[johngalt]

The curse of competence.

In your next family gathering people will ask you to fix their computer. You say 'Sorry I'm not IT, I'm a programmer'. Suddenly they dislike you. Do they dislike your cousin who waits tables for not fixing their computer? No, just you.

Similar themes play out in a business setting. If you're competent everyone will want you to do everything important. Which will result in:

1. You get stretched too thin and start making mistakes -> fired.

2. You refuse to take more than your share of work. This is seen as a slight to whomever you refuse. Similar to the above anecdote.

No one gets upset with the person who can't help them. They get upset when the person who can help them doesn't. Additionally people tend to focus on what you haven't done yet, not what you've already accomplished. The more that you are able to do, the larger the unfulfilled expectations become. Suddenly a large portion of the projects are complaining that they would be further 'if only we could get Redmaverick to help'. Now you're seen as the bottleneck for not helping, rather than the asset because your skills apply in so many areas.

If you are a skilled person who can execute tasks, it is vital that you always frame yourself by your accomplishments. By default your capabilities will be used to create a long string of perceived obligations.

[hga]

"You get stretched too thin and start making mistakes -> fired."

It can be worse than that. In a small startup, you can be the least-worst informed and capable about several critical areas, where you pitch in and do a better job than anyone else could have, and make mistakes.

(In one particularly galling example in my work history where I was employee #1, I recommended an ISP, which was good, but without talking to me the co-founder who set that up also bought their bundled email service, back in 1997 when this was seldom well done. This turned out to be a mistake visible at the top of the company....

Or take firewalls: while I now know a lot more about them, and can set one up with raw iptables or Shorewall, back then all I knew was what I'd read in Cheswick and Bellovin's seminal book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firewalls_and_Internet_Securit... and said, "Gauntlet has a good reputation". Yeah, but its company, Trusted Information Systems, had just been bought by Network Associates, which apparently following a common Computer Associates business model of firing almost all of the technical staff and milking the reputation....)

[michaelochurch]

Precisely. If you're "not working up to potential" you may not get fired but you're not going to be promoted. If you drop from a 9 to 7, people notice the -2 delta because changes in performance are much easier to pick up than absolute performance.

I'm (mildly) bipolar. The highs hurt me more at work than the lows. The lows I can push through and compensate for. I have a strong enough work ethic that except in an absolute mind-breaking depression (which I haven't had since my early 20s) I can handle it. In the highs, I either overperform or raise expectations. I always do a very good job of something, but that something might piss someone off.

Reliable median performers, on the other hand, don't piss anyone off or surprise anyone.

[hga]

Of course, as our host points out in Beating the Averages (http://paulgraham.com/avg.html), "If you do everything the way the average startup does it, you should expect average performance. The problem here is, average performance means that you'll go out of business."

Which, if you're one of these "overachievers", increases the chance the start up that hires you, at least early enough that stock options might even vaguely maybe be worth something someday, will fail. This has happened at several that I've worked for, they died hard after I was purged.

[ZoF]

If it's not to personal; do you have any anecdotal indications as to why your bipolar improved after your early twenties?(or rather; why you haven't had a bout of extreme depression since then)

[michaelochurch]

Some mood disorders come on gradually and get worse with time. Others hit hard in the teens and 20s and become less severe in adulthood, sometimes remitting around 50. Treatment helps, exercise is important, and the most important thing to remember is that there's no silver bullet but that a multi-pronged approach (medication, CBT, exercise, yoga/meditation, cutting toxic friends and making good ones, good sleep habits, avoiding drugs including alcohol) can make your life a lot better.

My genetic pattern seems to show more debilitation in the 20s. Unfortunately, some people don't recover from the damage (to health and career) done in that phase. I seem to have made it through the worst, though.

It was in my late 20s that I learned to live with an unstable mood. Sometimes I'll have a panic attack (10 minutes of extreme adrenal excitement for no reason) or a depression attack (an intense 2-4 hour bout of depression that, while leaving me exhausted, seems to leave no lasting mark) but I take a zen approach. Yes, this is actually happening, and it's just emotion. Easier said than done, for sure, but it's an ongoing practice.

Panic attacks I think of as a stern, somewhat obnoxious teacher whose motivations I haven't figured out yet. What makes panic scary is that it can imitate pretty much any physical disease. Phantom smells, visual flashing, chest pain, balance problems, paresthesia, vertigo, vomiting, blurry vision. I've had pretty much all of that shit. Over time, you learn that it's not dangerous. Then it becomes an annoyance (like a traffic jam) rather than a source of terror.

I don't think of myself as disabled by it. Most creative people are on the bipolar spectrum (although two thirds are probably sub-clinical). I don't lose work time to it, and my "never flake" rule keeps it from being too disruptive. I think of myself as traveling the same road as everyone else, but in winter rather than summer. And there are things you can see more clearly when the trees are bare and the air is crisp.

[hga]

Based on a variety of things including family history, my doctors and I believe I have "depression of a bipolar nature" ; not true bipolar but something akin that only expresses itself as depression. Based on his posting just now, it's very different from what he has, except for the "depression attacks", which perhaps got better with time, and definitely got better with anti-depressants, which generally cannot be prescribed to those who are frankly bipolar (and in my case one actually made me hypomanic, that's mania without hallucinations).

The #1 thing you can do to at least not help drive yourself deeper into depression is to learn cognitive therapy, which nowadays has a "behavioral" aspect added to it that I'm not familiar with (this is the CBT Michael refers to in his message composed at the same time as mine). Buy this book; I keep extra copies to give to people: http://www.amazon.com/Feeling-Good-The-Mood-Therapy/dp/03808...

If you're truly bipolar, there's no substitute for a doctor's care as well, you'll probably need a mood stabilizer, of which there are many varieties from the "gold standard" of lithium to modern atypical anti-psychotics.