isn't kindergarten where you can just show up and start scribbling.
Even if the actual act of coding (or painting, or martial arts, or writing, or watering roadside plants) is effortless, there's a hell of a lot of effort that goes into just getting yourself in a position to do it.
Example: perhaps painting is effortless for you, but putting yourself in a position to paint involves a lot of mundane things that require effort. You still have to buy and stretch canvasses. You have to buy a brush. You have to clean your brushes. If you want to make a career of it, you need to tackle some basic business tasks. You need to deal with an agent or gallery. You need to file your taxes, because painting gets a lot harder when you're in jail or the IRS has taken your stuff. You have to work and pay your rent, because it's tough to paint when you're homeless and worrying about your next meal and whether you'll survive the night. And so forth. There's a lot of shit that has to get done just to place yourself in a position where you can regularly put brush to canvas.
When I started my own business that was my experience. Writing the code was the fun part. Effortless, you might say. I was compelled to write it - it was harder to stay away from it than it was to work on it. But I went through hell just to be able to write that code - I worked long hours at my day job so that I could pay the bills, I often had to choose between writing code and having a social life, and so on. And prior to even starting that venture, it took me years of hard work and college education just to develop the skills that allowed me to write that code.
Your advice is, at best, useful only to those who already have their basic needs provided for. Trust-fund babies and the like.
We are probably not in disagreement. My point is to choose the direction of your ship from inside. There will be a lot of shovelling of coal into the fire in the dirty engine room. I'm not claiming that you just stand at the railing and say, "That way", and other people will do it for you / "the universe" will do it for you magically.
But the quality of energy will be different when you are shovelling the coal if YOU chose where the ship is going, if the dream of what lies on the other shore is yours. That vision (in your case, of starting your own business) is what fuelled your efforts, IMHO.
Why does he want to waste time on HN? Somewhere inside his heart is screaming a voice, "No, I don't want to do this". He's not lazy (CS top 10 school). It's just that the self-flagellation stops working for many people once they hit 20.
The difficulty is that the outer actions of someone like you (self-motivated) and someone like him (self-flagellating) may be the same. So the poor guy (or gal) tries to be like you and suffers.
> Your advice is, at best, useful only to those who already have their basic needs provided for.
Most of commenters on this site are software engineers — and this profession usually pays pretty well, to the point that we can safely assume that if the person is a capable software engineer, he has his basic needs provided for.
Only insofar as he remains motivated to use his skill for his own support. Even for well-paid software engineers, it can be difficult to amass substantial enough savings to feel comfortable taking 6-12 months off (depending, of course, on individual circumstances). Personally, I believe a sabbatical every few years would do wonders to prevent burnout, but very few plan well enough to make that happen.
This is entirely untrue and extremely dangerous. It is very possible to love what you do for a living (I do). Some of us find "true freedom" in tricking people into paying us to do things we would gladly pay to be allowed to do.
Really? I must be an exception then. I love what I do and wouldn't want to stop doing it. That said, I can imagine myself in a few other jobs too, so it might be my attitude towards work that makes me happy.
I'm not talking of happiness in that context. You are never truly free if as long as you have to work to make a living.
Once you have financial independence you can do anything you want, take unlimited vacations, learn music, go hiking, ride a motorcycle all day, heck you can even code all day and work on interesting projects without the fear of getting fired, denied a raise or whatever.
Your statements carry with them the implicit assumption that "anything you want to do" and what you do to make a living aren't the same thing. For some they are.
Believe me when I say that there's nothing more I'd rather do than what I'm doing right now. Not even in question. I love programming, I love the project I'm working on, and I love the ideas that are waiting to be worked on in my future. My heart fills with joy when I think about holding those finished products in my hands. When I get into the flow, I can zone out for days and work on my projects with hardly a break for food and sleep.
However, I have a natural weakness towards idleness. Like any negative personality trait, I have faith that it can be worked on. (If you're depressed or socially anxious, you wouldn't just accept these as the way you are, would you?) Internally, when I run into this problem, it doesn't feel like swimming against the tide; it feels like a massive speed bump that needs to be overcome, but that I know from experience has a smooth road ahead of it. I think it is a mistake to believe that every ambitious person is naturally driven, from beginning to end, solely by their ambition. Sometimes it's not enough.
Were I to succumb to my personality, I would sit in front of the TV, depressed and unfulfilled, for literally decades. That is not an option.
> If you're depressed or socially anxious, you wouldn't just accept these as the way you are, would you?
Have you considered that you might have an anxiety problem?
You mention being crippled by fear. You mention a constant gnawing. You mention a daily rehearsal of a major anxiety, your always feeling behind, frequently feeling exhausted and terrified, an endless state of panic, and being endlessly haunted. That is a whole lot of anxiety, and there are other kinds of anxiety disorder besides social anxiety.
My tip for you: find a therapist you like and go regularly. You've got two problems here: you are trapped in a behavioral loop, struggling for context. And, being young, you don't have enough life experience to see as many patterns as somebody older, especially somebody who spends all day talking with people. Regularly seeing a good therapist will help with both of those. They can also help you consider whether your level of anxiety is unusual, and what your options are.
I should add that when I was your age, I was too arrogant to do that. I was sure that by dint of raw smarts I would figure it out on my own. Which was both true and dumb: reinventing psychology from scratch would in some sense be an achievement, but like most reinventing of the wheel, it's not an achievement that anybody cares about, not even me.
Anyhow, I have worked out an anxiety-related checklist over time. Now when I notice anxious feelings, the things I wonder:
* Am I getting enough exercise? 30-60 mins cardio 3-4x week is about right for me.
* Am I carrying a lot of stress in my body? Yoga, massage, and hot tubs are helpful.
* Are there environmental factors? E.g., noisy environment, messy living space.
* What am I eating? My mood is most stable on foods with low glycemic index, worst with junk food.
* Am I getting enough sleep? I do best with ~7.5 hours on a very regular schedule.
* What's my drug intake? More than 100mg caffeine or 2 drinks alcohol and my mood will be less stable the next day.
* Am I taking my vitamins? This could be placebo, but I take a B-100, a sublingual B12, and some fish oil. My doctor recommended them for reducing the effects of stress.
For me, my procrastination is directly driven by feelings of anxiety. The more chill I am, the more I get done.
I live in Japan, most of the time holed up in my apartment and hardly interacting with anyone. On the rare occasions I get to enjoy a true fun interaction with someone, it really helps improve mood and reduce anxiety.
In England the BACP are the registration body you should look for if you go private.
Short courses of CBT for anxiety should be available on the NHS - either see your GP (and you may need to push this) or self-refer. A web-search of your county and terms like "IAPT" (improved access to psychological therapies) or "talking therapies" should return your local number.
You might find good results after a short course - 8 to 14 weeks.
This sounds about right for me. I had the same problem as OP and still do, but I've come to realize that the points you've mentioned above are really important.
I actually never realized how anxious I was, I just never knew I had it. It was really crippling. I've been trying to elevate my anxiety and as a result I've been more productive. I use my github page as indicator, it was empty for 2 years until recently. Almost two months now of me working on new frameworks and my projects.
This. Happy to talk in private about my experience with anxiety and procrastination. "Find a therapist you like" is great advice: it may take a couple tries. Good luck!
You don't have an age problem or a distractibility problem, you have an anxiety and neurotic problem. Who cares what other people are doing, at what age? There's always someone better than you. And almost everyone would rather be lazy, that's not unique to you.
