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TL; DR: buying a Macbook tricked me into going through a "dark" phase. It was worth all the money. This isn't necessarily true all the time, although it is in many contexts. For example millions of people are eagerly awaiting the new, shiny, same-as-before-but-slightly-more-expensive-and-with-a-couple-new-features, iPhone 7 but the number of people who get excited when there's a breakthrough in a particular scientific or technological field can be counted on one hand (and multiplied by 10^[2-4]). The explanation is pretty simple: I can get the iPhone 7 when it comes out but it's hard to get excited knowing I might go to Mars in 2060. I had a similar experience myself. As a human being I'm naturally inclined to, sometimes, consider short-term rewards more valuable than long-term rewards. They say the quickest way to change your lifestyle is to change the environment around you. In the case of software developers that environment is often their gear/tools. In my case it was my laptop. When I was still a student I was using the not-so-crappy-but-still-kind-of-crappy laptop provided by my university. The problem was not the laptop, of course, but the fact that I was doing something I didn't enjoy. One day, frustrated by the fact that a few Chrome tabs and PyCharm would literally devour RAM and swap alike, I started considering buying a laptop of my own. Fast forward to a couple of months later, and on the edge of a serious depression, I bought a shiny Macbook Pro with 16 GB of RAM. I started getting more into web development (I was doing research in a very specific field of cybersecurity), studied machine learning (and used it for my thesis project), found a very good job (where EVERYBODY was using Apple hardware) and slowly transitioned to doing web development full time. The Macbook acted as a trigger. I might have gotten the same results by moving to another country, changing house, changing friends, maybe by dropping college altogether, but that shallow, nonetheless very useful, purchase (I'd go as far as to call it an "investment") did the trick. I got my degree, I'm still working, and enjoying what I do, I even moved to another country eventually. Could I have experienced the same thing doing something else? Probably. But it's easy to say so afterwards. :) |