The issue is the ego. Ego has a lot of ideas about itself and others. Ego has such high opinion about itself it only can do great work. Which prevents it from doing anything. It's kind of a way of avoiding failures. Because failures will break the grant ideas about himself OP has created.
I accidentally went through a spiritual awakening which diluted ego. I have no problem in doing any kind of work now. Whether it's great or petty.
OP needs to work on the ego. Or figure out a situation where OP has to ship things no matter what. Which is hard unless you are jobless and can't figure a way out apart from building useful things that people pay for.
And my conclusion so far is: standards. I didn't had standards of what constitutes "fair difficulty", "good code", and more. So I would just give myself reps in both activities to become better without care.
Now that I'm older I second guess myself and worry about the things I attempt to build or play, all the time: "is this best practice?", "am I building it right?", "this game is too hard, it must be because it's unfair or poorly game designed".
And so I've decided to give myself room to enjoy myself without a single care in the world: I completed a game called "Metaphor Refantazio" on Hard, without looking at guides, without worrying about "best team comp", "where to get best gear" etc. and when I got stuck instead of looking things up I took a step back, looked what classes and gear I had to work with and figured things out on my own.
Don't get me wrong: the ideas and approaches I came up with were far from optimal (I can find videos of people killing the hardest bosses in one turn). But what matters is that they were my ideas. This game had been therapeutic for me in many ways, and this was only one.
But my point is, just like doing this makes you a better gamer, doing this in moderation can make you a better programmer. I'm not talking about "pretend the standard library, books and docs don't exist" but I mean "pretend tutorials on YouTube don't exist". I feel like tutorial hell can stem from exactly the same insecurities and desire for higher standards.
I think it comes from a misplaced belief about saving time and optimizing for “best” solutions. Taking a less optimal path is scary, even in a game with 0 real world consequences. I’ll consider that next time.
So before dilution I had this strong idea of who I was. I had this back story. There were certain things I do. And certain things I don't do. I used to judge everyone. I had a very high opinion about myself and used to constantly do or find things to validate that.
Now I don't have a story in which I live on. Each and every moment is intense. Sunsets are absolutely beautiful that you cannot describe through words. Spending time in nature is surreal. You do the right thing instead of doing things to validate your narrative. The dopamine hit I used to get when I used to do certain things is gone( i use to confuse these dopamine hits as me doing something right). This unlocks doing things more from Intuition and less from memory. There is less fear. There is more flow. More creativity. No regard for authority or beliefs. Everyone is equal. You want to know and not believe.
That said it's not all great stuff. You also have to work through some existential questions which you were previously isolated by the ego. Like mortality. Impermanence of everything. Aging body. What happens after death. Nature of awareness. Why I am aware. Is awareness eternal and it's implications etc etc.
Secondly, your mind is interfering with its own work. Tim Gallwey talks about this in the Inner Game of Tennis (which is not really about tennis! ;). Your critic is not allowing you to "run hot" and put down some words that are less than perfect. It would be helpful to find something to focus your mind on, a simple count, like key strokes or word count. Alternatively, there's the practice of Morning Pages from the Artist's Way. Just let yourself write anything for a while. It's not for publication. You need to open the gates and you can do that by lowering the stakes involved with putting a word on the page.
Inner Game
https://www.amazon.com/Inner-Game-Tennis-Classic-Performance...
Artists Way
https://www.amazon.com/Artists-Way-25th-Anniversary/dp/01431...
I wrote about some other stuff here that helps.
https://vonnik.substack.com/p/a-few-ideas-that-made-my-life-...
Every word you wrote stabbed me in my past, which means dissonance, somewhere.
Subconscious self-sabotage to rip the proverbial band-aid off, induced manic/delirium from a small infection, rumination/paranoia, catatonia.
Took less consciousness away from my delaying of problems. My ego didn't handle it, the manic iD, did.
I had successfully ran away from all my problems, failing upwards just enough to irk out a cowardly existence.
If Moses had an antibiotic, or had flossed more, the 4(0?) days of desert-delirium may not had been so fearlessly familiar.
after day 4-5 of catatonic rumination and paralyzing anxiety: I cried aloud, "just give me an ounce of strength"; that let me ruminate as to why:
I was asking for help: I am not allowed to. why not? skip that token, backprop later.
Why an ounce? and why of strength? and why am I asking aloud? and who am I asking?
...
Why an ounce? Why not a ratio of my body mass? Why not an arbitrary....because I have 0.
Zero what? Strength?
Why am I asking for strength? Because I am a coward.
and Occam's Razor clicked, all my problems stemmed from cowardice.
I awoke to find myself identifying with "depersonalization" for once, which was embarrassing. But embarrassing/cringe is dissonance, so my ego deconstruction began.
Morality is cowardice in disguise. <-- Stuck here, unable to proceed. Too axiomatic.
Or figure out a situation where OP has to ship things no matter what. Which is hard unless you are jobless and can't figure a way out apart from building useful things that people pay for.
I can see that my ego is getting in the way of doing more practice; the reading of Scheme books is much easier than writing some simple programs such as the practice ones at RosettaCode…
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42103115
I also recommend Waking up with Sam Harris. That's what got me started.
If I had a massive new app to build, it would indeed feel overwhelming if I felt like I just had to sit down and build it. I think we get extra stuck on that with writing, as it often feels like we just need to go from an empty page to a well-reasoned and edited blog post, with a lot of ambiguous struggle in between.