Just work on your project and be happy with your accomplishments. Find something to give meaning to your life like volunteering for a charity. It's vanishingly unlikely anyone will care about your (or the vast majority of peoples') legacies 100 years from now. Honestly, just enjoy your work, help others, and stop thinking it's a competition.
edit: I'm significantly older than you, so 1) I have some perspective on this and 2) sorry if this was less sensitive than what your generational peers might say or lacked trigger warnings.
I suffer from the same weakness as you. I always have. I also love my profession, programming, more than anything I've ever done in my life. Also, like you, when I get into the flow of something, I do it better than most people I know. I go hard for days/weeks, but when it's over I can spend endless amounts of time playing video games or clicking around on the internet. All the while reading what the "elite" developers in my field are churning out in a state of awe. How do they have time for all of this? Does David Nolan have some sort of time altering machine??
I'm a little older than you, so I'll give some advice about how to deal with our personality "flaw." Embrace it. Be aware of it, be OK with it, and learn how to make it a positive thing. A few years ago I stopped worrying about being better than some programming idol. You're probably a pretty creative, innovative type if you're anything like me. You can't teach that, in my opinion, and that's a big advantage. You have this skill, programming, and you enjoy it, mostly. You also enjoy some down time. Use your down time how you wish, but always be thinking about the next big idea be it a business, a technology, or a new library. When you find the right idea, it will give you a jolt. "Holy sh#t, no one else has done that yet?" These moments are the ones that catapult me back into that driven, ambitious mode that makes me so productive.
Just remember that no one expects more of you than you. Don't be so hard on yourself. Know yourself and learn how to take advantage of your natural traits.
I'm a 25 year old, not a hot shot by any means, but I try to be aware of my motivations and ambitions. The thing that people seem to be debating here is whether determining factors are innate traits and traits that are by choice or are the result of discipline or history or experience or a combination of these. For my own sake, I'm hoping it is the latter, as I think OP is.
To be honest, I do struggle with procrastination, and it hurts me to think that by now, I could have finished that miniproject that I've been working on or that other one, etc, and I use some of that as motivation to push me back into the act. I'm an introvert (which has it's own downsides), and I leverage that to spend my free time on my projects and learning. I do however try to minimize the "souless fun" time and maximize doing things that I find fun but I see as productive. The reason I even try is I believe I can overcome my procrastinating personality and become much more productive.
If I believe you, then I give up on that desire to better myself. should I? Perhaps it is different for different people?
EDIT: My final statement sounds challenging, but if you think it is healthier for me to not fight that part of me, then that's fine. I welcome your point of view; I want a discussion, not validation or an apology.
I'm definitely not going to advocate that someone not try to better themselves. If you feel like you want to try to overcome some part of your personality that you're not comfortable with then that's a positive thing. I do, however, think that after multiple failed attempts at overcoming that trait, it's best to reevaluate your perspective on it. Sometimes it's best to admit that something is just a part of who you are and that it is, in fact, a flaw. Of course, we are all flawed in some ways, but it's how we learn to live with those admissions that will determine your self-esteem. Sometimes, even, what we think are flaws from one point of view are actually advantages when viewed from another. For example, procrastination is generally seen as a flaw or a "bad thing", but if you learn to take advantage of that by fully thinking out the problem you're actually trying to solve when you finally DO start working, you might might find that you create brilliant, innovative solutions to difficult things. Solutions that the non-procrastinator didn't think of because he was too fast to the keyboard.
I appreciate your reply. I think one of the reasons I feel that it isn't an innate trait for me at least is that I didn't procrastinate as much as I do now until I started college. Perhaps I always had this tendency, but its intensity is something I hope to temper. It isn't until recent months that I've decided to do something about it, so hopefully, I'm not due for surrender yet.
I had a rather romantic and gifted English teacher in my first year of college who claimed that procrastination is a part of the creative process, likening it hatching an egg, she claimed that procrastinating helped mature ideas before you put pen to paper, similar to the idea to use procrastination time to fully develop a solution to a problem, as you said. Yes, there is a correlation of my hearing of her doctrine and my increased procrastination, but I can't blame her for it.
I've had the same issue in my career. I always thought of myself as lazy. I loved what I did, but my drive evaporated after 3-6 months on any given project (or any given hobby, for that matter). I always thought of people as falling along two spectrums: naturally talented and hard working. I saw that those young multi-millionaires generally had an overabundance of both. I've always seen that I have a whole lot of talent, but I simply couldn't find the motivation to work hard for extended periods.
After a decade of roller-coaster productivity, I finally went to see a therapist to discuss these issues. That was the best decision of my professional life. I was able to talk through my issues, but after a few months of behavioral changes (light box therapy, exercise, mindfulness, etc.), the issue, while better, was not fixed. So I was referred to a psychiatrist, who diagnosed me with ADHD. I got a prescription for Adderall, which I've been on for the past 4-5 years now. It has turned my productivity and career around. I'm making twice what I was making 5 years ago and finally am seeing a lot of the potential that I and others saw in me finally being realized.
ADD (ADHD is the technical diagnosis, but I have no "HD" symptoms at all) isn't really about "having the attention span of a gnat"; it's about inability to sustain focused attention long term, about not being as excited by the last 20% of the project as you are about the first 80%, about not being able to get started--but once you did, it's usually interesting enough to keep your attention for the rest of the day. That definition certainly fit me.
The OP said a couple of comments above: "If you're depressed or socially anxious, you wouldn't just accept these as the way you are, would you?" Chances are that if you are depressed or socially anxious to a point that it affects your life in negative ways, you'd see a professional about the issue and may end up with medication to help with the issue. You don't just wish those conditions away; nor do you wish ADD symptoms away. I'd recommend considering talking to someone about your issues with productivity.
I'm not saying that it's for everybody, nor do I believe in overmedication, but from my experience, which sounds exactly like the OP's, it was the right choice for both me and my career.
I also agree with jeletonskelly here: to a certain extent, embrace your "laziness"... laziness leads to working smarter, not harder. Know your strengths and flaws and come up with a way to use both of them to your advantage.
First of all, it's not a race. Statistically speaking you aren't number 1, and that's OK. It doesn't mean you stop trying, but you can stop competing.
I'd say find out what is important to you. What is important to you is not what you'd rather do or even what you love. What do you think is important for the world, for your life? Do you want to raise a child? Do you want to help society communicate? Do you want to solve a problem? If you couldn't do any "thing" what idea is the most important to you?
Idleness isn't a weakness. It's a response. Idleness is what your mind craves when it is under too much stress. Stress is mostly internal, you can be idle and still be under a lot of stress because you hate the fact that you're idle, this can be paralyzing.
However, if you didn't feel that idleness was bad, you would not feel that stress, and you wouldn't be trapped in idleness. You'd still be idle, but it would be easier to take action.
You focus on what you haven't done. This is the worst. You aren't excited by the cool things that those programmers have done, you are disappointed that you didn't do them.
Instead you should focus on the things that you are doing. Don't "force yourself" to go and work on something, that only reinforces that feeling and will cause you to retreat from that stress as soon as you can.
One thing I do in this sort of circumstance is try to do nothing. Simply be idle, but don't go and distract myself with the Internet, just do absolutely nothing, get a tea and stare out the window, do this for a few hours. Any feeling of things I have to do, I just let them go away. Pretty soon, there will be things that I really want to do. When I'm at that point then I'll go to work.
