When I look at the blogs of my peers, the people I want to emulate. I’m struck by the difference between the content that they write about and the content I write about.
In reviewing my musings they are mostly filled with content on trying harder. Motivating myself to do more work: “To begin more”Where as the musings of the people that I admire are about the useEffect hook in React and the differences between an ease-out curve and an ease-in curve in terms of psychology. The depth of though between the two topics is quite stark and it dove tails with something that I read yesterday in the book “On Character”. In “On character” the author says that you need to spend a lot of time thinking deeply on new concepts and ideas. His point was that many people in modern society don’t think very much. They react, and are fed opinions from the media but they don’t spend much time deciding what they believe or really engaging with ideas. Unfortunately, based on my above observations, it looks like I fall into the camp of not thinking very much but further the problems that I am struggling with aren’t really interesting. Questions of discipline and motivation aren’t very intellectually engaging, they are more binary issues: did you show up? did you think of something? did you build something? If the answer is no, then there is not anything interesting to discuss. Interesting problems are encountered when you are building. You have to think deeply about an issue when you are struggling with something and need to find a solution. So far none of my musings have been about interesting/technical problem. The majority of my problems have been emotional or motivational, which, while challenging, are not necessarily engaging or insightful to read about.
Going forward I want to be different. I need to seek out interesting problems to solve. So far in my career, I feel that I haven’t been challenged enough technically, and perhaps even when I have been challenged technically I don’t always approach technical problems from an intellectual framing. The way I usually approach problems is from a pragmatic framing: what are the inputs, what are the outputs and how can I change the system to get my desired output. This is an effective approach but it misses out on greater opportunities for learning an understanding. In the future you need to better identify when a problem that you are trying to solve might have greater implications than you realize and take some time to really think deeply about it.
Cheers to more meditative musings from here on out. 🥂