With programming, I start breaking it down into pieces of functionality, and smaller ones, until I have a list of concrete things I can actually get my head around and write the code for. I keep on doing those small things, build the structure around them, and eventually I have my app.
I do the same with writing now. Not an outline really, but a list of concepts I want to get across, then smaller ideas. I write out a few of those, often a paragraph at a time. The structure starts to reveal itself, and soon enough I have a new blog post.
I think the key here is arriving at something small enough that it doesn't feel overwhelming. New app or blog post feels like way too much in the moment, and my body and mind to everything possible to avoid it (procrastination). Writing out a paragraph, coding a function - very doable.
"I'm just going to spend like 20 minutes writing out this small feature and then call it a day", and doing that like 50 times throughout your side project, will result in a completed side project! :)
Even if it feels really lame, I catch myself thinking: "Well that's not very much to get done," I force myself to knock it out. If I can compare a small feature to emptying the dishwasher -- it only takes 5 minutes -- it makes the task feel a lot more manageable.
Maybe a better analogy is: put just 1 or 2 cups away from the dishwasher, and leave the rest, and don't beat yourself up about it. You know you'll return to put the rest away later.
1) Give yourself permission to do bad work.
If you're stuck, just start writing whatever junk is in your head. Make it hilariously bad! Write like a total idiot.
But often that alone is enough to unstick you. Having very rough work is infinitely better than staring at a blank page.
2) Procrastinate "a little bit"
Rebrand some procrastination as manageable short breaks, stop beating yourself up, and take control back from your rebellious subconscious. That way, you're working with yourself, not against it.
3) Always be asking yourself, "What's the smallest thing I can do RIGHT now?" and doing it.
E.g. you might not know how to write a full paper, but you can write down all your random ideas on a sheet of paper. Do that. Then once you're done with that, the next step might be writing an outline. Then, expanding each outline into a short paragraph...
But don't think that far ahead, just do the smallest thing now!
the whole one digs can be deepened similar to Zeno's Paradox by procrastinating a little bit with bad small distractions allowing time to exponentiate small problems into untractable ones.
It is a little reductionary, almost akin to telling depressed people to have a slightly better today than the day before; not necessarily wrong but just rephrasing the problem.
It is correct, but only by definition.
That actually reveals another procrastination tip I forgot to mention: do the hardest stuff first. "Eat the frog" is what I tell myself.
Also, that's not quite how Zeno's paradox works.
> While I do read articles here and there, it’s far less than I should.
Formulating it as a "should" abstracts away who wants it, and makes an artificially abstract norm out of it.
But what is actually? It's probably just something that the author wants. Not doing something I want feels less bad than not doing something I should. There are lots of things that I want and don't get or don't do, I'm already used to that.
It's a bit like the passive voice in writing, it hides who does something, or should do something.
Some "should"s are also what we think that others want us to do, often just assuming that without asking.
And so on. If you assume that every "should" is a thinking error, some go away, some become "want"s. It's a good first step, I recommend it.
Yep, and to take it further, I'd argue this kind of thinking is a reflection of any shortcomings that you think others perceive in you. It's an inadequacy complex.
You think about others saying: "Bill doesn't read enough. He isn't intelligent enough. He isn't informed enough. He spends too much time doing other things..." -- says who? Sometimes this can come from loved ones or colleagues priding themselves in their own hobbies or activities. Other times it can come from past criticism you've received from friends or family.
There is so much freedom in doing something for yourself (because you know it's right) versus pleasing others, when it doesn't really benefit others.
As an example, I don't cave to the pressures of working out because I know I'd only be doing it to impress others. I'm at a healthy weight, but I play recreational sports instead to get my exercise, because I enjoy doing it. I also benefit from socializing with others and being outside doing something competitive.
Definitely recommend a read
I came across it in this remarkable interview in the "Clearer Thinking" podcast https://podcast.clearerthinking.org/episode/192/david-burns-... After that I was really curious if his claims about success in therapy were plausible or wildly exaggerated, and my conclusion so far is: it seems he really is legit, but his students aren't able to fully replicate his success, so it seems it's only partially the "TEAM CBT" model, and partially that Dr. Burns is an exceptionally good therapist.
Also, write about things you've learned and projects you've built: both of those are topics where you aren't expected to provide shining new insight never seen before online: https://simonwillison.net/2022/Nov/6/what-to-blog-about/
We all agree that are limits to self control, otherwise people would force themselves to work all the time, or not be depressed/anxious, or snap out of ADHD - or, hell, not to feel grief. “Encouraging”, “welcoming”, and “promoting” the defeat of perfectionism-based procrastination seems more helpful in the aggregate, IMHO
But this is not shipping things half-baked. It’s recognizing the point where your standards are wasting energy more than adding value.
The article just says they pushed through and “put it aside”, but that has never seemed to quite work for me. I can push through once or twice, not enough to build a daily habit/obsession like I want.
Anyone have any tips that worked for getting over this hurdle?
Since nobody suggested this:
Write for yourself, locally. This removed my writer's block.
After writing for myself for about a year, I blogged consistently for two years.
I've since lost the kadence and want to get back to it, but now priorities have come in the way.
Now I usually write for my local tech community.
I know there's a dozen people who like to learn things if there's an easy way. That motivates me a lot
There's another hurdle of having a clear idea of the target audience; when you're the target audience, it gets a little fuzzy. So it has helped me to think of either "what I'd like to read 6 months from now if I had to learn this after partially forgetting it". Or someone else concrete I'm not actually obligated to share my writing with. Just so I can aim my writing better.
