Ask HN: Problems with Reaching Out to the World
I have a hard time reaching out or putting my work out in the world.
This manifests in different ways:
I never had a mentor in _anything_, and I always wished for one. I play professional foosball, music, programming since I was 8, skateboarding in my youth ( I'm in my 30s ) etc. I'm basically unteachable, I though that I just haven't met the right person and was envious of others that had mentors, but it's clear to me now that this comes from me.
It's very hard for me to put my stuff out in the world. I always judge the end result, I know that my role is to create not to judge, the world will do its thing, but again, it's an emotional thing. The same goes with music: I've been playing for a long long time, but never produced anything. I always improvised and I'm dreaming music, writing in my head all the time. But if I sit down if front of my laptop and write then it's super stressful, and if I push it I'm exhausted in 3 days. In my head it should be perfect the first time, if it's not then I'm shit.
For the last few months I've been meditating on the reasons and this is where I am: My subconscious thinks that the world is a scary place and you shouldn't expect anything, all you can do is be levels above everyone ( by yourself ) and then maybe you have a chance.
This obviously stems from my childhood, my environment sabotaged me a lot of times and didn't pay attention to what I want. I'm okay with that now, it's time for me to put that down. What i want is a creative life and this is my main block.
My fail-process is the following: I know I have to put out something, but stressed to do. This frustration boils over and after a point I reach out / push something out. If I don't get immediate positive reaction I get depressed, repeat.
Everything I achieved is thanks to these small reach outs, I just wish I could do it more ( btw this post is a part of that ) and without a pain in my chest maybe :)
One of the side effects of not reaching out is I'm kind of manipulative in my environment: instead of getting to know the right people I imagine who I could work with from my surroundings, and project things into them. I run a 10 person software consulting company which I started with a horrible partner that caused a lot of a suffering for years (it's over now). I don't want to do that again, I don't want to motivate or change anyone anymore.
I'm solo-writing a small app that will track your movements from a camera and measures the height of your jumps. It's for training at home without any tooling, or for sports that require high jumps ( volleyball, basketball etc. ). The idea is that jumping is a very good movement but it's demotivating without feedback, this app would provide the feedback.
I finished the MVP quite fast and I've been "improving": making it faster smoother, better graphs, lot of bullshit. I know I should release it without adding new features, it's just soo hard to do. I did this solo thing to meet these demons, it was definitely successful in that :)
I want to grow my company and get into robotics, help small scale agriculture somehow and it needs to grow. My idea is to be creative, put it out, talk with people, connect with them and things will fall into place. It's just so hard for me...
Not really looking for advice ( feel free to share tho :) ), just writing out, listen to how You got over the same thing.
Thanks for reading this wall of text :)