Only Beat Yourself
So many things have been going on and I am actually struggling to keep up with all the amazing things that have happened to me in the past couple of weeks.
I was up late one evening at the time of SXSW and blogged an open response to Obama's comment on the Apple vs FBI case. To my surprise it got on the front page of hacker news where I posted it, without really expecting anything. I'm so incredibly flattered by the 320 comments and feel extremely humbled so many people took the time to respond. (hacker news thread)
About a week later, I started a photo project to start shooting portraits in my free time, starting at 1 DKK (That's like 0.15209 in USD), increasing the price by 1 for each person, and I'm through my first 17 shoots now. Incredibly lucky to have met so many cool people and my photo portfolio has a ton of new shots in it. People have been interesting, kind, diverse and overall a real pleasure!
Lastly for personal things, I've picked up running again and after running 3.8km two weeks ago, I'm now at 7.3km (I refuse to translate that to miles, because the metric system is far more awesome). These numbers are a laugh compared to what some of my co-workers run, but hey, it's a start.
Back to the topic of this post, running is like most disciplines you do. You kinda have to beat your previous self to get better, to be faster or run longer. Both for coding or visual work, it's exactly the same.
Do it more, to get betterA good sentence to remember for everyone who wants to master anything is:
If you want to be a great $jobName, you have to do $jobName-y things every day.This is a fun sentence to remember for me, because it's charmingly flawed and refers to coding a lot, because it would spell:
If you want to be a great coder, you have to do coder-y things every day.This works for most jobs, some become
carpentry-y though, which isn't so great. ;)
(Linguistically interesting: more info on -y suffixes)
Beating yourself isn't always easy or fun, but it's basically everything that guarantees your success. In reality there are no people holding you back or standing in your way. Fairly few people I have met literally wanted me to suffer or thought I didn't deserve something.
The exception to that are people that deceive you or plainly lie to you. Avoid them if you can. Abuse of trust is irreversible.
Apart from that, you can really only let yourself down, let yourself drop to other peoples levels or methods, it's not their fault, it's yours. You're the first person you should disappoint, when you mess something up.
The time you spend doing things, the experience you gain and the people you impress, no-one can take away from you, so don't look for opponents in others, but in yourself.
I have messed up a bit by not blogging enough, but doing all kinds of other things ;) I'll show this site some more love over the next weeks!