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Ask HN: Are smart people who are very good at what they do happier?

2 points by shankr ↗ HN
I consider myself average, and I have been struggling recently with that fact. I have a decent job as a Data Scientist, but I feel like I am not very good at it. I have been thinking of trying something which I am really good at, but I can't really find anything.

Do people who excel at what they do find better satisfaction in their work?

7 comments

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dale14
No necessarily mate. They could be good at what they do but sick or can't find someone or or...
sharemywin
I think there is a fleeting sweet spot where your pretty good at it, but not so good it's become routine.

But, I think it varies by person. Some people are happy at factories, others ...

tboyd47
Find out your strengths and focus on developing those, and just be good enough on your weaknesses.

When I first became a programmer I was obsessed with clean code and architecture principles but would lose every debate about it with my co-workers, and always end up rewriting my code to match some principle someone follows. This would happen at every job and became very stressful and unpleasant. Now I have accepted that I will never be a first class code architect and although I am very secure in my developer skills, I don't really get involved in coding debates. I am content to let other people do the architecting and just tell me what to do, and much happier for it. I found other strengths I have on the job.

shankr
This resonates with me. I do lot of data work myself, but at the end, I get better inputs from my colleagues on how to proceed further. Lot of my colleagues are Phds and they seem to have knack of diving deeper into problems. This makes me afraid that I won't be able to lead a team or hold a managerial position later in my career.
thvu1k
No, that would be an extremely simplistic view of happiness
justme00
You need a good balance of things that matter to you, actually. There's no secret to happiness. Good luck man.
arbie
People who excel at what they do generally stay occupied enough to not inspect their current state of happiness too frequently, because they are usually preoccupied with work even when not working.

Think of it as the intersection between "No work is ever wasted" and "The reward for good work is more work." It's a messy amalgam of random ideas somehow coalescing into new products/features in the nick of time, every time.