201–210 of 344 posts
I know the feeling but I will leave you with this: "There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self. ― Ernest Hemingway"
My recommendation: feel your feelings, all the way through. There might be some tendency, when you feel small, to feel bad about feeling small — as though it is further evidence of your worthlessness — and that itself makes you feel worse, and down the spiral you go... Been there (: But if you make space for (or even _welcome_) those feelings, even if you don't like them, then in my experience you end up at a better…
I have a hard time understanding what you mean by welcoming them, or feeling them through. But if I interpret that as “accepting it”, as in understanding that it’s totally fine and that pressure is always created from comparing yourself, then I agree. Feynmann himself is famous for saying “disregards”.
I optimized for passing interviews and keeping managers happy.
Then I used my free time to code the things I enjoy, which are mostly 3d games.
Good luck!
Reading through the various comments, I wonder what happened to good old-fashioned ambition. Other than my post, all I can see are "it's ok, I feel the same way, don't change" replies. We used to admire our heroes and try to emulate them, and if fortunate enough, come as close to them as our talents and circumstances would allow. And we did that through hard work, through having lofty goals and working hard to achiev…
I have these kinds of feelings a lot. It is hard to feel useful in this day and age of a ubiquitous globally connected society because for anything you attempt to do you have instant access to the top 0.0001% of the Bell curve who you have no hope of ever beating. I find comfort in that I am not alone, thinking of all the peasants and regular workers across history who didn't amount to much either, but still mostly f…
it seems to me that the biggest problem OP faces is the relationship to themselves. Before you can effectively love others you need to be able to be good company to yourself. Because who will put up with you if you don't even think you're worthy of love. I stopped counting the number of times they mentioned that they considered themselves stupid. There is so much negative and toxic self critic in this post that my fe…
The answer is people who don't know the real you. Would anyone love you if they saw a clip show of all the lies, betrayal, hypocrisy, times you yelled at your family, embarrassing fails, wasted potential, etc. But for many of us that clip show plays daily in our heads as a reminder to stop being so shitty and it comes at the price of our self-esteem.
Reading through the various comments, I wonder what happened to good old-fashioned ambition. Other than my post, all I can see are "it's ok, I feel the same way, don't change" replies. We used to admire our heroes and try to emulate them, and if fortunate enough, come as close to them as our talents and circumstances would allow. And we did that through hard work, through having lofty goals and working hard to achiev…
Why are we forsaking that in favor of a "you don't have to try so hard, it's ok to be mediocre" mindset? One reason many feel is the fact that being "the best" often just means making some crappy corporation richer; when you start to feel that the whole system kind of sucks it gets harder to care about accomplishing things within it. I grew up wanting to be a game developer, but what would that mean in a practical se…
Ok, google makes billions and you make millions. that is a fine compromise by me.
Accept your fate
There's no such thing as "raw" intelligence. Those people you find so incredibly impressive who have done such worthwhile things? Every single one of them sucks ass at a multitude of things. Every single one of them would see something in your set of capabilities that would astound them. It takes a vast constellation of capabilities, including yours, to create and sustain our world.
John von Neumann could multiply eight digit numbers mentally and hold conversation in multiple languages by the age of six. How could that be attributed to anything but raw intelligence? Had his parents somehow stumbled upon the perfect formula for child rearing in 1900s Hungary?