TV and Internet are terrible though, you go to them because you're looking to be idle, but they're just stimulating enough to keep you from relaxing. But it's not idleness that's bad. The desire to be idle is a response, and it's healthy, just learn to do it efficiently. Don't do it in front of the Internet or the TV because they distract you from actually being idle.
I wouldn't say idleness is inherently a bad trait. Doing something all the time is a good way to burn out and miss out on actually living.
It's great that you have a passion for programming and you get into the flow of working on something you actually enjoy. I can promise you that most - if not all - devs go through such period of flow and not being in the flow. Sometimes you lock on to a project and spend days on it, other times you don't want to touch it with a 10 foot pole for days. I don't think that is bad unless it is harming some important end goal like a company deadline or life goals.
Are there other things you are interested in? If so, you can fill your so-called idle times with those. HN here, going outside and meeting people (if that's your thing), a hobby or two that you can naturally flow into as well.
If programming is your only passion, then you can fill a good chunk of idle time with other programming-related problems you find interesting. Random library you want to write? Go for it. If charity is your thing, find some group for social good that can benefit from your dev skills - make their website better, write an app for them, improve their inventory system, etc.
That said, it takes conscious effort to not be swallowed by the stuff that makes the news. Forget about those who seem to be starting $90000 billion businesses at 23. They've found something they like and it worked out well for them, great! Find your own interests and work on cultivating and growing those instead.
> “Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance.”
> “Every sun casts a shadow, and genius's shadow is Resistance. As powerful as is our soul's call to realization, so potent are the forces of Resistance arrayed against it. Resistance is faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, harder to kick than crack cocaine. We're not alone if we've been mowed down by Resistance; millions of good men and women have bitten the dust before us. And here's the biggest bitch: We don't even know what hit us. I never did. From age twenty-four to thirty-two, Resistance kicked my ass from East Coast to West and back again thirteen times and I never even knew it existed. I looked everywhere for the enemy and failed to see it right in front of my face.”
That book is a treasure trove in how to change your thinking and defeat this. But it does require changing your thinking and a great deal of discipline.
In a similar vein I think these lines from T.S.Eliot's poem "The Hollow Men" beautifully expresses one's struggles with the self:
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the shadow
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the shadow
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
OP, ignore my speech if it's a bit too much. I suppose you just have to find a balance and take some natural breaks.
Please don't do this : "for days and work on my projects with hardly a break for food and sleep"...At least, question yourself : how much of driving oneself is excessive? Generally, we don't pause to think about these things, and that's why, when you take a break, you crash. The pendulum swings to the other extreme, tortoise and hare, yada yada... you get it. With a handle like "tastyface", I know you get it :-))
(I'm just kidding with you. Please don't take this as an offensive statement)
It sounds like you have two problems: one long-term and one short-term.
Long-term problem: Comparing yourself to others. When done in modest amounts this can be a huge source of inspiration. But taken too far and it becomes a sure path to anxiety. Beyond that threshold the only person you should be comparing yourself to is the "you" from yesterday.
Short-term problem: Sounds like you have an addiction to distraction. I suffer from this also and just started reading this[0]. Too early into it to tell if it will help but so far it looks promising. I've also found the Pomodoro technique helpful.
I have just one question. Do you (day)dream about code? If so, you're golden... This might sound flippant, but I have my best ideas and revelations while I'm being "idle" (showering, walking the dog, watching mindless TV). Desk-time is overrated in my book. Stuff needs to "percolate".
Yeah, pretty much. If I hit a sweet spot in my project, I take a lot of pleasure in just thinking about the architectural decisions and data structures while going for a walk or something. :)
Here's some of the science for why we come up with the best ideas when our brains are turned "off" -- it allows the brain to make other connections that we aren't overly controlling it to make. If it works for you, meditation could also be a useful tool for harnessing these moments: http://lifehacker.com/why-great-ideas-always-come-in-the-sho...
I have come to accept that my way of working is in bursts.
Whether this is at a 9-5 admin job (work intensely 9-10:30, slow down until 12, work intensely 1-2:30, take it easy the rest of the day unless something comes up), or working on projects (do nothing for a week or two, or a month, then push out a months work in a week).
While studying, I used to beat myself up about the fact that I could not get into the habit of reading every night, and studying a few hours every day.
Sure, sometimes if I just go and start doing the task I need to do, then it starts to flow, but mostly if my head is not in the right place to do it, then what you get is lackluster output.
Some people are the "Work steadily on a regular basis" on a project, others are the "18h days for 5 days and then done with the whole thing".
The concerning part of your post is that you feel you would sit in front of the TV depressed.
Have you checked with your doctor if you are actually depressed?
Beyond that, it took me until my early 30s to realise that I should not beat myself up for not operating the way I assumed everyone else does. Ironically, people are under the impression that I work non-stop all the time or that I studied every night, because that is how they perceive that I must be doing things. Once I found this out from talking to people that I was in awe of, only to find they thought I was doing fairly well and must be working my butt off, I realised that even though I have a tendency to beat myself up about my work patterns, I should perhaps give myself a little more leeway and look at the results.
Perhaps it comes down to pressure as well, some people work very badly under deadline pressure, others are unable to be productive until they have the deadline pressure, but have had all the details in their minds for the rest of the project.
Here's two thoughts to keep in mind that might help.
1. Look up the ages of the most famous professional athletes on your favorite team. Odds are you are older than most of them. For a sec it might feel like you feel reading about younger programmers, but after a moment you'll have easy perspective that you are not them and nothing is comparable and that's ok. It's hard to regret that you never became a pro athlete.
2. Yes, yesterday is gone...but think about all the other people you are ahead of...half the planet isn't even on the internet yet. Probably less than a fraction of 1% of the world is a junior dev. You are literally ahead of 99% of the world. Don't lose your dominance and fall behind more people...youll never be ahead of everyone...but you can stay ahead of almost everyone!
Is that tendency toward idleness punctuated with productive spurts actually a weakness? I would hold that it is actually the appropriate situation in many respects, and that our society simply hasn't adapted to account for it yet. One of the only physical characteristics that humans have going for them compared to other animals is their physical endurance. We're built for long stretches of physical work. We are not, however, built for long stretches of intellectual work. Economically speaking it also makes sense. While a worker performing physical tasks establishes a level of productivity and remains mostly constant, an intellectual worker multiplies the productivity of others tremendously. They change the nature of the work being done. Economically, at least in a capitalist system, this is supposed to result in those intellectual workers seeing their compensation rise tremendously as well - providing them with the resources to take long breaks allowing them time for contemplation, improvement of their skills, etc. Were it not for the illegal actions of major tech companies early in the growth of the software field, we might see compensation related to the value intellectual workers produce. As it is, they set the standards for what such workers should be paid and divorced it completely from the value of the work being performed.
This has happened before, back during the Industrial Revolution. Factories and mechanical automation enabled workers to leap in productivity over their craftsmen predecessors, and factory owners divorced their compensation from the value of the work. Eventually, whole families had to work extremely long hours 6 or 7 days a week just to be able to afford to eat. Society let this happen because they saw the workers as not deserving of a share of the value they were creating because 'a machine was really doing the work and the owner paid for the machine'. Things eventually reached a breaking point and society forced factory owners to pay a single person enough to raise an entire family on for 40 hours of work in a week. This was a monumental change. Whereas previously about 3 incomes with each working 60+ hours a week was necessary to raise a family, 1 income from 40 hours reaching the same amount was not a minor adjustment.
