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This goes for everyone - not just geniuses. The burger flipper at your favorite fast food joint needs to concentrate on his own work, disregarding what the par
by peg_leg 9y ago
This goes for everyone - not just geniuses. The burger flipper at your favorite fast food joint needs to concentrate on his own work, disregarding what the particular tasks of the counter-worker is. An office worker needs to concentrate on their own Excel workbook, disregarding the type or quality of other people's work.
One can't be at peak productivity or creativity while constantly comparing their work to others. A very basic trap that even Nobel Prize winners get stuck in apparently.
- simplegeek 9y agoOne thing I'm not very certain is that can we as software developers totally disregard others work? I think the analogy doesn't apply here. We build on what other people build. Some many times I had to read other people code which I think made me a better engineer. If I work in isolation, not sure if I can improve the quality.
- TOGoS 9y agoNah, I think it applies just fine. There is a strong culture of building on top of the work of others, and in some cases people build really neat stuff that they could never have done on their own by pulling in years of work in the form of libraries and datasets and etc, but that way of working isn't for everybody. You might end up spending more time trying to keep up with the latest and greatest everything instead of developing your own ideas. I think of Minecraft as a pretty good example. While everyone else was focused on making photorealistic shooters on game engine X Notch was all like "what if everything was cubes that went on forever", and he ended up making something super unique (and extremely popular). Or Chuck Moore with all his wacky Forths. Not the billionaire that Notch is, but he seems pretty happy.
- yathern 9y agoThe irony in your Minecraft example is that Notch originally set out to make a better Infiniminer.