The Missing Piece of the Puzzle

Hi,

I am Aman, and this safe space is where I am most raw with my thoughts, hop on if you'd like to interact with them :))

If You Never Accept the Frustration of Losing, You’ll Never Grow. - Blue Lock

I often write about work because it takes up such a significant part of the day—more than eight hours, and even longer in an early-stage startup. When your job requires you to constantly think about work, it’s hard not to find yourself drawing insights and epiphanies from it.

Luckily I have been in a position where I have learned a lot from the environment I am in.

I like to think of these epiphanies as puzzle pieces, inspired by the anime Blue Lock. In the show, the protagonist's growth is driven by small epiphanies that reveal the missing pieces within himself. Each discovery allows him to completely reinvent and transform in every way possible, striving to become the best.

All the epiphanies I’ve discovered so far have come to me during moments of drastic failure or when my output starts declining. In such situations, I find it helpful to write and reason with myself about what went wrong. This process gives me clarity and makes it easier to accept setbacks, allowing me to improve and do better next time.

This time is not anything different but it feels like I have just found the final missing piece of the puzzle that I need in order to reinvent myself, Now that I look back I have been asking myself the wrong question

How can I be better than my current version?

In hindsight, it seems like a simple question to ask yourself, but I was operating with the wrong set of mental models, which made it incredibly challenging to address.

Now that I have some clarity on the state of things, I’ll try to outline everything I was missing in this chapter.

Position

Even though I’ve often preached about why people should care, I fell short when it came to practicing what I preached.

In the specific context of engineering, this meant failing to prioritise quality and attention to detail.

Ego

This is the most important ingredient I was missing.

Up until now I kept telling myself that I need to chase difficulty whether it is client side or server side but I actually never believed in myself to be the best at either of the said things.

It is fun being competitive and I had forgotten that even in a positive sum environment the ego to just outcompete everyone, the intensity to take on the most difficult tasks and the high agency required to overdeliver are some things that are just fun.

The way you perceive yourself and the way people perceive you changes 10 fold when you are proud of your work and when your ambition is infectious to people.

Henry Modisett (Perplexity) very beautifuly describes the kind of ego I am talking about here

Comfort

When you’re working at an early-stage startup, your instinct is to constantly be at war the intensity and focus required during that phase have to be razor sharp. However, as the business grows and you gain more resources, that intensity tends to drop, and you begin to settle.

I think the place where I went wrong was getting too comfortable at the position I was playing at.

Selectivity

I was being very selective on the vectors that defines my self improvement and was okay being bad at certain things. Looking back, I realise this was a poisonous mindset to have.

To have the luxury of saying that I am okay being bad at X is a great thing to have in general but not in a lean time when people expect you to perform.

Intensity

I have to be the most intense version of myself out there.

The best players in any field possess a lot of positive ego and take pride in their work, they always operate from a position of care.

If I want to compete on the same playing field as them, I need to level up. This means putting my head down and working with laser-sharp focus, in a way that people instantly recognise the seriousness I bring to the table when it comes to being the best.

Failing on my own standards

I was reading this again and I have realised that I failed at multiple things from my own list and didn't even realise until it was too late.

I am more focused now and I have the sense of clarity to win.

I want to highlight this again because I think it often gets missed sometimes:

Working with the best people in the world is a luck and I don't want to ever be in a position where I am failing to capitalise on that luck.