While I certainly wouldn't want to be terrified every minute of my work day (that seems like it'd lead to adrenal collapse), I have found that when I lean into discomfort, I learn more and grow more. For example, in my current job, my boss really wanted me to record some videos. I resisted (had plenty of other work to do, videos wouldn't be that useful, yadda yadda). But the real reason was that I was uncomfortable with the entire process, from script writing to recording to publishing.
After enough pushing, I recorded the first video. It was not great, but I learned something. Two things, really. First, I learned some technical stuff (what software to use, how to edit, etc). Second, I learned that this task, which I'd built up in my mind as something super scary, wasn't that bad. It wasn't great (and I definitely wasn't great at it) but I could do it.
I continued to record videos and after the fifth one or so, it got much much easier. I was still learning and improving, but it became just another task, not a monumental task. And now I have a new skillset.
There are times in my career where I leaned into a task that I was afraid of and didn't have the same positive outcome, but in general at work the fear around a task has been far worse than the actual task.
In my professional life, I have found that what I expect to be extreme is often less so. In addition to thinking difficult tasks are harder than they end up being, I have also found my estimation of simple tasks to under-consider the effort necessary. IMHO it’s another way of saying humans are bad as estimating.
I’ve found that developing the habit of excellence, “normalizes” it.
Instead of good work being an exception, I believe that it should be the norm (for me).
In my work, I do every project as if it was a “ship” project, to be submitted to the App Store. Even my simple test harnesses are apps that many professional developers would gladly submit for approval.
I write very good code, very quickly. It’s reached the level of “muscle memory.”
Yeah that's because we never verify estimates. Like make an estimate, do it, then compare it to reality. Make ten more estimates, carry them out earnestly, compare estimates to practice. Then you can review, one at a time, and then yes you can take an average that is of some value, maximum and minimum are better, or like really zoom in on the outliers, if you want to be an outlier don't exclude the outliers in the tasks you perform.
It's the same thing as keeping all receipts, nobody does it but some people do it, and those people end up way ahead of the money game.
[EDIT: here I start to change the subject, but I tie it back in the end]
But let me declare time and money are very different things. In some ways money is better in other ways time, people who say time is more valuable than money are always simply bragging about how little time it takes them to get money from others. For people who are getting exploited, time is worse than money. Time is all they have, their least valuable resource, it has negative worth, that's why they spend it watching TV (this also helps ends meet because you recover calorically from turning your brain off by watching television, the poor don't watch TV because they're stupid they watch because of how horribly calorically draining their work and especially commute are. I would do the same thing for the same reasons in the same situation. Like there's so many the-rapists saying life is the most precious thing, but not if your life is being someone else's bitch, yeah maybe the the rapists life is precious but the exploited, the evicted's is not. Time is a problem. Meaning not to HIMSELF, his life is precious to the the-rapist, in fact when I was in a torture ward, a nuthouse, that place, I was told these guys get into deep shit if a patient effectually kills himself in there. Meaning pulls it off. I opted for smoking instead, it's a perfectly legal and socially accepted form of suicide, I had no love for life then because I was being so much harm and my existence was primarily in order to benefit those I hated the most, my life was terrible why would I want to live it more if it's a worse life? So I started smoking, and in my case that really was freedom, just like Philip Morris says it is. I vouch. I knew a professor at Stanford who attempted suicide, we were in the ward together, he just wanted to die, when I told him I was getting threatened with being denounced to the police at any minute, my lynching, he told me about his cousin who committed suicide because he was going to prison for the second time, shotgun, perfect shot, no hesitation.
Like who gave the deliberately imprisoned homosexual serial rapist inmate the right to rape above the right of a beautiful junkie (this professor said he had a face like an angel) who got DUI's--California, 3 strikes, prison for a season (because of America's medical system being consistently niggardly with medication that actually works, there's the-rapist again), the dealer cheated him--so that guy doesn't have the right not to get raped? Like why is the problem that he ends time in order not to get raped?
Who made these rules? The-rapist. Not the one in the prison, he's secondary, he's like a puppet or a fluffer, very cruel and psychologically and physically poisonous, there's literally pimps who call themselves Poison, but he's a tool, formally a farm animal, he's weaponized, it's not him, it's the-rapist running the torture ward. The torture warden. Yeah they make money from the-rapey, $300 per patient per day. Erasing trauma, which should not be erased, trauma is valuable, it's your body doing everything it can to preserve evidence to protect and vindicate you and those around you in the future. But no trauma is bad, they say they can treat that, fill up that difficult-to-fill time in their own weekly schedule, he'll keep coming back for decades for more counterproductive, super super safe a...