Social change takes time. Mental workers being a large group is really quite new, and society hasn't yet figured out how to handle them best. They're trying to just treat them the same as physical workers, which will inevitably fail simply because the human brain is not built for decades of constant mental work.
Reading the OP and this comment I can't help but think "hmm, sounds like me when I'm unmedicated."
I'm a very ambitious and motivated person. I love stupid hard, nitty gritty problems. I've been writing code since I was 8. I landed my first coding job when I was 16 (working for the USAF Research Laboratory, no less). I'm now 29.
Growing up I was always driven by my interests. If I wasn't interested, I wasn't going to do it. If I was interested there was no stopping me from doing it. I was smart enough that I coasted through high school, but when I hit college I very nearly flunked out.
The problem was that my interests ran hot and cold. One day/minute/hour I'd be deeply interested in some subject, and the next I couldn't care less. This would happen with topics which I knew were captivating to me in a general sense. Sometimes I'd get so interested in some project I'd skip other classes for a week or more because I couldn't stop thinking about it.
However most of the time I'd find that without exercising hurculean amounts of discipline there was no way I was going to be able to stay on track well enough to study and finish homework/projects.
I'd sit down for a lecture with all kinds of ambition to focus and absorb the material. 20 minutes in my brain was somewhere else and the margins of my notebook were filled with mindless doodles.
When my grades dropped low enough my school's intervention programs kicked in. It was suggested that I go get checked out for learning disabilities. Since I felt somewhat compelled to show I was making an effort, I did.
I figured I didnt have any kind of disorder - especially ADHD. I wasn't hyper, and when I was "in the zone" it was nearly impossible for me to shake my focus.
It turns out that having ADHD doesn't necessarily mean that you are never focused. It just means you have a very difficult time choosing to be focused. In fact, hyperfocusing (marked by losing track of time, forgetting to eat, etc) is a common symptom.
Occasionally I go mine my old college notes for some obscure detail. With a single glance you can easily tell if a page was written pre-medication or if it was written post-medication.
If you think this story echos your own experiences and struggles, do yourself a favor and go have a chat with a psychiatrist or neurologist. It may just change your life in a huge, incredible way.
Finally, do try to stop comparing yourself to others in such a destructive way. Success stories are a bit like airbrushed models in lingerie ads. They don't give you the whole story. They're there to capture your eyeballs with hopes that they can be monetized, marketed to, or both.
Try to focus on incremental goals, instead. Scope these goals with a focus on finishing rather than perfection, and don't beat yourself up for not being superhuman. Specifically, try your best to fight the thought that success is predicated upon the kind of hard work that produces exhaustion. Success comes from routinely focusing on well-scoped, iterative goals.
So, you think inability to focus is the cause of your interests running "hot and cold"?
On medication (assuming some kind of CNS stimulant?) do you find that you're less prone to get excited about new things, and spend more time on things you're already invested in?
For me, it's really easy to get excited about new things. I throw a lot of stuff at the wall. Some of it sticks, most of it doesn't. But the more things that manage to find their way into my interests, the less time I have to focus on any single one of them.
I've been able to work around this to a certain extent with some pretty strict scheduling, but no matter what I'm working on, there's always a piece of me that REALLY wants to be focusing on something else.
> So, you think inability to focus is the cause of your interests running "hot and cold"?
Absolutely, but this may be unique to me. I find complex things interesting. If I can't maintain focus long enough to get a certain level of complexity all loaded into the forefront of my consciousness, I find that I don't become interested when I otherwise would.
> do you find that you're less prone to get excited about new things, and spend more time on things you're already invested in?
No, and yes, respectively.
I am still subject to distraction while medicated, especially from new and interesting things. I'd guess that new things are as likely to pique my interest whether or not I'm medicated.
The difference is that medication makes it easier for me to decide on a scope for my current activities and makes it so that a conscious decision is required in order to react to a stimulus or tangent which would take me out of that intended scope. Without medication I don't usually have direct control over this choice, and I'm very infrequently conscious of it.
> there's always a piece of me that REALLY wants to be focusing on something else
I experience this whether or not I'm medicated, but medication makes that voice in my head shut up once I get moving on an unrelated task.
This sounds very much like me. I beat it by finding a routine that works for me, a routine that helped me become more disciplined... and it took a while to beat, so don't expect immediate results. Also, while this worked for me, it may not work for you, everyone [despite those telling you that you're not a unique snowflake] is different and different things work for each of us so take what is helpful from my routine and ignore the rest, YMMV.
First step: Finding your zone. This is a matter of conditioning and conditioning doesn't come easily. Find something that puts you in a zone of focus. It doesn't matter what the focus is on, it doesn't matter what that zone is - the key is finding focus and maintaining it for longer and longer periods until you can easily maintain focus for a number of hours at a time [I'm told there are drugs that do this very effectively, but I personally try to avoid drugs wherever possible]. Whatever it is should be something that doesn't allow you to lose your focus or give up, even when the going gets tough and every instinct in you is telling you to throw in the towel.
For me it was cycling - totally unrelated to programming. It was better for me than being in a gym because if I decide to stop pedaling, I stop going anywhere. In a gym, this means just getting off the bike and I'm no further behind. If you're 10 miles from home and stop pedaling, you're 10 miles from home and the only way back home is to get back on your bike and start pedaling again. Sitting on the side of the road procrastinating isn't going to help, nor is it going to be in any way enticing to sit there. After 40 miles, you could be exhausted and realizing you still have a 5 mile climb ahead of you before you can put your bike down; there's no way around it, you just have to get on and do it.
I've set up a playlist on my phone of music that runs around 130-140 bpm [that's approximately the speed of club music that makes you wanna dance] and will run without looping for the duration of my ride. I listen to the same playlist every ride. You might get sick of it, but you listen anyway. After a few weeks of agony and wanting to throw in the towel but doing it anyway you start to find peace in the pain and it becomes a meditation, you don't even hear the music consciously any more but the beat drives you forward, you find the zone and it's just you, the pain and the road and before you know it the circuit is over. For me this process took a number of weeks, but now, if I put that playlist on, even if I'm not on my bike, my brain snaps into that zone. It's been conditioned to focus when that playlist comes on, just like Pavlov's dog salivating when the bell rings. [This requires ongoing maintenance]
Step 2: Remove necessary distractions. When I say necessary, I mean unavoidable things that will need doing and will break your focus when they are required to be done because you didn't take the preemptive strike of killing them off first. Things like important phone calls to your accountant or the bank. If you can't focus while you have a messy desk, clean your desk, get your coffee, eat your breakfast, do all of these unavoidable things first.
Step 3: Understand the problem intimately, ensure that you can recite it inside outside, upside down and backwards. You don't want to have to keep going back to ensure you understand the problem, this will break your focus. If you need to pester someone to help you understand the problem, pester them until you have fully digested every nuance of what it is you're trying to achieve.
Step 4: Understand the solution to that problem intimately. Ensure that you understand every single step that will take you from where are right now to where you need to be. Any pieces you don't understand, go back and reread step 4. If you keep having to come back and figure stuff out, this will break your focus. Again, pester whoever you need to in order to completely understand the path to the solution.
Steps 3 and 4 are my biggest triggers for procrastination. If I don't understand the problem or the solution to that problem well enough, I can't maintain focus. It might take me days to get down to it if I let myself skip either of these steps - so I don't.
