There are some things that are consistently going on inside my head -- I need to split these out somewhere - writing helps clears space in ur brain
1. Competition vs Collaboration
You may not be able to relate to this if u are not from India :((
Pursuit of CS and existence among CS majors at IITM had made me a very diminished personality -- in the sense that I could not tolerate people going ahead of me -- yeah quite literally the notion of unhealthy and zero-sum competition had spread its roots deep inside me. I was always in FOMO whenever I saw someone knowing something more than me OR performing better in an exam.
Sometime later though, this translated into "fear". Fear that person X has done blah-blah-blah and has XYZ skills and has interned 5 times while I am still here not having figured one thing out. This also stemmed from the fact that in my first I avoided contact with too many people and thought that I was gonna end up doing research in math -- even If I wud I was so mistaken to think that I could do it alone in a cubicle. Then the second went away in studying hard for academics and getting good at leetcode problems :((. Since I had just read things (well A LOT OF THINGS to be precise) but never documented, I myself did not have track of what I new + not joining any club or doing something real life made me sink even deeper into the thought that I have not done anything useful. Only to make things worse I kept competing and getting FOMOed by peers who had figured out things early and were doing "flashy" things
Well amidst all this nonsense I forgot that replacing competition by collaboration can benefit u so much more. Different people do different kind of things -- rather than bitching and envying with them u can just flip the side and try to learn from them. Imagine how much leverage this can give you!!
I cant go out and learn everything out there -- and most often there are things I wanna know about but not to "the" extent. In this case people who have spent time understanding can give u their versions of the compressed information! Wish I'd realised this earlier. Came out of this mentality very recently.
2. Acknowledging our vulnerabilities
Related to above -- I am a very calm and cool person (at least I think so, most often u are not the kind of personality when u think u are :P). But the last semester was an emotional termoil -- lot of things rambling and breaking down -- and me facing failures again! Very good relations around me became bitter purely out of my vulnerabilities and insecurities. Humans (particularly hardworking and ambitious) dont like to be insecure. I still remember debating with people over useless things and even criticizing them to their face (this is given that I am naturally very dimplomatic) simply out of the status turmoil that I saw slowly slipping out of my hands
I hate that version of mine more than anything in this world :( -- well a good lesson for the future is that no matter what ur behaviour should be internally driven and not stimulus influenced.
3. Getting value from the people around you
Again relates to the first point (mentioned prev in this post) -- I have a bad habit of holding opinions over people -- I realised only recently that this is flawed on two counts:
- people change over time -- Yukash, a good friend of mine pointed out
- people have different dimensions to their behaviour
Even if 1 isnt true 2 holds very well -- it is the value that we gain from people that we should focus on rather than some tiny annoyance that we might have generated by our own. People are a leverage (I AM BY NO MEANS SAYING USE PEOPLE). If you hold opinions on people or let ur ego dominate over u while interacting with others, there is a high potential value addition that u r missing out. So value the value of people!