|
I'm the same age as you, Dan, and just started to realize a similar thing. Your post really struck home with me. Right now I'm in the middle of a seven-month internship with IBM. Back at the start, I distinctly remember when Hacker News was full of articles discussing 42 Floors' open job offer to you, and I felt miserable - "I could be that awesome if only I managed myself better" - and determined to spend the entire seven months in a mad self-improvement frenzy. At the start of the summer I made this big sheet of paper with little letters and numbers next to each day to be crossed off. There were different things I wanted to do each day - read a bit of this book, work a little on this project - and they were all meticulously planned out. Since the work was divided up into such small chunks, however, it was easy to just miss one because ultimately it didn't matter. I also resented that the paper was planning out my day so much. Once I'd missed one, it was easy to miss another, and pretty soon it all fell apart. I don't think it's a good idea at all to micromanage yourself this much. Next, I tried making the goals slightly more long-term. I divided up what I wanted to do into months instead of days, making columns for each month between now and January and writing down what I wanted to accomplish in each month, all the books I wanted to read, etc. The problem again was expecting too much of myself and being too strict on myself. When I wrote down a reading list, suddenly reading the books didn't feel enjoyable anymore - it was something I was forcing myself to do and so something that I had to do. Even writing "Do a Rails project" made it less of an enjoyable experience because I felt like I was doing it because I had to instead of because I wanted to, even though I had only written it down in the first place because I wanted to do it. I've grappled with the second goal set for the last two months, talking to my friends and discussing a lot of the same ideas that you wrote about in your blog. I think you and I both came to the same conclusion, which is that you just need to have some vague idea of where you want to go and go there in a way that you'll enjoy. When the inspiration hits, you'll be free and flexible enough to do something with it, instead of being imprisoned by goals. So right now, my goals are just "Learn more about algorithms and do cool projects", which I'm enjoying a lot more. In particular, I think that we as programmers have a bad habit of assuming that we're capable of a lot more than we actually are, an assumption that kind of handicaps us by making us think we can jump into things in an unrealistic way such that we feel frustrated when we're not as godlike as we imagined. If this is utterly unreadable, thank Bill Clinton, haha. |