How I learned to embrace failure

If you see my Github profile, especially the contribution map, I’m almost active everyday, which is quite deceptive because in fact I’m not active everyday. If you look more closely, you’ll notice I’m more active in my dotfiles repo, which is just something I can’t stop doing, tweaking my setup to be more ProDuCtIvE. While looking at it closely, I think it was a symptom of something, something really big, something I don’t really want to confront, but here I am.

I’m afraid of failure.

I’ll tweak things to lure myself that I’m doing something… I enjoy instant gratification and believe it or not, I only start writing code if I have the feeling I’m getting something from it, and once it’s done, I’ll talk about it forever (just see how much I talk about atbswp - here I am again…). Anyway, if I’m writing this, it means something has changed, and I’m afraid, nothing would have changed if I hadn’t done a couple of things, First I started looking for a job, I got a shitton of rejection, at one point I started questionning my skills, like did they see the imposter in me? Is Computer Science the field for me? …? But after getting my job, all this taught me one thing. Failure is just discovering yet another way to not get to the result (I don’t remember who said this). Now you can tell me that it’s a well-known thing, but I believe experience is the best teacher. So if you’re not failing on a daily basis, start questionning yourself, because it’s easy to stagnate. Also, start writing something, anything, don’t care about good grammar and stuff, just write… It will help you tremendeously in a way you can’t even imagine.`

Written on November 25, 2020