It's the editing process and formalizing it for public consumption.
Either, the actual work of doing the cleanup feels too labor intensive, or I've already moved onto the next obsession, and am chasing that new idea.
Do you have a process for turning the local writing into more public writing?
1. Find a cue that will remind you to start writing, e.g. having your morning coffee
2. Write any amount of time; say 30min or so
3. Reward yourself. I just have a little snack, but it could be anything
Works great for me, and I found once I changed some small habits, it was also easier to do better overall. This advice is from the book "The power of habit" by Charles Dhuigg
Now a hacker news comment can only contain so much, so sharing your truth a little broader might require some additional medium (graphics, code example, video) but you can clearly articulate yourself well in a HN comment, so maybe think of the blogs as just a little more than a HN comment?
Other writers have talked about being compelled to write to get an idea out of their head that’s stuck there. I think they’re much the same thing. You’re essentially leaving yourself in that obsessed state until you can sit down again.
If you try to sit down with just a long term goal in mind you’re torturing yourself. And likely creating negative reinforcement of future stuckness. Write the bit in front of you, pause when you have an idea what’s next, not when you run out of steam.
X, HN, and other socials are far less important. You have no control over whether the algorithm decides to amplify your content. Most work that’s foundational to society isn’t popular on socials today and won’t ever be. There’s a lottery chance you’ll get picked for amplification. Winning that lottery is great, but playing the lottery is not investing in your future.
What changed for me was accepting that my posts aren’t going to be polished and it’s okay if they don’t front page HN.
I just jot down notes, organize them in an outline and publish it.
I figure eventually, as I feel more comfortable with it, I’ll polish up my posts more and more.
The act and the process of creating art is what I enjoy. The outcome of that work and sense of accomplishment is fleeting, not that important, and a little out of my hands.
Once I realized this I just make more things, take more chances, and find myself making "better" work than I ever have. So just spend your time doing the thing you like doing. If you don't actually enjoy the process then you probably aren't meant to do it, regardless of the outcome or the accolades.
- There are lots of blog posts and youtube videos about this topic. Try whether any will help you.
- If you post, go down the rabbit hole of your thoughts. What will happen? Keep going with "and then" as far as possible. Then replace negative thoughts with more positive ones. Those have to be believable and not just blindly positive. E.g. replacing "everybody will hate this" with "a lot of people will hate this, but some will really enjoy it" is already progress.
- As a child, did you have a caregiver or teacher that gave you the feeling that if you make mistakes, they will stop loving you? Make it clear to your adult self that you are deserving of love no matter what.
- Do you have types of writing which are easy for you? No matter the answer, why is that?
- Create something intentionally bad without publishing it, and sit with your bad feelings for a while. Usually that reduces the anxiety.
- If you post something, explore your feelings. Is that like nervousness before an exam, general anxiety or something completely different. This might give you a clue, why you struggle.
- Imagine a friend would come to you with this problem. What advice would you give them? How would you react to something you posted if somebody else wrote it?
- Be kind to yourself. Changing this is a long journey.
This might give you something to work with: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42102050. Maybe you're confusing natural and reasonable behaviour with self-sabotage? They look the same from some perspectives (such as perfectionism and people-pleasing).
Because for me I’ve realized there’s a difference between enjoying actually doing a hobby versus just fantasizing about what it would be like to be good at it.
Maybe that’s not what you’re experiencing, but I’ve tried to get into hobbies and have run into the feeling you describe. Eventually I would drop the hobby because I just didn’t enjoy doing it.
Ps congrats on writing online :)
Good points about recognizing the fantasy of doing something vs. the actual work might be part of this.
also, lol meta, thanks!
But what I know for sure is that I have a lot of thoughts and ideas as well as opinions and the idea of putting them down and expanding upon them really really intrigues me.
I also believe that it will really help grow.
I will produce bad articles because to become good you have to start with your current skill level which probably sucks if you are average. To become good you have to write. Nothing beats actually doing it. But knowing that everyone published something stupid at some point helps me accept that I will also go through that process as well. Everyone failed, everyone will fail and it is fine to fail.
And no matter how good you become you will still fail from time to time. You never graduate from it. Look at the famous movie directors, writers and journalists. Are all their works great? Is each of their work always better than the previous ones? Of course not. Some works will be amazing and insightful, some might be mediocre. Even the very best will have their ups and downs, so why not you?
Each time I publish a post I already accept it might be subpar.
if it's just a paragraph of thought then it might as well be on social media
Not for content, but for process?
Bro run! Spending time online is a sign of depression. And even if you are among the few in which this isn't true (which I doubt) talking and writing about stuff way above your head (not in the IQ sense but about stuff you have no control over) will get your there.
* Limit your self-promotion: If you feel unnerved by the criticism of the opaque masses of the internet (e.g. Hacker News) then do not present your work to them. If you absolutely must share your writing with anyone, why not share it with people who you actually know? Rather, don't self-promote at all, share your work with people who embody the readers who you had in mind upon writing it.
Which leads to my next thought...
