Ask HN: How to overcome strong feelings of worthlesness and inadequacy

I don't really have a passion I am obsessed with being successful, I feel I've wasted 6 years of my life that I will never get back, I feel that I have not accomplished anything worthwhile and for some reason I constantly feel jealous of everyone else's success, this has made me bitter too.

Don't worry about reading SICP or becoming an expert at some technology. That will come automatically over time. Just choose one stack for your side project and go with it.

It doesn't matter if you code your project in C, clojure, or ruby. What matters is that you produce something that you feel good about. If you make a goal to produce something good, you will learn the technologies and you will become a good hacker over time.

I write all this because I was in the same position as you a couple years ago, so I scrapped my ambition of reading theoretical CS books and learning all the latest hot new technologies (I will do all that stuff later). I decided I'd make a game, and learn what I need to add the features that I imagined. And I progressed. It was so much more fun that way.

It sounds like you're practicing too much "theory" and reading, instead of creating. This will make anyone feel bad. The people you admire did not get where they are by reading HN/books/etc. alone. They got there by doing things.

As others have said, pick a side project and hack at it -- release it, fail, and try again, and again. The beautiful thing about the tech community is that failure is encouraged and embraced. By doing things over and over is how we learn and establish ourselves. Your projects will suck at first, you will get no users at first, you will make no money at first (if you care about $). And then you'll iterate and improve. It's only normal.

Finally, as far as picking projects goes, don't pick a pie-in-the-sky-idea! Pick something you can finish in two or three weeks, or maybe even shorter. Anything longer and you'll get disappointed at your lack of progress. You don't have to create the next Facebook. Create a throwaway app for the app store (and don't be discouraged if you don't make much from it.) Learning how to ship small projects will be incredibly painful but that is how you will grow and become happier with yourself. HTH.

After feeling miserable about myself for some periods of time I end up meeting some cool people who are in the same line of work and I found that my thoughts were just not true. Honestly, it's close to impossible to know everything about programming like you want to. You probably know far more than a lot of people who are trying to do startups already! No joke! There are people who think knowing HTML and CSS is enough for them to make the next Facebook/Google/whatever.

Then there are always going to be people who know far more than you. Most of those people are here on HN. You can't feel worthless because you're not as good as you think you need to be. You'll never be good enough if you keep thinking this way.

I'm just like you and I was inspired by the community here to start my business and I love it but I still feel like what I've done is total crap compared to what a lot of folks here are doing. That's okay. The thing about programming is that you need to break things up into manageable chunks. It sounds like you're trying to do too much at once. One feature at a time. One database call, one AJAX request, one link to a CSS file at a time. Go slowly, work your way up and one day you'll look back and be amazed that all those tiny incremental implementations added up to this one huge app or whatever you're trying to build.

Remember too that everyone specializes in something. You know CRUD apps. Other guys know design. Others are generalist. You know what we all have in common? Everyone copy/pastes code from online from time to time! It doesn't mean you're not a programmer. It just means you haven't learned one specific part of programming yet. Honestly, working your way up from those stupid Hello World examples is the way to go.

I wrote a lot because I often feel just like you and I know how much it sucks. It's okay. There are so many people out there who would be astonished at what you know already that you wouldn't believe. When you hang around HN you're hanging with the best of the best and you don't want to be comparing yourself with them just yet. Be inspired, learn as much as you can but remember that there is so much to learn that you'll be learning to program until the day you die. My best advice would be to focus on one single skill you want at a time and work your way up from the damn Hello World examples even though I know it seems like you know enough to skip them. They will help.

Good luck to you, man. Feel free to get in touch by email, maybe you and I can build something cool together and prove yourself wrong about not being a real programmer.