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Yes. Taking on projects that are too big creates a situation like an airplane stalling because the angle of attack is too steep. Better only to take on projec
by pg 17y ago
Yes. Taking on projects that are too big creates a situation like an airplane stalling because the angle of attack is too steep. Better only to take on projects so small that you know you can finish them, however humiliatingly small that may be initially. Then, with always finishing as a given, start to gradually crank up the ambition. But never so sharply that you stall.
- nostrademons 17y agoI'm not sure I'd say never so sharply that you stall. When you're first starting out, it's virtually impossible to know exactly where the stall line is. If you're determined to always finish everything you start, you either get bogged down in projects that were so ambitious that you can't possibly finish them, or you only take on projects that exactly match the skill level of your past project, where you don't learn anything. My early projects oscillated pretty widely in difficulty when I started. I'd take on something ridiculously difficult (but I didn't know it was ridiculously difficult at the time), and naturally fail at it. Then I'd take the skills from that and do something I knew I could finish. Eventually this converges, and the highs become less ambitious while the lows become more ambitious. I've found that I finish a significantly higher proportion of projects now than I did in college, and their difficulty levels more closely approximate a straight line than a sawtooth wave.