* Unless you are representing some sort of institution that the public trusts and you are obliged to sustain this trust, why write with the public (read: the opaque masses of the internet) in mind at all. The "reader who you have in mind" while writing is the equivalent of the "dream spouse" who you may have imagined: They just so happen to possess all of the virtues that coincidentally complement your own and all of their faults are can be conveniently managed within your scope of reasoning. The good thing about the reader/writer relationship is that it is inherently polygamous so feel free to write for yourself and for yourself alone and whichever readers fit the description that you have envisaged in your mind to whatever degrees will be drawn to what you have to say accordingly and if it doesn't work out then there's always someone else, somewhere, who fits the description of someone who one way or another is just a kind of living complement to your own personality. Such is I suppose a component of romance in man's sojourn on earth.
The blog posts that inspire me to write the most are the one's that are impersonally personable. Writing that is obviously written by a human being who is sharing their experiences but in a way that is totally indifferent to my own interests. That isn't to say that it comes across as self-absorbed but that it is like the behaviors among children on the school yard. He's playing jacks. He's spinning tops. They're playing four square. They're beating each other into a pulp along the tree lines. But no one's doing so as if they intend for me want to join in.
The blog posts that I find the most boring read as though they presume an audience and are even written in a way that presumes scathing criticism from said audience. A lot writers have become dispossessed of their ability to express themselves in earnest ways because of this. I don't necessarily fault the opaque mass of humans who express a wide range of reactions to the thoughts of others because society is not a monoculture in spite of efforts toward the contrary.
If you are writing just to "build a brand" but the process isn't clicking internally maybe it's your spirit resisting the sociopathic impulses of your carnal desires. A lot of lifeless blogs I come across are such because I feel like I can sense that they are writing only to gain an audience who can raise their capital. So while the content may be informative it is lifeless and I feel little sympathy when a reader criticizes the author's work in a way that is indifferent to the spirit of the author and the author feels dismayed. It's not that your intended audience is revolting against you. You haven't even told them who you are. They are rejecting your business or your pining for employment that you have woven into your interpersonal communications.
And good for them!
Forget about trying to change this from the perspective of thoughts. Cognitively understanding that you should "just" stop worrying about what other people think about your work might not bring you far.
Instead, realize that anxiety is a bodily phenomenon and as such needs to be addressed with the body. That means: Breathing techniques, exercise etc.
It is not a bodily thing, just there is a bodily feedback loop: you feel anxious, it leads to a bodily reaction, your senses register it, you feel more anxious. Sometimes dealing with the body and breaking the feedback loop is enough, but for me personally it works for 10 minutes or so. If I hadn't overcome the psychological reasons of my anxiety, I feel myself anxious.
> Cognitively understanding that you should "just" stop worrying about what other people think about your work might not bring you far.
May not bring or may bring. It depends... People are different, so different methods are best for them. I deal with things mostly in a psychological ways. My general method for anxiety is to make my anxiety into a fear, by finding the thing that makes me anxious (this step is standard way of psychotherapists to deal with anxiety). Then I imagine that the thing happened and how will I adapt. Mostly I find out that this thing is not as bad as I perceive it, it cannot kill me, it cannot hurt me physically, I can deal with associated social costs, or if I cannot... For example sometimes I can reframe the situation: my goal is not to send the rocket to the Moon (with 10% chance of a success), but rather to do a test launch, to find out how my rocket perform (here we get ~100% chance of a success).
I need to accept the possibility of a failure, and understand that the possible failure is not terminal, it is just possible and acceptable setback. People tend to dramatize and say that some failures are not acceptable, but if people really had a possibility of an unacceptable outcome (lets say it is a painful death for all involved and their families) then the most rational thing to do would be to stop the activity that could lead to this outcome. When I allow myself to buy the dramatization I face anxiety issues.
In regards to anxiety, this is what works best for me: https://actualism.app/
It also means alcohol, drugs, shrooms, ketamine, MDMA, Research Chemicals, uppers, downers, amplifier substances , smoothering substances, focus enhancers, dissociatives...
I mean the modern society seems like coming up with some trends such as the war on drugs, the vice taxes and all the patronizing BS, only to discover that there is a reason why those things exist and we indulged in them for as long as we have been around in the first place
Alcohol - messes up your sleep, without which your mind will never be operating as clearly as it could. If you frequently mix it with other substances, it'll also turn into a trigger, making you crave said substances every time you have a drink. Use with moderation.
Shrooms - these are really nice, but like most psychoactive substances, they'll definitely get in the way of focusing on hard tasks. Doing something fun gets more fun with shrooms, doing something hard gets harder. Use with moderation. Indulge, don't escape. I'd give the same advice about LSD.
Ketamine - has an extremely broad profile of effects depending on dosage. You can mitigate this a bit by correctly measuring and dissolving it in nasal spray, but even then tolerance builds up very quickly and you end up compensating by doing more. It has a small dosage window where it'll be an indulging drug, just adding a pleasurable shift to your perceptions, but then as soon as you go over that window, it will turn you into a little dissociated zombie, unable to hold an interesting conversation with someone who isn't on the same ballpark of high as you are. It can cause serious damage to your urinary tract. Indulge, don't escape. Try to use once per month at most.
MDMA - can be amazing at low dosages, but evidence indicates it is neurotoxic in most doses you'll run into in parties. When it starts to come down you will want to do more, so if you're trying to be careful make sure you have measures to prevent you from doing so. Hangovers can be brutal, specially on higher doses. At higher doses it'll make you confused and mess up with your short term memory, but your social confidence will still stay high, so you can turn into an obnoxious person rambling about something for the third time in half an hour to whoever is unlucky to be nearby. Indulge with a lot of caution, don't escape. Use lower doses. Give it a 3 month break between uses.
