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On Proving Yourself

thesephist.com

97 pointsfeross29 comments

The three balances one must make with their career is: (1) doing things you enjoy, (2) doing things you’re good at, and (3) doing things other people want.

Having only 1 or 2 of these 3 can be OK, but not ultimately fulfilling or sustainable.

In this framework, the author is saying one should shift more weight towards doing what you enjoy (and are good at), and less what others want.

I think the balance is dynamic, and changes as you get older.

Under the apprenticeship model, you start heavily doing what others want, while building what you’re good at. Once you’ve proven you have real skills and can provide value to the world, you think how to mix that into a unique way to deliver value to the world while being able to express your unique self.

> The three balances one must make with their career is: (1) doing things you enjoy, (2) doing things you’re good at, and (3) doing things other people want.

> Having only 1 or 2 of these 3 can be OK, but not ultimately fulfilling or sustainable.

Surely you mean "fulfilling and sustainable"? It seems to me that there are certainly people who find great fulfillment by satisfying (1) and (2) without (3), even if they have to sacrifice for it (and even then, sometimes if you (1) and (2) hard enough it'll create (3)—think of how many esoteric passion projects get rapt attention, and sometimes even financial support, when the right community of interested people finds them).

If you can create (3) later then that’s great. A lack of (3) is not sustainable because you are unlikely to get paid, and your peers ignore your work and ideas, which can be demoralising.

I think one can get used to not getting paid (if you have independent funds), but being ignored is something one can rarely get used to.

The satisfaction to be gained from doing "what others want" also depends massively on who those other people are, and the nature of your relationship with them.

Well said, there’s nothing better than finding genuine motivation to get something done, not just because you want to complete it, but because those you respect also respect you, and will be grateful for its completion.

I like the point he makes. It's worth expanding on a little; why don't more people do what he's suggesting and spend most of their time trying to just do stuff they think will be good I stead of optimising for something else? At a basic level, it can be pretty scary, particularly if you're in the situation he describes where you don't quite trust yourself yet.

We have a big problem with that where I'm from. We get a lot of brain drain going over to California (ok fine, everyone does), not necessarily because of the opportunities that are undeniably present there but because early-career tech people here are inherently less willing to accept the proposition that it's possible to make the work cool where you are; not everyone will work for Google Brain once in the valley, anyway.

I struggled greatly with this and had a big misadventure going to the US myself but the perspective it gave me on the need to lean in(wards) was worth it. Hope it is for someone else too.

You have to be able to explain what you're working on to your partner's parents and friends. If they haven't heard about it in the newspaper or on TV they won't be impressed and might not want you to be their in-law.

Edit: interviewers are also unimpressed by personal projects they've never heard of. It's the publicity that gives you clout, not the quality of your project.

Edit 2: Just to clarify, I wholeheartedly agree with the author and also try to build according to their ethos, but I've felt the insecurity they describe at various point in my life.

> It would be hypocritical for me to say that it’s foolish to want to prove yourself, because feeling like you are qualified and worthy deeply influences how you do what you do [...]

Something I've been working on in myself is being happy with where I am and not always trying to prove myself to others. I used to be in a place where so much of what I did at work was an attempt to prove how smart and clever I was to others. (Don't get me wrong, I love solving problems on their own, but I also wanted others to see how capable I was.)

It would bring me down when others didn't see the clever things that I came up with, or if I wasn't rewarded for the smart solutions. Ultimately, I started to realize that my "worthiness" shouldn't be determined based on what others believe. It sounds like the author isn't quite there themselves. Being "qualified" or "worthy" is a nebulous goal and always shifting as you become more successful. You'll never reach it and if you're relying on others to feel worthwhile, you'll constantly be disappointed. I think this is ultimately something you learn with age and experience.

I was reading a book recently that put things in a way that made sense to me. What it said was that you ultimately have to take stock of your own values, those things that are important to you, and just work on those things. The external success (or praise) in your work is secondary and something you just don't have full control over. All you really have control in your life is the actions you take and how closely aligned they are to your own values. So, live your life virtuously by living in accord with your values and that should be the ultimate arbiter of success, and not whether you've "proven" yourself in the eyes of other people. It's easier said than done, of course, because praise feels so good.

Imo this hits the nail of the head:

> But fortunately I’ve found that just doing the thing that fulfills you the most also happens to be the fastest way to discover other people who will celebrate your ideas and hard work.

Even it those "other people" are only a "cohort" of 3 or 4 and not the metaphorical thousands, as long as those 3 or 4 persons are genuinely into what you're doing and, most importantly, they're doing/building most probably something similar to you (or following the same philosophy), then I find that that is very much worth it (i.e. "giving away" the attention of the multitudes for the "attention" of a few people from your particular domain).

I have a much more cynical and pessimistic view that's pretty much not on brand for HN.

I spent 3 years working on a videogame as a personal side project. Although I was passionate about it, thing is it was a very niche idea. Sure, maybe I got literally 2 or 3 people that were super into it, but it never got any traction.