Step 5: Everything else can wait: No Facebook, no Hacker News, no Blinkfeed, no Quora, no email, no phone calls, no text messages, no whatever else it is you like to waste time with. Put them all aside and have the discipline to stay away from them until you're finished this step. Now, do whatever it was from Step 1 that puts you into your focused zone. Get on with completing the steps you've laid out in Step 4.
Step 6: You're done, go reward yourself with all those other distractions that you put aside to complete Step 5. Congratulations.
Wow, this is eerily close to describing me. Even the bit about your first coding job being at a young age at a research laboratory (though mine was a university).
> When my grades dropped low enough my school's intervention programs kicked in. It was suggested that I go get checked out for learning disabilities. Since I felt somewhat compelled to show I was making an effort, I did.
This is where the stories diverge though. My college's intervention program was basically them calling me lazy and forcing me to sign a paper agreeing that I would improve. I knew I couldn't accomplish that, so I didn't re-enroll the next semester.
I had always accepted that I was very lazy and learned to work around/with it. But over the past few years I feel like it has been getting much worse. My passions are starting to feel like chores. I used to practice the guitar for several hours each day, but now it's closer to an hour each month. Even sitting down to watch a whole movie on Netflix can be tough. I'm not sure if I've watched even a single movie in it's entirety at all this year.
But of course, I won't even notice myself spending 4 hours aimlessly browsing the web without leaving my chair until I realize that I've wasted my night...
It's gotten so bad that I have considered it might not just be laziness and comments like yours are really encouraging. But I don't know where I'd begin. And, frankly, the idea of seeing a specialist for help or medication really scares me.
Do I just google for psychiatrists near me and give one a call? Would I need to find one that specializes in ADHD? Are there any websites that can help direct me?
I really appreciate you taking the time to write this comment by the way.
> the idea of seeing a specialist for help or medication really scares me.
Don't let it. You're seeking help voluntarily. Assuming something is actually wrong with your brain, it's worth it to address it head-on. Worst case, you wind up with a bad doctor and you have to go find a new one. Best case, you gain some tools to help you gain a much higher degree of control over your life.
> Do I just google for psychiatrists near me and give one a call? Would I need to find one that specializes in ADHD? Are there any websites that can help direct me?
What country are you in? If you're in the states, I'd start with your insurance company. Most insurance companies have directories of in-network specialists. If your insurance is shit and doesn't cover specialist visits, then yeah - I'd just Google around. Absent recommendations, look for somebody board-certified [1]. I happened to luck into a doctor who had both psychiatric and neurological specialities.
In New Zealand you must start off by asking your GP for a referral to a psychiatrist (you may need to do this in the USA if your insurance requires a referral). Explain your concerns with concentration, and that you'd like to be screened for ADHD and other related conditions. At this point if they're well-informed they'll likely ask you a few questions about it and offer some advice, but since you're asking to see a specialist they should be willing to make a referral. If they're not well-informed, they'll either skip the questions & counsel or tell you to piss off. If you get the referral, you'll go see a psychiatrist. I have no idea what the diagnosis process is like here, however - I was diagnosed in the states. However, when you are diagnosed your psych will receive a special authority number. Eventually this number will be transferred over to your GP once your treatment regimen is stabilized.
Aside: In the states it's not likely that your GP will tell you to piss off when asking for a psych/neuro referral. Also in the states GPs may offer to treat you directly w/o a specialist. This is illegal in New Zealand, as general physicians aren't typically qualified in this area. Really - go see a specialist.
The diagnosis process is nothing to be worried about, though it could take a bit of time. The process can take a few hours, or a few 1-2 hour sessions. If I recall correctly, they did an ADHD questionnaire, the MMPI [2], an IQ test, an "IQ achievement test," a few very brief visual/spatial tests which supposedly look for neurological symptoms schizophrenia, and a session or two of discussion with a psychologist about what my goals for improvement were, where I felt I was failing, etc. I think my range of testing was a bit more in depth than usual, as they were looking for a bunch of different learning disorders. After all this they discussed the results of each of the tests with me, explained my diagnosis, and set me up with the psychiatrist to begin a treatment regimen.
This sounds A LOT like myself. I've never really considered going to a psychiatrist or neurologist, I thought my experience was somewhat normal. Do you mind elaborating some about what sort of medication/condition are you talking about?
I've been editing to fill in some more details. I'd rather not discuss my experiences with medications specifically here, but feel free to shoot me an e-mail (see profile) and I'll be happy to answer any questions I can.
If you want a possibly contrasting experience, feel free to email me (see profile), I was diagnosed with ADHD-C within the past year after many years of "this is just how I work, there's nothing that can be done".
I always look for behavioral solutions first, because they are often easier to execute than quasi-philosophical changes of outlook, and IMO are often underestimated in their effectiveness.
Have you tried waking up early? I find that I will similarly veg out from 5pm onward. For the past few months I've been faithfully getting out of bed at 5:45 every morning (with the help of a clock radio). The peace hours between 6 and 9 are my favorite part of the day now.
I have 3 hours to myself to work on projects, work on a MOOC, do a self-check and orient myself to deal with the day.
Indeed, success is 10% vision/inspiration, 10% skill/talent and 80% discipline. You've gotta show up and do what needs to get done, regardless of your want to do that. That goes double for your own personal projects as as it does for your J.O.B.
It's harder to drive yourself to the finish line than it is to drive projects for an employer. I can't speak for everyone else, but for me at least, I have zero sense of obligation to myself - if I ditch a personal project because I lose interest or because I find a better solution or just because I don't feel like it, my reputation isn't at stake. It's easy to walk away from and leave it on a shelf gathering dust with few (if any) consequences; whereas I feel a deep sense of obligation to see paid projects through to the bitter end, however bitter that may be. You don't want to damage your reputation for delivering on your promises. This is a constant struggle in my life.
You make a great point, one that I have been thinking about, and unfortunately, I'm not sure if I can entirely agree with it.
There are something to be said about habit and discipline. Certainly, one should never pursue something they have no interest in whatsoever. But for any thing we want to accomplish in life, there are tangent, chores, and generally "schlep" that you can't avoid. An extreme reading of your comment would mean that we should give up at the first road block. How do you differentiate between lacks of internal motivation, and great motivation being thwarted by fear of unpleasant tasks? In an ideal world, that shouldn't be an issue, in the real world, it's a lot harder to know.
When you're playing an instrument, if you've practiced a piece few hundreds times, you don't think your playing is good anymore. You know when you're making mistake, but even when you're playing perfectly, your perception of the piece you're playing would be a lot more "meh" comparing to the perception of some outside listener -- after all, you've heard that piece a lot of times. Motivated or not, without discipline it's unlikely you can keep doing things over and over.
When I was younger, I've always thought that great people doing great things by just focusing on their genuine interest, ie a physicist just want to understand the nature of the universe, and not particularly care whether his work is gonna have any impact or effect. It turns out that interest might not be the full picture: people who do great work might actually be conscious in wanting to be great, too. One of the example would be Richard Hamming, mentioned in his "You and Your Research" essay (which just popped up on HN lately, actually), even Feynman's biography mentioned that he need introspection during the period when he wasn't being productive as a physicist.
> In order to get at you individually, I must talk in the first person. I have to get you to drop modesty and say to yourself, ``Yes, I would like to do first-class work.'' Our society frowns on people who set out to do really good work. You're not supposed to; luck is supposed to descend on you and you do great things by chance. Well, that's a kind of dumb thing to say. I say, why shouldn't you set out to do something significant. You don't have to tell other people, but shouldn't you say to yourself, ``Yes, I would like to do something significant.'' -- Richard Hamming, You and Your Research.
