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 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, you should be internally driven and not stimulus-driven.
3. Getting value from the people around you
Again relates to the first point (mentioned previously 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 our mind has given birth to. People are a leverage (I AM BY NO MEANS SAYING USE PEOPLE). If you hold opinions on people or let ur ego dominate, there is a high potential value addition that u r missing out. So value the value of people!