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I’m young, inexperienced and a perfectionist

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Re: I’m young, inexperienced and a perfectionist

#41
post #23

Jesus when i read this Article I see me... I love to start new Projects but i never finish them(only when i must because i customer is kicking my ass)... I always have a lot of motivation... but when i sit down and must read or do something i lose focus very often and maybe work on it for 30 minutes or 1 hour and then i start to watch some stupid youtube videos... To this day i dont know how to focus... I got depress…

I had a major problem with this back at college. I'd read articles about how to study, or focus, instead of focusing and studying.

The problem, clear in hindsight, was that actually hitting the books revealed how little I knew. Which is natural when you are studying a new subject, but filled me with fear because, well, exams.

It wasn't a happy time in my life. Maybe it's the same for you now. But that meant that rather than have the self belief to brush off initial defeat and study more, I found myself drawn towards distractions. Better to not know how bad you are than to work to improve it.

The sites you make are never going to be as good as the ones you imagine. Doing that animation, or adding this feature, is going to turn out to be harder than you first thought, and you are going to compromise.

If your self esteem is tied up in your work, or how good you are as a programmer, and you are like I was, then that means 'you are a bad person'. Better to read another blog than accept it.

Now I'm in a happier place, it's good enough to do my best. If I exceed expectations, I feel happy, but if I blow through a deadline, I'm confident that the next programmer would have too. Not happy about it, but confident.

So if you are like me, I'd suggest fixing my self belief and negative thinking yielded more than better time management. Hope this helps.

Re: I’m young, inexperienced and a perfectionist

#42
post #23

Jesus when i read this Article I see me... I love to start new Projects but i never finish them(only when i must because i customer is kicking my ass)... I always have a lot of motivation... but when i sit down and must read or do something i lose focus very often and maybe work on it for 30 minutes or 1 hour and then i start to watch some stupid youtube videos... To this day i dont know how to focus... I got depress…

same here

Re: I’m young, inexperienced and a perfectionist

#43
post #21

56 instances of the word "I". That's your problem. All the rest is fluff. OP, try rewriting this, substituting "he", "she", "they", or "you" for "I". Funny how quickly your perceived problems melt away as soon as you stop dwelling on yourself and start focusing on others. Edit: I realize that OP is being slightly sarcastic, but I took this as an opportunity: This is a condensed version of pretty much the same feedbac…

Wasn't the OP's intention to write about themselves though? Changing I to he/she etc doesn't seem like it would make much sense? Could you expand on what you mean?

I believe this is typically where someone would respond with a snarky wooosh comment.

Re: I’m young, inexperienced and a perfectionist

#44
post #23

Jesus when i read this Article I see me... I love to start new Projects but i never finish them(only when i must because i customer is kicking my ass)... I always have a lot of motivation... but when i sit down and must read or do something i lose focus very often and maybe work on it for 30 minutes or 1 hour and then i start to watch some stupid youtube videos... To this day i dont know how to focus... I got depress…

A way I have found to get round this is to set small, achievable milestones, it sounds like you are getting caught up in the "enormity of it all" - when we started our company the aim was "to enter competition X", then "get £5,000 in grant funding", then "3d print a prototype", then "build a test rig to test prototype", then "raise some investment", then "get a professionally designed product", the "set up 1 trial with potential customer", then "launch to public" etc.

By breaking it down into small steps and focussing on the next achievable goal (we actually went even more granular than this but you get the idea) you don't get swamped, and if it all ends and you fail to hit a mile stone then hey, at least we hit 5 out of 6 or 10 out of 11 milestones (depending on when/if you fail).

We're still going 2 years later using the same process and it works really well

Re: I’m young, inexperienced and a perfectionist

#45
post #21

56 instances of the word "I". That's your problem. All the rest is fluff. OP, try rewriting this, substituting "he", "she", "they", or "you" for "I". Funny how quickly your perceived problems melt away as soon as you stop dwelling on yourself and start focusing on others. Edit: I realize that OP is being slightly sarcastic, but I took this as an opportunity: This is a condensed version of pretty much the same feedbac…

I found the OP's style of introspection refreshing. I am not sure why it matters how many times he used the word 'I', after all, it is a post about the OP himself.

Yours is not even a valid criticism. How about commenting on the actual content surrounding the words you're focusing on instead of arbitrary metrics that enforce your own perceptions?