Right, there's no need to get all New Age enlightenment-ish about it. I am not even in disagreement with the Richard Hamming quote. All I'm stressing on is that it's title is "YOU and YOUR Research". It's not "YOU and WHAT-YOU-THINK-YOU-SHOULD-RESEARCH-ON Research".
I struggled with the exact same confusion about "it's supposed to be natural" vs. "real life == effort" for many years till I understood : you do what it takes when it's your vision. You put in the outer effort, but there is no inner friction. And this can happen across years of "effort".
For example, if you envision clearly that you want to provide your child with a home, and at the same time decide that you're not going to work 12 hours a day for it, and forego a Google job in preference for a more "boring" employer who pays lower but allows flexibility while still paying enough for the mortgage to be paid, why not? It will still look like dreary effort to the hotshot Stanford grad, but to you, each day, which is part of a designed self-directed life, will be lovely. So what if it involves some amount of will-power to deal with an abusive colleague, etc;? You'll live, because it's within YOUR parameters of tolerance. The same thing could work the other way round : you cannot IMAGINE working for Google, but for someone for whom it's been a lifelong dream puts in the "effort".
i fully agree with your point, and hope it's not getting lost on folks: figuring out what drives you requires a level of introspection (and revisiting-- it will likely not be static your entire life) that most people never do. introspection is hard, and not something you get taught at school. i'd argue most people dont realize how to self-reflect until they are much older.. or perhaps it requires a certain level of experiences before it is even approachable?
> Our society frowns on people who set out to do really good work. You're not supposed to; luck is supposed to descend on you and you do great things by chance.
This is so true. It's odd that we celebrate butterflies and crush caterpillars. I think it was Les Brown who said something along the lines of– if you want to achieve uncommon, unreasonable results, you have to be an uncommon, unreasonable person putting in uncommon, unreasonable amounts of effort.
25% of all new businesses fail within the first year.
36% fail before their second anniversary.
44% fail before the end of the third year.
----
46% fail due to incompetence.
30% fail due to inexperience.
11% fail due to lack of domain knowledge.
As the years pass, the conditional probability that the new business will fail in the next year, given that it did not fail in the previous year, tapers off. The competence has been tested. The inexperience vanishes. The domain knowledge becomes less something you acquire from elsewhere and more something you make from within.
From the statistics, it looks like an awful lot of people are making uninformed guesses, out of their early incompetence or inexperience, and incorrect guesses destroy their business. That does not look like fortitude to me. It looks like walking your very first tightrope, never having had the benefit of even seeing another person cross one, over a pit of starving grizzly bears, as the people who have already crossed laugh at you and throw rocks at your head.
Those who already fell into the pit and managed to climb back out for another try have fortitude. But they also didn't get eaten. That's lucky.
It is unkind to say that those who never make the attempt lack fortitude. Perhaps they simply have an aversion to being chased down and eaten by ravenous bears. Or maybe they were born in the pit, and never got far enough ahead of the bears to try to climb up to the ropes.
But that does not address the question that should be on everyone's mind with respect to this analogy. Why do those people on the other side of the pit throw their rocks at the people on the ropes, instead of at the bears in the pit? Why is it necessary that starting a business be both radically unfamiliar and incredibly risky?
>>The narrative of luck makes people feel less bad about their lack of fortitude.
Contrary to whatever you think 'chance' plays a huge role in every one's success. When luck meets hard work, the returns compound. When hard work meets back luck, a person feels they were treated unfairly.But chance matters in a way far more than you realize. Heck, a Human is born out of sheer luck.
People don't realize how important luck is, until despite all their hard work they fail. A few people fail over and over again despite giving their best all in the while watching people doing way little win.
It's not a nice thing to go through. It will take nothing short of a disaster to make you believe in a miracle.
But the thing is that without hard work, you can have all the luck in the world and nothing is going to happen. And it also seems that the people who work harder have more luck for various reasons raging from having more opportunities come their way to seizing opportunities better.
Ultimately, I think, the kind of luck that matters most is the lack of bad luck. You can be the hardest working person in the world, but if you get hit by a car and spend two years recovering, that's gonna be a problem.
My point is, success compounds. At one point it starts looking like pure luck.
"But the thing is that without hard work, you can have all the luck in the world and nothing is going to happen."
Unfortunately that's not true. People will the lottery every week. In business that happens too. Look at all the well funded startups which never amount to anything, and factor in the prestige, earnings and opportunity those companies afford their participants. Plenty of people are early employees of hot startups simply via friendships and connections. Many of them leave or are fired. Many of those people become vastly wealthy.
Moreover look at all the one-hit wonders and luck is an even greater factor. If people who are smart, talented and able can reproduce their success why are they so rare? When someone never manages to get close to their initial success lack is often in play. It's not that they weren't clever, or didn't work hard, but it can be that luck picked them from a field of very similar people.
That shouldn't of course change your behavior. Luck is beyond our locus of control and planning for it, or around it, is like planning around a potential meteorite strike, or rain.
Anything you can force via effort isn't luck which is why people get confused. You can achieve against the odds via hard work alone which is why working hard is worthwhile.
You can also scale your success. The difference between making a living, making a million and being Mark Zuckerberg can all be attracted to work and wit without the need to factor luck into the equation at all.
Finally we're all focused on good-luck. Bad luck is the real enemy. To be diagnosed with a serious illness, or to be unable to take an opportunity due to factors you cannot effect will cut the legs out from underneath you however hard you work. Sometimes your good luck is invisible unless you're aware of the bad luck of those who'd otherwise take your place.
> You will NEVER have the energy that the people whom you compare with have.
I do hope this is an extreme case of misdiagnosis: it's implying that the OP is not an achiever, and lacking ambition - just because there are a few small hurdles in the way of his getting things done!
Here's an alternative diagnosis: if you focus too much on your peers, you're poisoning your own motivation. Of course you'll spend all day on HN, if the alternative is staring at an editor with a voice in your head scolding you for not being a success. Fix that and you'll have fixed your procrastination (easier said than done, probably, but still). A reading tip: Mastery, by George Leonard.
> I do hope this is an extreme case of misdiagnosis: it's implying that the OP is not an achiever, and lacking ambition
Taking the first part of quote out of context makes it seem harsh, but the second half of the quote provides justification.
>> You will NEVER have the energy that the people whom you compare with have. Because they are being themselves, and are connected to the natural wellspring of motivation that comes from genuine interest, while you are the salmon swimming upstream, aping societal ideals and trying to be someone you are not.
The quote assumes that your peers are focusing all of their energy on being themselves. If you are spending your energy concerning yourself with the efforts of others, you arent spending _all_ of your energy focusing on being yourself and doing your best. Seems very much in line with your diagnosis.
I don't think the second part of that quote makes things any better at all. OP is basically saying "I want to be successful in my projects, please advise", and the off-the-cuff diagnosis offered is that he's "aping societal ideals and trying to be someone [he is] not", and that unlike his peers, he must be lacking "genuine interest" in his projects. Seriously?
> Seems very much in line with your diagnosis.
I think you gave the grandparent post a very charitable reading :)
Most successful businesses are not the result of passion projects. OP's problem isn't that he lacks ideas (so he claims), it's that he has the common affliction of not being able to follow through on them. Even if we all want to be Steve Jobs, most of us won't be.
But we probably do agree that constantly comparing oneself to others is not good for emotional well-being.
