81–90 of 134 posts
Whenever I start caring too much about something, I pull up the "pale blue dot" image ( https://funnyjunk.com/The+pale+blue+dot/funny-pictures/52789... ) and remember that I will die long before Voyager will make it even 10% to the next star. All of humanity, including us, is just a tiny speck in an unimaginably vast and uncaring universe. Some people find that terribly upsetting, but to me it also means freedom beca…
Then I say “What could I do in X weeks that I can actually ship and that is a real step toward the first Y % of my perfect vision” and I execute on that. I make sure that I am actually building part of my perfectionist vision, not some hacky garbage, but just limited in scope to be achievable in limited time.
Inevitably, along the way I realise my perfect was mostly wrong so this is an iterative process. I refine and repeat.
But your perfectionism is not wrong - use it to your advantage! Just make sure you are also a perfectionist about actually executing your ideas and shipping something.
Take on bigger risks and set bigger goals for yourself. When your pants are on fire, your brain will not care about whether your shoelaces are tied or untied.
FAANG stability and cushy salary does this to a lot of other people I know.
Whenever I start caring too much about something, I pull up the "pale blue dot" image ( https://funnyjunk.com/The+pale+blue+dot/funny-pictures/52789... ) and remember that I will die long before Voyager will make it even 10% to the next star. All of humanity, including us, is just a tiny speck in an unimaginably vast and uncaring universe. Some people find that terribly upsetting, but to me it also means freedom beca…
I'm not to keen on motivating myself through nihilism, because I don't think humans are really supposed to work like that. When I start caring too much about something, I try and reevaluate my goals instead. e.g. what I think the good things in life are to me, and whether what I'm doing is genuinely going to get me there.
There are other things to consider: our attachment to other people's opinions, perceiving failure as a lesson and investment towards our success, knowing that perfect is the enemy of good, and so on. But that will naturally come when we remove our ego from our work and not give it power.
In Brazil we have a saying: done is better than perfect (o feito é melhor que o perfeito). In terms of code, I write code that works and polish it later.
Perfect the art of embracing the not perfect as being the perfection since perfection is ultimately a quantum state thus if you were to reach it, it will cease to be perfect.
Run this through your perfectionist mind and it should compile nicely.