The same point expressed beautifully by Jocko Willink: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyMEQMt6yAw
Excellence is a habit, but so is failure
21–30 of 268 posts
Re: Excellence is a habit, but so is failure
#22Ever since I quit my first job I've been tinkering with languages and frameworks. And every time I would complete a book or course I'd face the decision of building something on my own. That building never happens. 1 month later my portfolio is nonexistent, there are no projects, and my blog is a figment of my imagination. And right now I'm in the process of learning yet another framework. So I've been thinking: This…
Man you just hit me hard with this... Also add one insanely overbearing mother that expects straight As and a perfect child, on top of some bullying and such... Really leads you to just want to curl up and not take risks anymore. I've just been discovering, through the aid of therapy, just how much my mother has affected my whole life up to this point. I love her and she was doing her best. I really believe she was, based on her mother (oof, even more insane lol). Man has it done a number on me in every way you can imagine.
I only mention this because your piece of essentially having the fear to move any personal projects to portfolio projects is very real with me,as well.
Side-note... How old are you? What frameworks? What personal projects? I'm 40 and just REALLY beginning this journey into coding and as much as I love it it is also insanely overwhelming because of reasons you started and also my terrible ADHD. So hard to stay focused on learning a piece at a time. My brain wants to open all the links, check out all the courses and YouTube videos... And it becomes too much.
Re: Excellence is a habit, but so is failure
#23I think it’s going to come out eventually that obesity is not a failure of willpower but a derangement of your metabolism caused by some environmental chemical such as PFAS, glyphosate, etc.
Re: Excellence is a habit, but so is failure
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Choosing to enjoy life" is not how most people get fat. It's not meals with friends and family but rather scrolling tiktok and eating potato chips.
Eating shit and scrolling is enjoyable though, right? It just doesn’t sound as socially acceptable to admit it.
Being manipulated by greedy corporations into spending the bulk of your life in a human Skinner Box is enjoyable? Stop deluding yourself.
Re: Excellence is a habit, but so is failure
#25Ever since I quit my first job I've been tinkering with languages and frameworks. And every time I would complete a book or course I'd face the decision of building something on my own. That building never happens. 1 month later my portfolio is nonexistent, there are no projects, and my blog is a figment of my imagination. And right now I'm in the process of learning yet another framework. So I've been thinking: This…
I tell people to build a small crud application that you can use to manage some data you have some interest in. I've build a similar non-marketable applications, usually a todo/project management application or something that imports a bunch of stock market data probably 30 times now, I actually use the project itself to learn new languages and frameworks because it hits most of the areas I will have to learn to be productive and I can pickup the language semantics along the way. When you're done you have code that is going to be doing things you will actually encounter in the wild instead of contrived and isolated examples from text books.
My favorite part is once I'm done I feel comfortable enough with reading through repos and some books over how to be more efficient/idiomatic and then going back through my little project and refactoring it.
With all that said I have a graveyard of projects in languages and technology that is probably not used anywhere commercially and the project itself is languishing if it was completed at all - but for example, I have a half working todo app in racket and despite being a junk app in a non-commercial language, I had to learn lisp and it at least subtly has influenced how I approach problems. Same thing with Rust which I actually use quite a bit personally and commercially, but when I originally learned it I was 100% golang professionally and I noticed my golang functions would resemble rust functions if I squinted and I think the complexity in my golang went way down.
I guess my advice is Just Start Building Projects (that you may never even show anyone or post on github, much less go marketing it.) and you will benefit from it massively. If you are able to learn and benefit from it _and_ it becomes popular or a commercial success than great! But who cares, on the internet no one knows you aren't a dog.
Re: Excellence is a habit, but so is failure
#26Life is about taking risk. We make daily decisions that involve big and small risk constantly. Choosing to enjoy life today instead of waiting for tomorrow for that enjoyment isn't a failure , it's a choice. It comes with risk and tradeoffs. Everyone thinks there's a magical line that everyone else should take that straddles that line between enjoyment today and tomorrow. That lines doesn't exist, and isn't even the…
> Calling those meals "failures" now would be saying that it was a mistake to enjoy that time with my family and friends, and it absolutely wasn't. If gaining weight is the failure in this context, the mistake would likely be the excessive intake of food. Time spent with friends and family would not be the mistake. This might have come off a bit harsh.
Temperance, as you suggest, is a beautiful thing. It's hard (for me, especially), but sometimes we just have to put down the fork and politely decline that second, third, or fourth pancake.
Re: Excellence is a habit, but so is failure
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eating shit and scrolling is enjoyable though, right? It just doesn’t sound as socially acceptable to admit it.
Being manipulated by greedy corporations into spending the bulk of your life in a human Skinner Box is enjoyable ? Stop deluding yourself.
enjoying something != life fullfilment
Our biology enjoys those dopamine hits
Re: Excellence is a habit, but so is failure
#28This seems like a specific application of the "inverted thinking/inversion" mentality. I once came across a post on this but can not find it now. I think it was about this article: https://fs.blog/inversion/
Edit - Or this one: https://jamesclear.com/inversion
Re: Excellence is a habit, but so is failure
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Choosing to enjoy life" is not how most people get fat. It's not meals with friends and family but rather scrolling tiktok and eating potato chips.
Eating shit and scrolling is enjoyable though, right? It just doesn’t sound as socially acceptable to admit it.
I think you can enjoy some potato chips and some short videos, but I have my doubts about how many you can consume in a row while maintaining enjoyment.
My experience is that the enjoyment one feels with the first few bites quickly transforms from seeking the pleasure of continuing, into avoiding the pain of stopping.
Re: Excellence is a habit, but so is failure
#30Life is about taking risk. We make daily decisions that involve big and small risk constantly. Choosing to enjoy life today instead of waiting for tomorrow for that enjoyment isn't a failure , it's a choice. It comes with risk and tradeoffs. Everyone thinks there's a magical line that everyone else should take that straddles that line between enjoyment today and tomorrow. That lines doesn't exist, and isn't even the…
"Choosing to enjoy life" is not how most people get fat. It's not meals with friends and family but rather scrolling tiktok and eating potato chips.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/friends-a...
Food for thought.