My advice to OP: don't focus on outcomes (ie, 'this 22 year-old did X, why haven't I?), focus on the process. Your goal should be to each day do work and spend your time in a way of which you would be proud. Avoid the hot and cold cycle of overwork / burnout and procrastination.
> Most successful businesses are not the result of passion projects.
I would argue against that statement. What makes you say that? Passion is the necessary driving force to keep someone motivated enough to follow through.
Was Rockefeller passionate about oil? Sam Walton about discount pricing? I think most successful entrepreneurs are just natural-born businessmen, and the specifics of their industry are mostly incidental.
You're probably looking at this from inside the SV bubble, but I could make a similar case there, too. Plenty of apps just ride the latest trend, and would pivot in a heart beat if it made if it makes business sense.
About 4 years ago, I thought I was done with software development. I was so burnt out and full of self doubt that I thought I was going to quit it forever. I wanted to do anything other than work with computers again. I quit my job, took up painting, and then a month later found myself banging away at a keyboard into a text editor because I had this burning idea for a program.
The problem wasn't the work, it was the environment. I had allowed myself to get into a situation where I was spending all of my creative energy on someone else: my employer.
I did a brief stint back as an employee at another place for a while, just because I had gotten desperate for cash and it was the only opportunity that came my way for a while. But I eventually went freelance and now I only work part-time for my client. The rest of the time I spend working for myself.
Moral of the story: you are correct, you do need to just cut and run sometimes, but just be careful not to confuse the impact of environment on your feelings about your activities with your actual feelings about your activities.
I think your problem is the crisis du jour, the 'hollow men' of our times. At its heart lies multitasking and sensory overload. With the barrage of modern tech/media, it's become so easy to tune into many little bits of nothing for hours/days/years (surfing the web, watching video, fiddling with your phone, hacking the web) that time passes effortlessly and invisibly. Eventually you look up and realize you're a decade older.
One way to deal with this is similar to how people meditate: 1) focus on being aware of nothing, or 2) focus on being aware of everything (while not becoming distracted). Either way, employing single-minded attentiveness will reboot your brain and help you generate your own thoughts again. A sense of purpose can arise only after you stop being distracted by the trivial racket of the world outside.
To begin, sit and do nothing for as long as it takes, til you get antsy enough that you just have to do something. Whatever that something is, it rose to the top of your list of stuff you felt the need to do, so that alone makes it important. So act on it. If later you run out of ideas again, then sit down and return to doing nothing until the cluelessness passes.
But whatever you do, DON'T mindlessly tune in, and STOP doing ten things at once. Those paths lead nowhere.
Losing want, is good. Many people strive and yearn for this.
Now that you know you don't want/expect anything out of life, you are in a position where you can serve humanity. You'd probably die tomorrow/next week/next year/next decade. You don't know. It's your duty to leave this place in a better state than you found it in. Assuming you have some skills that can help others, pass them on. Volunteer. Tutor. Plant trees. Build schools/shelters. Teach middle school math/science. Try to evoke the sense of wonder in engineering/software/physics in children, the same wonder that you saw in these fields once. Don't do it with the expectation that it would make you happy. It might not. Do it because you have to. Do it because there are millions of people who would give anything to trade places with you.
Take a break, spend some time somewhere nice and quiet– like a faraway beach, and sit for hours and see what comes to your mind. You're bound to be curious about something, interested in something. Day to day life has a way of wearing that down in people– we get so caught up in our obligations and our bills and such that we forget what we're curious about, what we're interested in.
Once you figure out what you're curious about, throw yourself into learning everything you can.
That, and serve others. Volunteer. Ask yourself– what do you wish you had when you were a kid, that you didn't? What do you know now that you wish you knew before? Then seek out people who're struggling with that problem, and help them. It feels good.
In the tragedy of the commons, the person with the shortest time preference wins. I desire long-term goals like college funds for the children and retirement funds for the parents. The spouse always desires a house with one more room in it than the one we currently occupy, a vehicle newer than the ones we currently drive, furniture more comfortable and attractive than that which we currently own.
For a full decade, I have spent nearly nothing upon my own interests. I dare not spend even $5 for a fast-food sandwich, for fear that $5 will add to "our" debts. I find that my interests have waned, and my ambition has withered. What good is wanting that which you cannot have? Why take a risk when you can realize no benefit from the reward?
Then I realized that this is what it must be like to live in poverty. Desire begets misery. Merely existing incurs debt. The only treatment for the despair is apathy, but that is like taking heroin for a headache.
But now that I no longer care about anything, now that I have stuffed all my dreams into a sack and thrown them in the river to drown, now that I no longer feel pleasure in anything that am able to do myself, I have fallen into the trap of nihilism. Everything is pointless, including attempts to become a non-nihilist.
It's too late for us. Our only purpose now is to serve as a cautionary tale for others. The lesson to be learned is to never allow the course of your life to be directed by others, or you will lose the ability to direct it yourself.
I did, of course, tell a teensy little lie previously in this post. I have discovered a passionate desire to write fiction, and take pleasure in devising schemes by which the system of the world may be altered to become less cruel to those subjected to it.
Just force yourself to try new things until the things you do no longer seem obligatory. Just yesterday, I saw a video on YouTube where the subject, who had miniscule pedagogical talent, demonstrated the creation of a longbow in ten minutes, using less than $10 in materials that are readily available from any home improvement store. Longbows are largely obsolete. Why would anyone make one from modern materials? You can't even use something like that for historical reenactments. You can buy bows made from modern materials that work better for hunting or target shooting. Why would you make a video of yourself making one?
The answer to all those irrelevant questions is that this guy likes making bows, and he wants to share his enjoyment with others. You and I can also do that, no matter what it is we do.
How the hell did he even figure out that he liked doing that? Making bows is hardly a commonplace activity. Apparently, he just did something that he had never done before, and simply kept on doing it. Stop counting days and start doing things. Anything.
It gives me some sense of satisfaction that I can write such a convincing representation of such a person. But then I get sucked into a philosophical discussion with myself about whether authors can accurately depict characters with personality traits that they do not themselves possess. And that makes me worried that I might be depressed and in self-denial about it.
The facts remain that ancestor post needs to do something not part of the ordinary routine, and that I ought to finish that first book instead of posting on HN.
Exactly, I quit and started a project. Found the domain had some really hard problems, got bogged down in the impl. Started wasting time, burning thru my savings. Faced the cold hard reality it wasn't happening, and went back to work.
All I have to show for it? A 9 month gap to explain in my resume.
This!
Life is too short to pretend to be someone that you're not.
Simply one should make peace with being considered an utter failure by everyone and then proceed to do what they love nonetheless. All else is poor imitation.
This is the mark of genuine flow :) wow...you should start your own "do whatever you want" university. Pretty sure all the young impressionable minds around here will enjoy it.
College student here. I've read a lot into the "do your own thing" mentality, especially the "don't go to university just do stuff", such as at Thiel summits, startup events. I personally love the idea of founding a startup, so I've given it a lot of thought.
It's important for me to work on my own terms and to do something I find meaningful, and so I enjoyed riding along with the crowd that follows the above mentality. However, I'm also good at critical thinking and sometimes I ask myself about the people and what we're doing. Why are we all chasing the startup dream? Can we really all achieve great success? I think a big part of "why" is the pack mentality, ironically, that drives young people like me to this "don't join the workforce, don't listen to the man, do whatever you want", because so many people are encouraging us to chase our dreams. But I've come to the conclusion that for most people, it's simply not feasible to achieve that dream of making enough money doing your own thing. You need to be very, very good, or be lucky enough to have an excellent idea (and execution!!). Sadly, most people and ideas (and luck) are merely mediocre and not the top 5% or whatever needed, simply by definition.
