This is a follow-up to my previous blog-post which I hastily wrote down because I felt like it. There has been some… not critique but, disagreements. The post was somewhat misunderstood, so here’s a rant.
First of all, I want to take the opportunity to say that if you would hear me saying the previous blog-post in a conversation I think you would take it very lightly as I would say it rather jokingly and light-hearted.
When something is written down it seems to take on a life of it’s own. Everything gets analyzed and immediately gets much more serious than how it was intended. This is why I have almost completely stopped writing down thoughts in this blog, I don’t like to have them over-analyzed or confronted, they’re just thoughts, thoughts means nothing—actions mean something.
I like writing down my thoughts so I can form them in some sort of completeness and analyze it myself, but if the reader of the thoughts doesn’t understand them 100%, it just makes the situation worse.
Now about the actual post. Of course I don’t feel entirely worthless because some other dude has done something I want to do. There is some kernel of truth to the whole sentiment of not accomplishing something note-worthy, but that’s just some passing thought I wrote down to be able to look back on and remember how I felt at that particular point in time.
For the sake of making the previous post more understandable, I will try to put some of my own analytics into it.
I have been consulting since I was 14 and I’ve done some stuff that I thought was pretty cool at the time. I would consider these accomplishments. But you sort of have to understand where I’m coming from. In my world, everyone has a masters degree, anyone can get a masters degree; you just have to spend 5 years and you get it in the mail. About half the people in my world work as consultants in parallel with school. Two of them have been CEO’s of 25+ employee companies and one is an Executive VP.
Now I have two choices, I can observe the real world as it is, where having a masters and being CEO of a small consulting firm is a pretty good job. Effectively saying to myself “I’m good enough”, and just settling for that.
Or; I can say “I want to do more, be better and improve myself continually”.
I don’t like the “Good enough” mentality. Sure, I’ve accomplished something by working as a consultant and by getting a masters, but you know what? That’s not really that special. I spend 8 hours a day on something just like everyone else.
What matters to me is what you do in those other 8 hours. Right now, I think I spend around 2 of those 8 hours coding, I spend 3 of them watching TV shows and I spend 3 of them surfing HN and Reddit.
The reason I look up to luddep so much and those other people who are just like him, is that they spend their extra 8 hours on doing something productive and important. They spend their free time on improving themselves.
So if I only spend 8 hours on something important every day, like every other human being in the world, how could I possibly claim to be improving myself? I don’t think I can and that’s what I mean by not accomplishing anything. I piss away my 8 hours (or at least 6) when I could be doing something important with them.
So why am I writing this post instead of using my time for something productive? I don’t know, maybe I’m just really fucking lazy, maybe my theory is wrong, maybe I am satisfied at being average (in my world).
That’s why I labeled the previous post “thoughts”, because it’s just that, thoughts. I don’t have the answer to any of these questions and I don’t actually know if any of the questions are in any sense even relevant. I don’t actually walk around and think “What am I spending this hour on? What am I spending that hour on?”, I do what I like to do, do what I have to do and go about living my life as best I can. Don’t you sometimes think “How could I be better?”. If you don’t, I’d say there’s something wrong with you.
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