Research chemicals - unless you are the researcher, stay away from these. Some drugs have very different effects to others that are chemically very similar and often impossible to differentiate with standard test kits you'll be able to buy and use without being a chemist. Reliable information on their effects, dosage, interactions is difficult or impossible to find — not only for you, but also for your EMT or doctor, in case you need medical assistance.
Uppers - addictive, can cause re-dosing, will fuck up your sleep and your appetite. Suppress orgasms (and often erections). Stress your heart muscles and your arteries and veins. When taken for productivity, will give you short-term gains that turn into holes you'll need several weeks to dig yourself out of. Use with extreme caution.
Amplifier substances - in my experience, there's no such thing. You can do substance X today and have an amazing "amplified" time, and then do the same dose again a week later in a different setting and have a real bad time, constantly in your head, seeing the negative interpretation of everything. The things which make it more likely for a substance to be an amplifier can't be fixed with more substances: how well are you sleeping, eating, exercising? Are you mulling over some difficult conversation instead of just having it? Are you surrounded by people you like who are good to you?
It is frustrating. One recent mindset change I have adopted that reduces the feeling of overwhelming is:
1. Say it out loud, "I have plenty of time" and breathe deeply
2. "I have to work within constraint for which I do not have control of"
3. Can things be a lot more worse then they are? Fortunately, the answer to this has been 100% yes. Things can be worse in terms of developing complicated medical condition to family complication.
4. There always be be 'noise', work on reducing it and accept the 'distractions' are noise. Since distraction is noise, ignore it instead of giving into it.
The older I get, the less this is true, but the less I stress about it. There’s a great many things I’ll be able to accomplish, but never everything that I would want to. And that is fine.
The older I get the more it is true.
I used to have the exact same ambitions, blocks and difficulties writing (you can see on my blog).
Turns out, I just don't like writing. It's something that many smart minds extol as a great practice, which I 100% agreed, but once I gave it a serious go for myself, just didn't really enjoy the journey, product nor the outcome.
Usually, you need to like one of those elements otherwise there's a good chance you're not doing the thing for yourself, but because someone else is giving you the reason.
Do try though, because you won't know until you do.
For many of us writing is tough and quite hard work so it's understandable why many don't write much.
For instance, when I look back at my posts on HN—which I rarely do because it's embarrassing—I see typos, wrong word usage and grammatical errors that I didn't notice at the time. I only wish I could correct them.
I had a colleague who is now deceased but he could take pages and pages of handwritten notes and they were perfectly legible, logically coherent and could be essentially typed into papers with little or no editing. I envy his ability, I only which I could write with such accuracy and fluency.
I've often wondered why I can't do that. It seems to me that too many concepts come into my head at once and I lack the ability to sort them quickly and write them out in a linear/coherent fashion with enough speed.
The result is that editing can take more time than the actual writing. It's somewhat of a disincentive, so much of what I'd like to write doesn't get written.
It's interesting to compare say Mozart and Beethoven in this regard. Looking at Mozart's handwritten scores one sees page after page of almost perfect notes without cross-outs or alterations. On the other hand some of Beethoven's scores are such an unholy mess they're almost illegible.
On evidence, it seems the mental processes of both these geniuses worked in quite different ways.
Edit: it seems to me whether one likes writing or not one has to do so to communicate efficiently and effectively. I've often wondered how many great ideas have been lost because they were never documented.
I think the first thing people need to do if they want to start a habit is find a way to like it. If you want to exercise most, then cycle to work. As you'll enjoy it more than being stuck in a metal box you've now made exercise a habit. If you want to read more, you need to find books you like and ways of reading them that you like (paper, ereader etc).
If you want to write more you need to first find a way to write that you like. You might like writing with pencil and paper. Seriously, try this. But you might prefer a WYSIWYG word processor. You need to try it. Then find something you enjoy writing. Fiction? Blogs? A private journal or memoir?
Bottom line is if you don't like something you won't keep it up.
I believe this belongs under the term Perfectionist Dilemma, as defined by Adam Miller [1]:
The perfectionist dilemma is when a creator values the quality of a finished product, such to the extent that it inhibits their ability to iterate, change, and even produce. For many, it’s the ultimate writer’s block, invoking a fear that the finished product isn’t or won’t be as originally intended.
I totally agree with this. I believe it's an instinct feeling, so I'm accepting it as it is.
_________________________
1. https://medium.com/@thatadammiller/the-perfectionist-dilemma...
If the substance of the bad review hurts, it means you've communicated something clearly enough that it was easy to pick apart. If you understand and accept the criticism about how you were wrong, now you have a better chance of being right.
This is Hillary Rettig's specialty; she largely focuses on being kind to yourself, and getting out of your own ass. The world isn't ending when you fail.
https://hillaryrettigproductivity.com/the-seven-secrets-of-t...
Opinion: having seen this with many friends I think the author does good to acknowledge it, but the main thing to figure out is why they're writing. To be prolific at writing does not need to imply prolific at publishing.
I've actually started to write these review style comments because far too often the articles posted here don't have substance and interesting debates happen around bad data. So I wanted to see a change and critique the content not just the general concepts behind it. I now write more without having to accept my contributions are significant. But also create a network effect where friends read my reviews instead of being swayed by the upvotes and comment sizes, or worse the algorithm.
Don't worry about being good enough or what other people will think. The truth is almost nobody even cares.