Fortunately while we are young we'll fall softly and, as a software engineer, will likely able to find a job even if we meet failure. But sometimes I do worry not only for the feasibility of my own dreams, but also the other young people around me, and it's certainly something to think about before we encourage everyone to jump "into their dreams".
Great points! Yes, "critical thinking" a great phrase for it.
I agree with a lot of your points. The "don't go to university" / "dropouts are successful" meme is particularly alarming to me. Unless your achievement are stupendous, most employers, even startups, judge you based on your level of education, your Uni's ranking, etc; Why discard that data?
Furthermore, university is a great place to grow socially and find friends, girl/boyfriends, and maybe even a future co-founder! (Sometimes I think our education system should have a social education aspect too. Networking, communicating, and even brown-nosing can all be very useful.)
As someone at the very other end of the 20s spectrum:
1. My own responsibility towards myself and my life weighs a lot more heavily on me at 29 than it did at 22. At 22 I had faith that it would work out, somehow. I think that's a feeling to be taken advantage of while you still have it.
2. Conversely, I also realize now that I won't be successful at something that I don't like, and that doing something I like is worth more than money. Obviously this only works to a certain extent, I still need to live. But it seems more and more that as long as you are pursuing you believe in and enjoy, you aren't poor in spirit.
My point being: maybe don't worry so much for the feasibility of your dreams at this moment in your life.
"Do whatever you want", yes. Whatever you want can involve not starving, being able to afford health insurance and a mortgage, marry a desirable person, have children, etc;
Without thinking too deeply about it, I feel like it may be useful to point out some different ways of thinking about programming.
1. It's an interesting hobby, like crocheting, writing poetry, or solving tricky integrals.
Sometimes it's hard work, but that's enjoyable too, maybe that's when it's the most enjoyable. If it feels like drudgery, maybe you're just tired; knitting is extremely repetitive, yet kind of nice.
The degree to which you stretch yourself by attempting grander things is up to you. Some people enjoy working on intricate projects for years; some prefer to do something quick over a weekend.
If you make something useful, that's very nice, but not required. If one of your creations makes a nice Christmas gift, cool!
2. It's a way to configure computers to do things for you and your friends. This opens up interesting opportunities.
Someone who doesn't know anything about programming is limited to computer use within the parameters already provided by applications. But even that is very powerful, because what programs do—should do—is enable people to do things that they want to do.
For example, WordPress, while technically not that fascinating, has had a massive impact on the world. You don't need to be a programmer to set up WordPress—but if you can program, you can do more things with it. You can more easily make it look like you want it to look or do what you want it to do.
3. It's an arena of self-expression and demonstration of ambition.
The original poster mentions being in his mid-twenties. The significance he finds in this has to do with an idea that by that time, one "should" have accomplished lots. But maybe the real significance is that this age intensifies feelings of ambition. That's probably not a cultural universal, but it's some kind of phenomenon. It doesn't have that much to do with programming; a welder, nurse, or writer might feel the same thing. Cultural ideas of careers and individualism play into it.
The flip side of this kind of ambition (forgive the off-hand philosophizing) is the fear that deep down, I am nothing, I am a fraud, I am useless to the world. That might be a motivating fear. You mentioned J. Krish, there's also the Buddhist idea of three kinds of deceit: the idea that I am better than others, the idea that I am worse than others, and the idea that I am equal to others. That seems to leave little option. But, um, think about it.
4. A kind of synthesis. If you dial down the intensity of tractionless ambition a little bit, you may realize that a little bit of programming can go a long way. And steady, patient work is more sustainable than striving, and more fun. There is no intrinsic, cosmic reason that you must create a new JavaScript framework if you don't feel like it. An animation of a bouncing lolcat might do you more good than three years of dreaming about neural networks.
This website right here is so simple you could code it in a week. Forget about web scale; if your thing gets used by a dozen people, and they actually like it, you're a wizard already. You are not a failure for not winning the VC lottery and even AirBnB is just a forum for letting people crash on your couch. "I have seen all the works which have been done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and striving after wind."
Awesome post. I don't usually expect to see this kind of philosophical stuff on HN. I think there's a lot of truth in what you say here. It just like, people in denial about who they are all the time. Reminds me of Emerson "Envy is ignorance, Imitation is Suicide"
I think its worth noting that 1) someone could end up doing all the exact same things, but for a different reason and be totally content that way. And 2) a lot of people go through their whole life dissatisfied and uninspired, and that isn't the end of the world.
Wow, that was well said. I'm not that often genuinely impressed by what I read on HN. Never've read anything by Jiddu Krishnamurthi, could you recommend something?
it is 10% talent and 90% hard work. Not the other way around.
I love coding Ruby. But all the design and front end work? From HTML5 to CSS. Forget it. But if I focused on "effortless" Rails coding only -- this would get me absolutely nowhere. Not to mention unix skills, administration, making customers happy, etc.
Sure, would be easier to work for a big corp and do Rails coding only. But then there are other hard or intolerable things there (intolerable to me!). Like bosses proud they can't code with BA's in Political Science. Or lazy coworkers. Or whatever else.
Life is hard and then you die. If you can find happiness in this sentence (and I can!), if you can still find sense in all of that and be happy somehow. That's happiness. Because sh*t always happens.
And all these rich young kids. They might have problems on their own too. They might have no social live. They might have had no childhood. They may have nobody candid to them to hang out with. They may be poor as far as their people relations go or as far as their free time goes. What's so awesome about working 24/7 and all the money when you have no time to enjoy it? This is being really poor. It's exactly like not being able to afford going to vacation because of lack of money. You can't go period. No money or no time, both make you poor. As lack of social live does.
I would also mention looking at what you do to satsify your natural inclinations.
I myself am very goal oriented. I always have to feel as if I'm moving forward on something. It took me years to realize what I enjoy most about games is the feeling of accomplishment you get from finishing them and I'm actively more productive in other areas of my life when I limit my game playing time. Not because I'm "wasting time", but because emotionally I'm not satisfied and find myself constantly working and building other things.
This advice is easy to give but difficult to follow in practice. Krishnamurrthi wrote from a position of pure arrogance, because he was told his whole life that he was a special person. He's not special; he's just repeating what others have said in a watered down package. That's what makes his philosophy so dangerous.
It's not, it's getting worse.
You are in a cycle of slave-driving yourself. You remind me of Jiddu Krishnamurthi's assertion that "Influence acts strongest when you don't realize that it is acting". I would venture that most of your accomplishments are a result of being told what you should do, what you should be.
You will NEVER have the energy that the people whom you compare with have. Because they are being themselves, and are connected to the natural wellspring of motivation that comes from genuine interest, while you are the salmon swimming upstream, aping societal ideals and trying to be someone you are not.
Choose the opposite for a while : stop doing things that don't motivate you. Find out what motivates you. Be spontaneous. If you find a small plant at the roadside that you want to water, do it. Observe that absolutely no effort was required in this action. This is the mark of genuine flow : you will not feel the effort. If you chance upon some project which you execute in this natural state of interest, you will not feel tired.
Almost no one takes my advice because it's so threatening to be natural. What if you are not naturally ambitious? That's a horrific thought to have while being in the company of achievers, isn't it?