I then proceeded to learn what I could of best practices, spending far too long experimenting with the language and far too little actually doing. In the end, we ended up with two half-baked infrastructures in two different languages and reached the trough of disillusionment before anything we could show to be disillusioned about!
It's something that I've learned in other parts of my life, especially through writing, but have never quite managed in coding. The primary tenet of National Novel Writing Month is that to finish a rough draft of a long fiction work, you must, starter to professional, give yourself permission to suck, to write something you know is sometimes horrible. You do this so that you have a canvas to fix during editing, to find nuggets that you love, and can revise, and can work with.
Intellectually, I know this about programming as well, but I always have this twinge of guilt when implementing it, and go back to my old ways. The irony is that in larger projects, this can be a useful quality. Having someone on the team that can go back and look at the code, showing exactly where we need to improve before we ship is useful. In solo projects it is often disaster.
At least for me. :)
The gist is that you get into something because you have a good taste for it, but for the first few years of doing it your taste is far ahead of your skill. The trick is to keep doing things anyway, knowing they will eventually catch up and surpass your taste.
The surprising thing I've found about being okay about sucking at writing is that often the "barf drafts" (as I call them) that seem god-awful when I'm actually writing them, turn out being pretty darn good when I revisit them.
It is constructive. There are a bunch of people who are interested in self improvement, trying things, failing, and then picking themselves up and trying again.
That's rare. You don't find that in many communities. Most of the time it is just negativity and "you can't," "you shouldn't," "here are all the flaws," etc.
Hopefully this grouping of people and ideas will help all of us in some way, they do say that it is the people you surround yourself with...
I recently saw a thread on Slashdot (which I hardly ever read these days) started by someone who'd got a bit burnt out and whose skills were by his own admission out of date, asking how to get himself back into the game. It got a lot of replies saying "staying on top of the game is your job, which you are clearly terrible at: give up now" and no actual advice. Which made me realise just how (generally) positive, inspiring and helpful HN's occasional burnout threads are.
One comment: '"Permission to suck" is quite the erotic sentence :)'
Observing a lot of my friends over a lot of years, I'm starting to suspect that the willingness to fail, and particularly to fail in public, is possibly the key differentiator for people who achieve impressive things.
(I'm currently learning a new skill myself. I was sucking very badly, I'm now just sucking pretty badly, and I'm enjoying the progress.)
This reminds me of when I learned to dance Salsa, and more recently, Tango.
It's a far more public failure than writing a blog post. Your body – the very thing that experiences the embarrassment of failure – is your instrument when dancing. To add insult to injury, you're failing in front of a never-ending stream of women.
But, thankfully, sucking is temporary and life is long.
EDIT: I'd like to add that life is much, much, better when you know how to dance.
(I still can't dance very well.)
It is hard to be 'Ok' with yourself not being able to do something you perceive as 'easy.' Or worse when someone you consider to be less talented than yourself is better at something than you, its hard to internalize that too. But all of these stem from the notion that your own value is determined by what you can do. That notion gets in the way of getting better at things.
If you are trying to succeed at meditating you are working against your self.
If you can't suck, you can't fail. If you can't fail, you can't learn, you can't progress.
In most corporate places, you're not allowed to fail. Most will refuse changes, even if it's for the better, because, it may suck. It may fail.
So yeah. If you wanna be great, you gotta suck.
I was taking guitar lessons and I would always be afraid to bring in side tunes I had been working on because I thought they were terrible (and they are) but it's tough to give yourself permission to suck when doing nothing hurts a lot less.
A breakthrough for me though, was when I stopped obsessing over getting every note right, and instead focused on strumming the right chords. Then, I found playing much more enjoyable, and it was easier to play whole songs and sing.
Once I got that down, I was able to move on to more complex things. Like many things, it helps to embrace your suckage with musical instruments.
That sounds boring but manageable. 'Thinking about nothing' seems impossible and stupid at the same time; people who do the disservice of saying that should be slapped.
The point of meditation is to learn how to control your thoughts, specifically in being able to realize that your are choosing your current train of thought, and that you can switch it at any time. If you are stuck worrying, or being sad, or unable to see the richness in something, it's most likely because you can't properly focus on the only thing you'll ever have in life: this moment.
While you & the author are technically right, batgaijin is saying that it's bad advice for beginners to be told "think of nothing".
Sounds like you could use some time meditating about your hostile attitude :) Seriously though, so much of eastern thought related to mediation involves paradoxes that a practitioner reflects on in order to grow.
Think about nothing
Observe your thoughts in a detached state
Do no work but get everything done
etc
I started learning about meditation from the standpoint of trying to detach myself from the constant buzz of thoughts (i.e. 'thinking about nothing'). I seriously doubt that there is a entirely right or wrong way to teach meditation since it ultimately involves a process of self discovery and coming up with whatever metaphor works best for oneself is an important part of the process.
That's because it is impossible.
The "permission to suck" pill needs to be taken along with the "desire to improve" pill. In other words, pay less attention to your current state and more to the trajectory - i.e. where you're heading. If the heading is right, then it is only a matter of time before you reach an arbitrary benchmark of your choosing.
