This takes me back to the weirdness of my post-college years: so much pressure to show that I know what I'm doing but no actual work or life experience to draw from. The transition thinking success is good grade to realizing that real success is figuring out what the questions are and how much effort I should put into answering them.
I definitely relate to the crux of the article though:
> I realized getting to a point where you reap the benefits from what you’re hoping to learn requires you to do it yourself and fail. A lot.
I also had to work hard to shift from the fixed mindset: "I'm smart therefore I need to be good at this. If I'm not good at this, then I'm dumb" to "I'm going to put the effort it and give myself the grace that learning takes a long time". Almost nobody is smart enough to get it right away, and truly, nobody starts out knowing everything.
I learned this most clearly from running, where I had no expectations to live up to, no "I should". I put in the work for years, and ran faster and further than I ever thought I would. I'm never ashamed to say "today was a crappy run" or "I didn't do very well, better sleep it off". Then why was I afraid to say "I don't get this complex idea yet, I better spend some time reading it 12 more times until it starts making sense"?
I'm working through something similar right now. I like your thought about shifting away from the fixed mindset. I'm also realizing a lot of this, maybe all of this, comes down to identity and ego.
I'm taking an evening class right now in computer science at a local university. Without mincing words, I am getting my ass kicked by it. Absolutely handed to me. It's proofs-based, and I don't have much of a background in this (even during my time in college back in the day, I didn't take these types of courses).
I'm getting stuck all the time, finding it hard to understand the lectures, and then avoiding studying altogether because it's not "clicking" for me. But if I'm being honest, what I'm doing above all is avoiding studying because of how painful it feels, and how much of my own identity as a "smart" person comes into question. I've never really had trouble with coursework, and would even say a lot of it came naturally to me, so from that I built up a little castle wall of an identity wherein I'm a "smart person who learns things easily."
Yet here I am unable to learn this easily at all. I'm discovering that I need to tweak my mindset and keep my identity smaller. Why do I have to be a smart person? Why can't I just be a person who wants to learn something that he's finding challenging? Is it helping me to belittle myself by telling myself that I "should" understand this quickly? Or is it just leading me to running away from the whole thing altogether, thereby worsening the situation?
Sorry for the rant / writeup. I'm processing all of this in real-time myself, and trying to get myself back to studying...
Disney has a wide-ranging, vast library of content. All the classic Disney stuff, Disney Channel movies, Marvel, Star Wars... Not saying it's worth it, but it's a wide appeal. I can only thing of 5-10 great Hulu shows; I don't really know what to watch on there.
Oooh, I love this. A few years ago, I started keeping track of my favorite coffeeshops. They're not "the best ever" by some objective metric; I'm not Zagat. But they're special to me!
I assume your metrics are great coffee and excellent ambiance.
The best coffee I've ever had was from The Library Specialty Coffee in Toronto. The location though is so minimal and uninviting that I couldn't rank it very highly as a coffeeshop.
Where I live (Austin) some of the best coffee I've had is from a trailer, so that obviously wouldn't rank either.
I'm not sure I've been to any coffeeshops I would rank very highly... Sadly, the best is probably the Starbucks near where I live. The people who work there are extraordinarily nice and the place is very clean, quiet, and comfortable. Too bad the coffee isn't better.
I never thought about it before, but I guess the place is more important to me than the drink when determining where I want to go for a cup of coffee.
As always, I was working on modifying a CRUD program. It's been a while since I read through the documentation carefully and worked on it, so it feels refreshing.
I think a lot about a mismatch of effort these days. Here's an extreme example: I spend an hour drafting a doc outlining our engineering strategy for the next few quarters (or if we're in a startup, maybe writing up my product vision.) I share it with you to get feedback and comments. If you plug it into Claude and send me back an AI-formatted list, with sections like "the real insight (read this first)", we have very different ideas about where our value comes from and what deserves our effort, even though on paper I drafted a doc and you reviewed/expanded it.
I think it's fine to provide AI input if you disclose it, in which case you could encourage me to just plug it into Claude myself next time.
And I agree there's gray area: the AI output might be the result of a long conversation, shaped by careful prompting and context and guidance. The writing is AI generated, but the thinking is human.
Nice pov.
I spoke mostly from an engineering perspective.
When revisiting my corp career in executive position I agree!
However when writing strategy documents and stuff like that I think that the AI is mostly corrupting the idea and making it extremely verbose.
If someone manages to make the AI speak straight to the point with the vision based on what they want to communicate, that, to me is completely fine too.
What is kind of sad is that in the old times we would value a lot the folk that went and wrote a memo, put a lot of thought to it and so on.. Now literally you just plug claude in your notion and you have the document.
To me, this kind of speaks about "the value was never really in the document itself"and more in the understanding of the doc. You can delegate a lot of stuff to the AI but you can't delegate understanding. So when you're presenting it to the exec committee, or circulating it, does not matter what claude/gemini/gpt wrote down, it matters if you understood it, agrees with it and understand that this represents your positioning.
What I see w a lot of juniors, on the other hand, is that people really just copy and paste or shallow understand what was wrote. Delegating too much like that removes the human-seed and makes it kind of worthless
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