To be clear, I was just talking about my subconscious "this will take X time so I should/shouldn't bother doing it now" intuition. Proper estimation of tasks and projects is a whole different topic.
Yeah this is really important. To piggy back on this I use to feel like I couldn't do something because it was too hard, but I changed my perspective to I can do anything with enough time and that has done wonders to my career development.
I'm not sure I parse the title correctly; is it "if you're scared that you are winning (then do this)", or "if you're scared, it means that you are winning"?
It's a crazy question. Obviously she has just given birth. Why would we brainwash women into think they account to nothing if they don't ALSO have a "career"?
The author has just given birth and is raising her kids is feeling social pressure to demonstrate her value to her peers. (Side note, this only occurs in more affluent circles. A working class mother talking to her friend would feel no such insecurities.) She seems to resolve this conflict in her head not by realizing that the premise is wrong, but by "giving herself some slack" until she can get back and make some career accomplishment to restore her sense of value.
Ultimately we all choose the yardstick we measure ourselves with, and for the most part if you have confidence in your choice, other people will actually accept whatever we've chosen most of the time.
This kind of unhappiness the author is experiences comes from being unable to break free from the perceived expectations placed on her. The solution is to form your own expectations of yourself and try to live up to them, but many people it seems do not have the courage to do this on their own, so instead they join in with whatever the current zeitgeist says the new set of expectations on everyone should be, as if simply changing them will be their solution as well. These new expectations once they take hold, however, will simply be tomorrow's tools of oppression of the individual, no different from those that exist today.
I think this ends up inevitably for many people being a very sad way to spend your life unless you happen to fit into and have the life circumstances to support fitting the model. Even if you do, you'll do so without ownership and agency in the choice of what you're going to do with your life.
> This kind of unhappiness the author is experiences comes from being unable to break free from the perceived expectations placed on her. The solution is to form your own expectations of yourself and try to live up to them, but many people it seems do not have the courage to do this on their own.
Mostly agree with this, but I wonder if a lack of “courage” is what’s actually preventing most from breaking free of societal values. It seems more like a lack of introspection and discipline. Introspection to identify the root cause of dissatisfaction, and discipline to retrain your mind.
Even if you don't think it's true that "spawning" is an achievement in and of itself, I think it benefits you that others do "spawn". If you society discouraged having children strongly enough, it would collapse. An aged population with no workers or innovators isn't a recipe for success.
This is a literal response to your question as to why it's good that people think reproducing is an achievement, I'm not talking about whether it actually is or isn't.
Albeit the title doesn't match the content that much (you have to give some thought for it to make sense), I would partially agree with the sentence, based on personal experiences.
I don't have a hard time talking to women in general (I am a father of two), regardless of beauty, but if a woman approaches me, with hints of interest, I get really scared/shy/anxious. If it is the contrary, that is, I am doing the approach, usually I am cool. But thinking through, it is quite interesting, given that in a social circumstance having a woman approaching you, it means that she found something on you more interesting than other guys.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 55.3 ms ] threadAfter enough pushing, I recorded the first video. It was not great, but I learned something. Two things, really. First, I learned some technical stuff (what software to use, how to edit, etc). Second, I learned that this task, which I'd built up in my mind as something super scary, wasn't that bad. It wasn't great (and I definitely wasn't great at it) but I could do it.
I continued to record videos and after the fifth one or so, it got much much easier. I was still learning and improving, but it became just another task, not a monumental task. And now I have a new skillset.
There are times in my career where I leaned into a task that I was afraid of and didn't have the same positive outcome, but in general at work the fear around a task has been far worse than the actual task.
Instead of good work being an exception, I believe that it should be the norm (for me).
In my work, I do every project as if it was a “ship” project, to be submitted to the App Store. Even my simple test harnesses are apps that many professional developers would gladly submit for approval.
I write very good code, very quickly. It’s reached the level of “muscle memory.”
It's the same thing as keeping all receipts, nobody does it but some people do it, and those people end up way ahead of the money game.