"The monotony and solitude of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind." - Albert Einstein
"If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that." - Stephen King
In other words unplugging, making time to read books, and allowing yourself to be bored are all good ways to stimulate the creative mind.
When everything seems like a elephant... start with small bites.
And get a good way into the elephant before you start measuring how well you are doing the eating.
So the actual solution would probably involve a lot of logistical planning and preparation on how you would carve it efficiently and then refrigerate and/or distribute all the pieces.
Not doing so, and only thinking one bite at a time, would be a massive waste of the elephant.
The solution might be to use the internet less and enjoy the offline life some more, not to "overcome the hurdle".
He's one of the few people I've seen address what I think is the key difficulty with this sort of stuff: that you can think think that you're addressing procrastination/perfectionism when actually you are engaging in it (with a target of fixing your procrastination/perfectionism). It's a difficult situation to break out of, because it seems like any effort to break-out would necessarily have this sort of grasping, but I think he (and Buddhist meditation) talk a lot about that key challenge.
It helps you learn your own thought patterns and understand whether your logic is sound or not.
And you're right, getting started is the name of the game. Someone brilliant once said: beating "procrastination" is really just imagining yourself starting the task, instead of being in the middle of it or finishing it.
Instead of picturing the document full of paragraphs after writing for several hours, what does it look like for you to sit down at your desk or couch to write? Do you need coffee first? What's a good motivator for getting started? Can you find a new trigger to motivate you, like a snack? Some people like to reward themselves after doing a task, which can help, but I find myself saying: "Ooh, I'm going to brew some coffee before I start" and that gets me excited to follow through with whatever I set out to do.
If you fall off the bandwagon, returning to the activity is tedious. First lines feel like hard work, as if you were a totally unfit person trying to climb a steep hill.
Then it gets slowly better and if you can persist and write for several days, you are "in the flow" again.
The solution: do things that you really believe people need. Then you owe it to them to find out if you actually are “good enough”, and you don’t care what others think because all you care about is whether the people who need it are happy with it.
I've tried that. I've tried shunting out everyone else's opinions. But then of course, if you lock me in a room with me, myself, and I, you now have 3 of my biggest critics all in the same room.
I don't really care what others think, never really did, and none of these anti-procrastination or anti-perfectionism pieces help when it's my own standards that I'm not meeting.
[1] Procrastination - Fuschia M. Sirois PhD [2] Radical Acceptance - Tara Brach
Paradoxically, I also often feel that some tasks are _too easy_ and won't start them because they're simple, uninteresting, or unrewarding. I feel like I can execute them perfectly, so I put off getting started.
I'm doing something similar with reading – 50 pages minimum everyday. I've read more books in the last 4 months than in the last 4 years by just keeping the streak alive.
It hasn’t really gotten better since then even though I’ve built even more cool stuff since then (hell, I even was #1 on HN for a whole day earlier this year).
This is one of the reasons I took the dates off of my posts (even though I think they might be useful to readers).
Naturally, I ended up not even attempting doing anything, because the punishment for not doing something and making a mistake was the same.
I ended up getting a great job that I was really happy to land. But I only applied sporadically because just the thought of having to endure the slog was mentally painful.
Fear of what others might think didn’t stop me from building effective automation at the command line. It prevented me from publishing my work on GitHub. It took being in the job market to push me past that as I wanted to let my work speak for itself for technical reviewers during the screening process.
On a different note, present-tense me is always harassing future me with ambitious plans set as reminders. The sense of failure from constantly pushing them off is demoralizing. Some of that came from depression (I’m in treatment now) and some was a byproduct of being a high-achieving alcoholic. The latter sapped my mental fortitude and turned me into a passive streaming consumer. Each time I quit drinking, projects abound as my mind clears up.
Apologies for trembling a bit. Procrastination is one of my greatest challenges, now that I’ve corrected so many other self-sabotaging behaviors. It’s one that I still haven’t really begun to figure out how to address. But hey, I’m doing pretty well otherwise, so there’s that.
Thank you friend..
An ever present sense of pressure, feeling imposter syndrome and that bleeding into self criticism and anxiety is 100% fixable, and this information needs to be much wider distributed within society.
Dr. Aaron Beck and Dr. David Burns introduced the concept of “cognitive distortions” - they identified various methods humans use to lie and deceive themselves in their self conversations.
Dr. Burns publishing of a book titled “Feeling Good” that kick started the entire Cognitive Therapy movement, which is the idea that one can talk themselves out of unhappiness with the right guidance.
It is all about learning how to identify self deception; once one learns how to be truthful in your own self conversation, the emotions and unrealistic expectations fall away leaving a more stable and logical individual.
Here’s a summery, but be careful searching this topic online as the “fraudster community” loves to prey on people seeking self help information.
Filtering. We take the negative details and magnify them while filtering out all positive aspects of a situation. For instance, a person may pick out a single, unpleasant detail and dwell on it exclusively so that their vision of reality becomes darkened or distorted.
Polarized Thinking (or “Black and White” Thinking). In polarized thinking, things are either “black-or-white.” We have to be perfect or we’re a failure — there is no middle ground. You place people or situations in “either/or” categories, with no shades of gray or allowing for the complexity of most people and situations. If your performance falls short of perfect, you see yourself as a total failure.
