191–200 of 344 posts
One book that helped me in this respect is "Mastery" by Robert Greene. Go through this Twitter account and if anything resonates with you, I definitely recommend reading the book. https://twitter.com/masteryquotes Envy is a capricious emotion.
I guarantee, that for every RollerCoaster Tycoon, there are hundreds - maybe thousands - of people who wrote games in Assembly and went bankrupt trying to market them.
A big chunk of "success" (whatever that means) is completely out of your hands. It's luck. I felt it was a lot easier to forgive myself for not being a hyper successful genius when I realized that.
I have both an MD and a PhD, and yet I struggle with very much the same thing you describe. I spent most of my life building my career (it's still a work in progress), and every now and then I realize how don't know -- not just about world history, languages, art, philosophy -- but also about basic ways through which people enjoy their lives. I've always felt like an idiot around people who have well-balanced lives. I didn't watch TV so I knew nothing about shows, or sports, or social media. I read a lot, but it was mostly about medicine, so I had few ways to connect to people outside of work. I had few friends, and though I was "accomplished", depression was my constant companion.
My solution is ongoing, and has been to deliberately set learning goals for myself. I actually carve out time to read up on topics I want to learn about, that are outside my usual range of interests. In my case, anything I really want to do has to be planned and scheduled, but that only forces a discipline on myself to actually follow through, and helps with time management. I've always been interested in art, so I'm slowly building up my knowledge of art history. I'm taking up guitar (in in my 40s, so it'll be slow going). However superficial it might sound, I'm making an effort to learn things that are also of interest to other people. This makes it easier to connect with other people, and make friends.
Tl;dr: the feeling that you're under-accomplished is probably common. Setting yourself learning goals, and not spreading yourself too thin, can help.
I am not, and never will be, the next Kraftwerk or author of SuperCollider or whatever.
I do like exploring and have interests. And with what I do know (enough code and music to be dangerous) it ends up being a lot of fun (well it involves code so sometimes it's frustrating as hell, but any creator will say the same thing about their medium).
I guess the point here is that you could get angry or disappointed with life or you can focus on things you enjoy.
This can be naive advice if there are other issues. I had luck with therapy, it's a good idea for every human IMO. HN is OK but professionals are better.
I'm starting to slowly realize that it's a vicious cycle for me. When my family wants to go do things, I want to stay at home and "work on my projects". So I spend a lot of my free time in front of the computer, trying to think of a cool thing I could build. That turns into youtube binging or twitter stalking, realizing there are so many talented people out there, solving all kinds of interesting problems and building cool things. I see them talking about the mountains of ideas they have, but not time to get to them all. Meanwhile, I have zero ideas - none.
The reason, I think, is because I live a small life. I'm so inside my box and my comfort zone, that I don't have new experiences, or discover new things. I don't run into new problems to solve, or socialize with people to discover problems they're trying to solve. So the ideas never come, but the way I consume life doesn't allow for it.
But rather than break the cycle, and spend more time away from the computer and living my life - I just rinse & repeat. I'm not getting any younger, and so many are out there building things, in the open, at lightning speed. How can I get where they are if I don't park myself behind my keyboard? How can I make a name for myself?
"Great, 4 hours before bed. What can I build tonight?"
"Ugh, how is 2 am already? Time for bed I guess. I'll try to think of some more ideas tomorrow."
Most of the planet is worried about having somewhere to sleep and eat.
Live your life and try not to get too tangled up in what .001% of the planet is up to. You will never feel good enough if you keep chasing the .001%...
> Nothing I’m doing in my life are anything that people will remember me for. I never expected to be remembered beyond my generation and it always surprises me to find out that some people DO expect that. I'd argue that 99% of people are entirely unremarkable and will be forgotten entirely within 2 generations of their death. The sooner you come to terms with that and accept it, the better.
To build on this: Why does being remembered matter at all? It doesn't. It's a weird trait in the human brain to want to be remembered. The instant you die you will have no memory of yourself, your life, or anything really :) So it's a fool's errand to care about what people think of you after you're gone, because you won't be here to know about any of it. The only thing that matters is to make the most of the life yo…
Well, I have news. If you were to radically transform the world, if your work surpasses any of our industry "titans" and creates the foundation of a utopia to last for thousands of years, if you are adored around the world by everyone alive young and old and captured in the annals of history... congratulations, you have affected the lives of approximately zero of the beings that have lived or have yet to live. And you will still die. And they will still die. And in time everything you have wrought will be destroyed. And you will be utterly forgotten. And all of humanity's history will disappear from knowledge. And the earth will be devoured by the sun. Inevitably. So it goes. It is irrationally tilting at a windmill to think that the degree of your impact in this life has anything to do with the meaningfulness of your existence.
The takeaway here is that you are no less important and your life is no less meaningful than any mogul or genius that you can think of. It is reasonable to think that nothing that you or they do will ever matter. Or even can. But that's ok; life is still beautiful. And if you have others in your life, you matter to them incomparably more than any of those geniuses ever could. I think if you look, you can find meaning there.
It's not settling, it's understanding the reality of things. You don't need to change the world to matter; you can just be you.
1. Preparation/Research/Attention to detail. A good deal of masterpieces were researched for about a year or so before anything started. Will Wright doesn't start away thinking how he'd make a game of something, he'd just keep reading more about the topic and then get fascinated about things that would otherwise be boring, like traffic theory.
2. Beginner's mind. They approach problems like they don't know the answer, but learn a lot so that patterns are clear.
3. Passion. They can't stop doing it, can't think about other things. Probably a side effect of heavy research. It's easier to build passion than discipline.
4. Self-doubt. Often the first thing people bring up in interviews. You have to come up with a solution yourself. For some, it's building the thing before sharing the idea, because they know others will bring them down. For others, it's accepting that failure is normal. Or some take on a very small piece.
5. Effectiveness. Prototyping (especially writers). Research. Most don't follow a usual track or try to be good at everything, e.g. photographers may only take care of the basics of lighting, many writers are dismissive of character, plot, prose and so on. This goes along with beginner's mind.
So for the most part, it's not that you're untalented, mentally unhealthy, or demotivated. It's probably that you're going at it at the wrong angle.