Re: I’m young, inexperienced and a perfectionist

#47
post #33

This is how everybody learns - you make something, see the flaws in the process or the outcome, and then iterate again to fix them. Your technical approach to it is perfect, just keep it up. However, you've missed the key point in the game - hustling. By the sound of it, you were not picking up a paycheck while doing this for 2 years. This is a major mistake. The product itself doesn't matter - if you're inexperience…

I did this, and I wish I could encourage others to do the same. Honestly.

I started completely at 20 and not even 7 months later I was getting paid above average in Seoul to do the same thing, basically. Except I had expert help whenever I needed it in the form of coworkers.

I'd have to say that the two biggest factors contributing to this is that people like the OP probably don't know about opportunities available to them (though hard to imagine given the outlet used to express himself), and the general "5+ years of experience/ex-Googler" mentality really seem to discourage trying. Hell, I've gotten over a year of professional experience and sometimes I think I should just take an unpaid internship if I wanted to find a new job now...

Re: I’m young, inexperienced and a perfectionist

#48
Cliche warning. Admitting that you have a problem is the first step.

Most young people are like this. You're not unusual. Difficulty focusing is pretty normal, but you do have to do something about it if you want to achieve anything.

I hate to break it to you, but the corporate world makes it worse. Now you're surrounded by unfocused, capricious, and disengaged people in a world where the worst people tend to have the most success. You need to take that for what it is: a motivating negative example, how not to live and what not to become.

When you're young, you wonder why most people never accomplish anything. Now you're getting older and seeing why. Lack of focus. Career incoherency. Bad management. Low drive. People let their time and energy and engagement get nickel-and-dimed by the world and soon there's nothing left.

You've learned a lot in 2 years. That's great! You've probably gotten more out of the past 2 years than 95% of people; but if you want to run with the elite (I'm not elite; I spend way too much time on activism, but that's another story) you have to up your game even further. Up it again. And again.

Perfectionism is something that comes to us from schooling, I believe. You work on something, then you "turn it in", and you get your one final, seemingly life-altering, piece of feedback: a letter grade or a score between 0 and 100. School also encourages risk aversion, in so far as tests ask easy questions where the average person gets 75-85% right, which means that 1 total failure (0%) counteracts 5 excellent projects or aced exams. (This is not universal; in the UK, exams are harder but 70% is an excellent score.) If I were to redesign the system, tests and projects would be very hard but 20% would be passing and 50% would be an A... but that's another rant. In the real world, that "work for months then 'turn it in'" strategy leads to demotivation, anxiety, and (as you've experienced) perfectionism. You need to find people you trust and link up with them to get constant feedback. This is why the REPL (interactive mode) of modern languages is so important; without interactivity, you don't learn anything and become disengaged.

You have to change yourself if you want to achieve anything. You're experiencing the processes that cause so many people not to achieve anything, but at least you're aware of it. You have to form better habits. Work, and sleep, and exercise, in the same hours every day. Have a principled schedule for taking breaks. Get up at 5:00 if that works for you. Exercise every day (it helps). Establish a routine because if your life is constantly full of injections and senseless change, you'll constantly be cleaning up your own spilled apple carts. Curtail (or cease) drinking.

You need to form better habits and establish a routine of getting stuff done. Just remember that each action counts for about 10, insofar as people are creatures of habit and what you do now also influences how you will behave when you are tired and falling into default activities (self-control is hard and limited and 70+ percent of your time will be in default activities, so make those better). What differentiates the true high-achievers from the rest of us is that they program themselves (often unconsciously) to have useful default activities, instead of watching TV or playing video games.

That's not to say there's anything wrong with TV and video games in moderation. I love Mad Men and Breaking Bad, and I probably play an SNES RPG (those are good because they're time-limited at about 50 hours) every year or so. You just don't want those to become your default time-filling activities. If you want to be a top-tier technologist, your default activity should be something related to technology.

Re: I’m young, inexperienced and a perfectionist

#49
post #17

That's why I still use vanilla PHP & Postgres for web projects. I don't use any hot new technologies, I don't use frameworks, I don't do unit testing. I try to use as little client side JS as possible. Whenever possible, I use static HTML. The advantage is that I can create a working prototype in days. I can show something to the client very early, and I don't spend months to fulfill specifications the client didn't…

That doesn't make any sense.

Once you learn a singular framework, it cuts out any additional effort you need to go through to create said prototypes and you end up with a prototype that can be extended to production standard.

Sure you need to spend the time to learn it, but that's a one time deal for the most part.

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