Overgeneralization. In this cognitive distortion, we come to a general conclusion based on a single incident or a single piece of evidence. If something bad happens only once, we expect it to happen over and over again. A person may see a single, unpleasant event as part of a never-ending pattern of defeat.
Jumping to Conclusions. Without individuals saying so, we know what they are feeling and why they act the way they do. In particular, we are able to determine how people are feeling toward us. For example, a person may conclude that someone is reacting negatively toward them but doesn’t actually bother to find out if they are correct. Another example is a person may anticipate that things will turn out badly, and will feel convinced that their prediction is already an established fact.
Catastrophizing. We expect disaster to strike, no matter what. This is also referred to as “magnifying or minimizing.” We hear about a problem and use what if questions (e.g., “What if tragedy strikes?” “What if it happens to me?”). For example, a person might exaggerate the importance of insignificant events (such as their mistake, or someone else’s achievement). Or they may inappropriately shrink the magnitude of significant events until they appear tiny (for example, a person’s own desirable qualities or someone else’s imperfections).
Personalization. Personalization is a distortion where a person believes that everything others do or say is some kind of direct, personal reaction to the person. We also compare ourselves to others trying to determine who is smarter, better looking, etc. A person engaging in personalization may also see themselves as the cause of some unhealthy external event that they were not responsible for. For example, “We were late to the dinner party and caused the hostess to overcook the meal. If I had only pushed my husband to leave on time, this wouldn’t have happened.”
Control Fallacies. If we feel externally controlled, we see ourselves as helpless a victim of fate. For example, “I can’t help it if the quality of the work is poor, my boss demanded I work overtime on it.” The fallacy of internal control has us assuming responsibility for the pain and happiness of everyone around us. For example, “Why aren’t you happy? Is it because of something I did?”
Fallacy of Fairness. We feel resentful because we think we know what is fair, but other people won’t agree with us. As our parents tell us when we’re growing up and something doesn’t go our way, “Life isn’t always fair.” People who go through life applying a measuring ruler against every situation judging its “fairness” will often feel badly and negative because of it. Because life isn’t “fair” — things will not always work out in your favor, even when you think they should.
Blaming. We hold other people responsible for our pain, or take the other track and blame ourselves for every problem. For example, “Stop making me feel bad about myself!” Nobody can “make” us feel any particular way — only we have control over our own emotions and emotional reactions.
Shoulds. We have a list of ironclad rules about how others and we should behave. People who break the rules make us angry, and we feel guilty when we violate these rules. A person may often believe they are trying to motivate themselves with shoulds and shouldn’ts, as if they have to be punished before they can do anything. For example, “I really should exercise. I shouldn’t be so lazy.” Musts and oughts are also offenders. The emotional consequence is guilt. When a person directs should statements toward others, they often feel anger, frustration and resentment.
Emotional Reasoning. We believe that what we feel must be true automatically. If we feel stupid and boring, then we must be stupid and boring. You assume that your unhealthy emotions reflect he way things really are — “I feel it, therefore it must be true.”
Fallacy of Change. We expect that other people will change to suit us if we just pressure or cajole them enough. We need to change people because our hopes for happiness seem to depend entirely on them.
Global Labeling. We generalize one or two qualities into a negative global judgment. These are extreme forms of generalizing, and are also referred to as “labeling” and “mislabeling.” Instead of describing an error in context of a specific situation, a person will attach an unhealthy label to themselves. For example, they may say, “I’m a loser” in a situation where they failed at a specific task. When someone else’s behavior rubs a person the wrong way, they may attach an unhealthy label to him, such as “He’s a real jerk.” Mislabeling involves describing an event with language that is highly colored and emotionally loaded. For example, instead of saying someone drops her children off at daycare every day, a person who is mislabeling might say that “she abandons her children to strangers.”
Always Being Right. We are continually on trial to prove that our opinions and actions are correct. Being wrong is unthinkable and we will go to any length to demonstrate our rightness. For example, “I don’t care how badly arguing with me makes you feel, I’m going to win this argument no matter what because I’m right.” Being right often is more important than the feelings of others around a person who engages in this cognitive distortion, even loved ones.
Heaven’s Reward Fallacy. We expect our sacrifice and self-denial to pay off, as if someone is keeping score. We feel bitter when the reward doesn’t come.
References:
Beck, A. T. (1976). Cognitive therapies and emotional disorders. New York: New American Library. Burns, D. D. (2012).
Feeling good: The new mood therapy. New York: New American Library. Leahy, R.L. (2017).
Cognitive Therapy Techniques, Second Edition: A Practitioner’s Guide. New York: Guilford Press. McKay, M. & Fanning, P. (2016).
Self-Esteem: A Proven Program of Cognitive Techniques for Assessing, Improving, and Maintaining Your Self-Esteem. New York: New Harbinger Publications.
Console logging is still coding too! Debugging can be console logging or stepping through with a debugger. Or even run the program with different inputs.
But as I'm writing, the words are full of meaning, to just me, and I'm really saying something honest that I know is honest. After a while though, they seem dead.
So I write all the time (literally, and all over the place too) and I don't really care to share it because the words I've written aren't even all that impressive to me - it's more how I feel about the words I'm writing.
Or maybe I'm just saying that. I feel like when people say (share with others) that they think something, it's actually just a ploy to trick themselves into thinking that way - because being the person that would genuinely think that way is an attractive thing for them.
What can I say.
1. Trouble writing because you want something perfect:
Write crap, sit down and tell yourself I'm going to write one line, that's it. Just one line. But do it everyday.
