— learning — 3 min read
The only way to do great work is to love what you do
Hi,
I am Aman, and this safe space is where I am most raw with my thoughts, hop i if you'd like to interact with them :))
Lately I have been thinking a lot about what I would do if not for programming, after thinking about it considerably and looking back at my experiences from different fields back in college days, I couldn't find anything.
I fundamentally like building things, and I think I have romanticised this concept so much at this point that if you look back at the chapters of this blog, you will find this theme to be of a constant occurrence.
Having identified what I enjoy doing, there is one question I keep asking myself asking over and over nowadays.
From books to courses to people, to side projects, I keep scavenging corners of the internet for things that can help me be good at what I do.
The drive to tackle intellectually challenging problems seems to be an insatiable one for me. It's as if I'm consumed by the idea that I must always be progressing, never allowing myself to become stagnant.
Curiosity appears to be the common thread among those who excel in their respective fields. Thus, I am constantly seeking out ways to cultivate and enhance my own curiosity.
In my opinion, there is one clear path to becoming truly good at something, which is to train your curiosity. I have been constantly trying make myself more and more curious about various subjects such as:
The fallback here is always based on action, until and unless you build something, you never really know whether you can be obsessively curious about a field or not. The itch to know how things work definitely gives you a surface level curiosity but the joy in building applications with real world use-cases is unparalleled.
This is a probably a very nuanced topic so I will only project a surface level opinion of what I currently think about this in general.
There is a very definite answer to whether you enjoy your work or not. Perhaps asking this question to ourselves is a bit difficult, and I have been avoiding it for a long time. However, having asked this to myself, it has given me a lot of clarity on the kind of problem statements that push me to go the extra mile at my work, the kind that pushes me to stay up late at night, purely out of curiosity.
Quality is not an act, it is a habit. - Aristotle
Modelling real world is not easy, in general when I think about software I think about automation, It takes a general intuitive thinking to model real world complex scenarios.
Simplicity requires skill, and to develop the thinking where it comes naturally to me will require a great deal of effort and awareness about the problem statement.
Patience to understand and being slow in the shorter run is highly underrated. Post-ChatGPT, I find myself using it as an aid to avoid logical puzzles whenever I encounter them. In doing so, I have realized I am avoiding the only thing that makes my job primarily fun. Despite benefiting greatly from my excessive usage of it as a tool, I get the maximum out of it when I use it primarily to figure out possible solutions.
I am currently engaged in a rather interesting problem statement that requires me to level up drastically. There can be multiple approaches to a particular problem statement, but the real skill lies in crafting the most simple yet most complex solution, which almost sounds paradoxical.
This is what I am currently working on, would definitely love to banter with you on how I can approach this in a more simpler and scalable way.
The way I look at it, it makes no sense to work on what I do if I am not good at it and not constantly improving and enjoying.