if something is important enough, you still do it even if the odds are against your favor. ~Elon Musk
yesterday i discussed the dunning-kruger effect and how people overestimate their ability at a certain skill, especially when they are just beginning to crawl. i also mentioned how there are two negative trajectories to the dunning-kruger effect. one is that one is not able to confront the reality and quits altogether. the other (which we are going to talk about) is that a person still keeps on learning and advancing in the skill parallel with the “ideal confidence” (ignoring time as a parameter here) but doesn’t gain confidence in their abilities to do work.
this scenario is called the imposter syndrome. According to Wikipedia, stated as follows:
a psychological experience in which a person suffers from feelings of intellectual and/or professional fraudulence.
in many cases, the trigger for such a scenario could be comparing yourself with people who are, again, far ahead of you in the ladder of competence hierarchy. it is often stated as comparing your day one with someone else’s day thousand.
by now i believe you got the understanding of what this syndrome really deals with. you might ask what could be a potential solution to this? and personally i haven’t figured that out yet myself. there are several narratives of how one looks at their drive for life. for example, a person like david goggins thrives by comparing himself to every other person in the world and that fact keeps a person like him going. if he doesn’t outwork his competition he isn’t succeeding according to him, which is completely fine for his use case.
the above-mentioned example may or may not work for you, and the fun part is you might never come across a pre-existing solution for your specific problem.
one thing that often helps me is to just follow your calendar (no matter if agi is invented). just sticking to what you are doing consistently and walking on your own trajectory is, in most cases, a better decision than giving up your entire calendar for chasing some other shiny objects.