So yes, doing something that you enjoy is it's own reward... to a point. I poured hundreds of hours in that videogame and led to me burnout once, jut to have a few hundreds visits. I don't exactly regret the experience, but I could have spent much less time and effort on it.

Now I'm less "follow your passion" and more tactical about my efforts. I spent a weekend prototyping a game where you guess an emoji using a "hot/cold" system by comparing emojis based on their semantic similarity. When I asked for feedback it was universally panned, so I decided to drop it. Sure, maybe there is one person who'd love the game, but we only have so much time on this earth, so I have to consider the opportunity cost of building something that one person could love vs building something more people might enjoy.

If your cohort is only 3 or 4 people, hopefully your sustainable livelihood isn't tied too much to that endeavor.

That's part of the whole thing, that when you do something you love or which at least you're greatly interested in you don't necessarily do it for money, I'd say that in most cases you don't do it for money. That's what jobs are for (money, that is).

> Like any bright-eyed engineer fresh to the Valley, I wanted to start a company. I wanted lots of followers on Twitter.

God help us if what bright eyed engineers want, is lots of followers on Twitter.

> God help us if what bright eyed engineers want, is lots of followers on Twitter.

That was my reaction. But on reflection: he says he's changed, and is now much happier. I wonder if he's painted his earlier self in a hyper-critical light? The person he described seemed to me to be horribly shallow - it was all about wanting to be cool, popular, and to hang around with other cool people. That's a sort of Kardashian mindset.

Anyway, by the time he flipped and relaxed into doing what interested him, he had already achieved his influencer-like goals.

I also felt I had to prove myself; but not in terms of who I got to hang around with, or how many followers I had. I felt that I had to prove to myself that I was a reasonably good software developer. It took me a decade.

There's this claim (not sure where it comes from) that to get really good at anything difficult takes a decade - learning an instrument, skippering a boat, even cooking. I'm inclined to agree.

I'm always amazed people are out there taking multi month long sabbaticals. Especially in the US

Other than health insurance (which is often available via a spouse or affordably via a high-deductible market option), what makes taking a multi-month sabbatical more difficult in the US? If anything, the high compensation of SWEs in the US might make it easier to save money for a multi-month break.

Being in the US, I know a lot more people in the US than elsewhere, but I know quite a few people who took a path like this in the US.

Yeah health insurance is the big one. Rent also being high, like this guy lives in NYC from what I saw on the site. I guess the other uses of that cash, like going towards down payments on homes which are also incredibly expensive

Health insurance, rent, car payments, car insurance, utilities. In bay area, these could easily come up to $4k

If you save up the money, you can take as much time off from working as you want. The reason why most people can't do that is because they increase their expenses to meet or exceed their income rather than spending less money than they make.

Precisely. Especially among this crowd, the hamster wheel is largely self-imposed.

In what sense does it seem amazing to you?

I answered in the other post, also every job search I've gone through has been a multiple month ordeal, I'd spend the the whole time stressing about the next job.

requires extreme privilege in the US and much of the world. same reason you see trucker protests (whether canada or argentina) are full of business owners not actual labor, because labor can't afford to protest for days/weeks on end without work

Workers have been "protesting for days/weeks on end without work" since forever. Including in far more poverty-striken eras...

Maybe read up a little on the history of labor in the US and globally?

I have

> When I look back at my projects and writings that made the biggest impact in my career, they are never the ones that I built for the express purpose of accomplishing one of the many checkpoints I was naively chasing. Instead, they’re almost always borne out of me following through on what’s personally interesting to me

This really hit home for me. My most significant memories are of the things I did out of passion and interest and not because "I had" to do them.

In other words, it's about being authentic vs trying to reach some socially prescribed ideal of success in order to prove yourself.

There are many more nuances than those presented.

This is a personal example, but there are many such cases: I used to do a job, academic research, that I loved, but it was poorly paid. I switched to a very lucrative job, which I don't hate, I don't love, but it is a job as it is understood when people say, "I have a job."

But the money from "the job" allows me to have a much easier life in terms of money, with less stress that I don't want (paying rent, what if I have an emergency that requires dollars) and with room for the many passions I have.

Guess what, I can also live without doing research; I did research on my own for a while, even published a couple of papers, which was both meritorious and useless at the same time, but I eventually devoted my creativity to other activities that are now more fulfilling than research.

Nothing wrong with proving yourself, introspection or self-improvement. But the best people (in my book anyway) care for others as their #1 priority; so much so that they barely have time to reflect.

I sympathize with this view, but I think many people's biggest contributions to humanity are not through care for others.

Take Donald Knuth, just off the top of my head. I've seen people close to him write glowingly of his personal qualities, but I would argue his contribution to humanity is overwhelmingly through his work, not through caring for others.

If you measure people primarily through care for others, you'll miss out on some pretty remarkable people.

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