2. Care too much about what others think:
If others perception of what you write is hindering you, just don't share everything you write. In this early a stage the point is to get good. Occasionally you'll write something that you'll be really proud of, share that. Not every word that comes out of our heads is pure magic, we all think and write a lot of crap. Welcome.
People-pleasers often do things because other people would like them more if they did these things. As such, the reward for work like writing a blog article is positive external reinforcement/approval or minimising the risk of confrontation, disapproval, or even aggression. If their work pleases few people (not enough readers), they may feel like it wasn't worth doing, or if their work attracts criticism, they may feel guilt or shame for doing it. Fear of these consequences fuels procrastination.
Writing should be about the innate purpose of writing. It is to learn, to express yourself, to communicate. If one wishes to do these things, then there is almost never procrastination, as these actions always bring only positive rewards. There is no negative outcome to learning, to expressing yourself in written form, and communicating. Sure, the type of things you learn, express, or communicate could bring some negative consequences, but those actions on their own do not. They bring good results and feel good to do.
Perfectionism exaggerates the expectations one would put on themselves and their work. So people-pleasing may become people-impressing, people-delighting, and people-sweeping-off-their-feet. Anything less may bring the shame, guilt, and disappointment, and then "procrastination" becomes pretty much guaranteed. Because it's not really procrastination, it is a natural and very rational decision to not engage in activities that would bring only a bad outcome. Humans, generally, really don't want to hurt themselves. We learn not to touch the hot stove, just as we learn to not do things that don't meet our (sometimes delusional high) expectations.
Everything in procrastination is a lot more logical and explainable than it may seem. People-pleasing/conflict avoidance + perfectionism combo is common in tech workers. This has taken me decades to learn, now it helps the programmers I train, and I hope it helps you. Of course, everyone's life is a bit different, so don't have an unreasonable expectation that what I said applies to you 100%. It may only apply 20% and still be helpful.
Likewise, even if the work is a resounding success and showered in positivity, there is now an internal pressure to do even better in the future otherwise you will disappoint your new followers in your next work.
All of this in my mind is fear of the outcome as opposed to the joy of the journey. The satisfaction must come from doing the work, not from the outcome of it. It's the only way to really break the cycle.
godspeed
And then once the issue has been identified, the next thing to do is seek help. One of the great lies that everyone believes is that nobody understands me. I’m on my own. I have to fix this myself.
Bullshit.
So whether you just talk to a friend, attend a support group, pay for professional help, etc., these are all very effective at helping those who desire change to actually change.
If I had to sum up the reason in one word, it would be laziness.
What is 'laziness' when applied to something that you clearly want to do? How can someone want something, yet simultaneously choose to not want it? Turns out the answer is simple, and the nerds have known it since 1801[1]: you don't exist. Your continuous, unified self is an illusion brought about for instrumental reasons.
Treat yourself like a system to be optimized, not an ineffable soul to be brought away from vice through logic. If you were tasked with improving a malfunctioning software system, you'd be laughed out of the room for starting with "well, clearly, the system is just sinful, and choosing to make mistakes."
[1]: Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, Chapter I.2.II.1: "Of the Paralogisms of Pure Reason"
Now to these conceptions relate four paralogisms of a transcendental psychology, which is falsely held to be a science of pure reason, touching the nature of our thinking being. We can, however, lay at the foundation of this science nothing but the simple and in itself perfectly contentless representation “i” which cannot even be called a conception, but merely a consciousness which accompanies all conceptions. By this “I,” or “He,” or “It,” who or which thinks, nothing more is represented than a transcendental subject of thought = x, which is cognized only by means of the thoughts that are its predicates, and of which, apart from these, we cannot form the least conception. Hence in a perpetual circle, inasmuch as we must always employ it, in order to frame any judgement respecting it. And this inconvenience we find it impossible to rid ourselves of, because consciousness in itself is not so much a representation distinguishing a particular object, as a form of representation in general, in so far as it may be termed cognition; for in and by cognition alone do I think anything.
For the more empirically minded that are understandably resistant to such an unnatural conception, try to find discussions of "laziness" in these articles. I'd be surprised:
https://www.webmd.com/add-adhd/executive-function
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/symptoms/23224-executi...
Dr. Russell Barkley has good explanations of what different prescription ADHD drugs do, which I find gives insight into what's going wrong when you have an executive dysfunction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnS0PfNyj4U
In particular, the emotional blunting effect of stimulants erases the thought that what you do might not be good enough. You no longer care about what others think, so you can just do what you want to do. I personally find this also makes me a callous asshole if I'm not careful, which I believe is related to the modern epidemic of coffee zombies.
The only thing that has worked for me to overcome my crippling fear of writing shitty blogs on the Internet, is to write more shitty blog posts.
I write every day, publish every day, send them to my email list, every day.
90% of them are crap. Next year I hope 80% of them will be crap. And so on.
I have also noticed that when I send a particularly crappy one, I don’t get a lot of unsubscribe or hate, because people just wait for the next one. I’m guessing the 3500 people on my list generally want to receive them, or they would leave.
Most of them are crappy in particular ways: two personal, too broad, too vague, too long, Too $hort, two philosophical, two tactical… You get the idea.
Publishing often allows me to try a wide variety of approaches, lengths, styles, tones, topics, without fear that I am doing “wrong.“
If you want to connect, drop me a line at marcus@marcusblankenship.com. Always happy to support a fellow writer.