[EDIT: here I start to change the subject, but I tie it back in the end]
But let me declare time and money are very different things. In some ways money is better in other ways time, people who say time is more valuable than money are always simply bragging about how little time it takes them to get money from others. For people who are getting exploited, time is worse than money. Time is all they have, their least valuable resource, it has negative worth, that's why they spend it watching TV (this also helps ends meet because you recover calorically from turning your brain off by watching television, the poor don't watch TV because they're stupid they watch because of how horribly calorically draining their work and especially commute are. I would do the same thing for the same reasons in the same situation. Like there's so many the-rapists saying life is the most precious thing, but not if your life is being someone else's bitch, yeah maybe the the rapists life is precious but the exploited, the evicted's is not. Time is a problem. Meaning not to HIMSELF, his life is precious to the the-rapist, in fact when I was in a torture ward, a nuthouse, that place, I was told these guys get into deep shit if a patient effectually kills himself in there. Meaning pulls it off. I opted for smoking instead, it's a perfectly legal and socially accepted form of suicide, I had no love for life then because I was being so much harm and my existence was primarily in order to benefit those I hated the most, my life was terrible why would I want to live it more if it's a worse life? So I started smoking, and in my case that really was freedom, just like Philip Morris says it is. I vouch. I knew a professor at Stanford who attempted suicide, we were in the ward together, he just wanted to die, when I told him I was getting threatened with being denounced to the police at any minute, my lynching, he told me about his cousin who committed suicide because he was going to prison for the second time, shotgun, perfect shot, no hesitation.
Like who gave the deliberately imprisoned homosexual serial rapist inmate the right to rape above the right of a beautiful junkie (this professor said he had a face like an angel) who got DUI's--California, 3 strikes, prison for a season (because of America's medical system being consistently niggardly with medication that actually works, there's the-rapist again), the dealer cheated him--so that guy doesn't have the right not to get raped? Like why is the problem that he ends time in order not to get raped?
Who made these rules? The-rapist. Not the one in the prison, he's secondary, he's like a puppet or a fluffer, very cruel and psychologically and physically poisonous, there's literally pimps who call themselves Poison, but he's a tool, formally a farm animal, he's weaponized, it's not him, it's the-rapist running the torture ward. The torture warden. Yeah they make money from the-rapey, $300 per patient per day. Erasing trauma, which should not be erased, trauma is valuable, it's your body doing everything it can to preserve evidence to protect and vindicate you and those around you in the future. But no trauma is bad, they say they can treat that, fill up that difficult-to-fill time in their own weekly schedule, he'll keep coming back for decades for more counterproductive, super super safe a...
The author has just given birth and is raising her kids is feeling social pressure to demonstrate her value to her peers. (Side note, this only occurs in more affluent circles. A working class mother talking to her friend would feel no such insecurities.) She seems to resolve this conflict in her head not by realizing that the premise is wrong, but by "giving herself some slack" until she can get back and make some career accomplishment to restore her sense of value.
Ultimately we all choose the yardstick we measure ourselves with, and for the most part if you have confidence in your choice, other people will actually accept whatever we've chosen most of the time.
This kind of unhappiness the author is experiences comes from being unable to break free from the perceived expectations placed on her. The solution is to form your own expectations of yourself and try to live up to them, but many people it seems do not have the courage to do this on their own, so instead they join in with whatever the current zeitgeist says the new set of expectations on everyone should be, as if simply changing them will be their solution as well. These new expectations once they take hold, however, will simply be tomorrow's tools of oppression of the individual, no different from those that exist today.
I think this ends up inevitably for many people being a very sad way to spend your life unless you happen to fit into and have the life circumstances to support fitting the model. Even if you do, you'll do so without ownership and agency in the choice of what you're going to do with your life.
Mostly agree with this, but I wonder if a lack of “courage” is what’s actually preventing most from breaking free of societal values. It seems more like a lack of introspection and discipline. Introspection to identify the root cause of dissatisfaction, and discipline to retrain your mind.
This is a literal response to your question as to why it's good that people think reproducing is an achievement, I'm not talking about whether it actually is or isn't.
I don't have a hard time talking to women in general (I am a father of two), regardless of beauty, but if a woman approaches me, with hints of interest, I get really scared/shy/anxious. If it is the contrary, that is, I am doing the approach, usually I am cool. But thinking through, it is quite interesting, given that in a social circumstance having a woman approaching you, it means that she found something on you more interesting than other guys.