A former mentor gave me some valuable advice once about this that didn't make sense til years later. Basically, I got a computer science degree while working full time minimum wage - in a very competitive program and high cost of living area. It was extraordinarily hard, orders of magnitude harder than anything else I've ever done, just trying to survive and not starve and somehow find the time to do well in my studies.
He said something like "if you keep burning the candle at 110% like you have been for long, you'll find that you often can find something deep within you to keep going, but eventually, this can run dry, and it doesn't really regenerate. It takes something from you that you aren't going to get back."
I don't mean minor stuff like, "oh I'm really tired today and I don't want to go to school." I'm talking like, very difficult coursework + stressful job + major life calamities and personal loss all compiling at the same time in a way that you just want to crawl into a pit and die, yet, you keep going - that kind of willpower/stamina whatever you want to call it.
He was right. I think he was alluding somewhat to burnout, which I think is related but somehow different - I am not the same person I was before that endeavor, and don't feel I really ever "healed" from it. It's very difficult to describe. feels a little like anhedonia, like a part of me has been missing since then. When I get in similar circumstances now, I find it harder to summon whatever it was inside of me that "kept going."
I expect I'm still healing because I'm only ~10 years removed from this, but, sometimes I'm not sure.
About seven years ago, I was working full-time at an amazing but consuming job, raising a family, and surviving the pandemic. I was also writing every single day on a large textbook. Then within the span of about six months, my dog got sick and died, my mom got cancer, and a few friends and family members died unexpectedly. I kept writing every day while dealing with all of that. I literally wrote in the waiting room while my mom was getting CT scanned. I kept working on the book as the pandemic reared its head and politics went insane.
I got through it all and finished the book, but I haven't felt the same since. It's like some nerve in my soul got burned to a cinder and is no longer able to fire.
I've spent a lot of time in therapy which has been amazing, but I'm still not what I'd call all better.
My hypothesis is that I spent so much time compartmentalizing emotions like anxiety, grief, sorrow, and hurt in order to keep moving forward that I got too good at stuffing them in a box. The only way to avoid being overwhelmed by them was to sever my connection to all of my feelings, which meant I lost access to joy, humor, whimsy, and passion too.
I'm working to rebuild that connection, but it doesn't come back easily.
I relate to this. I don't know what it is either, but over the course of my 25-year career it's become impossible to summon that "will" within me. My brain just constantly asks "and what are we doing this for again?" which is anathema to sustained effort. I wonder if it's simple age; maybe this is just the energy of youth that evaporated. Or maybe it's becoming jaded; seeing how people will encourage their employees to burn it hard, for a modest reward that (in my experience anyway) often does not even materialize.
I agree entirely with this post. Considering that it is posted on HN which has very much promoted the startup hustle lifestyle for so long, this feels a bit like the buyer beware that comes 15 years after the fact. Something to consider for anyone who wants to give everything in exchange for 0.001% equity in a B2B blockchain fart app.
I believe this is simply the aging process. We all want to peg it to something specific we've done, but I've never met a person who doesn't feel this way at some point in the middle of their lives. Our bodies are just like every other living thing in that they get less and less efficient after the initial bloom.
You have to figure out when do to that 110% or more.
Not only for whether it's ever worthwhile in your role and how you benefit, but also for pacing.
For example, if you're a startup cofounder, in a good team, and you win big if the startup wins big, then you might put in that 110% frequently -- but you save your superhuman 200% bursts for emergencies, so that you can reliably put in close to 100% every day, not start making fatigued huge mess-ups.
For another example, if you're a series B startup hire, being paid below-market, with 0.01% stock options that will never be worth exercising, and the founding team turns out to be bad at everything except raising ZIRP money and beer-pong-- then you should still do right by your good teammates, and also be professional in general, but don't spend years burning yourself out at 110% while watching the dysfunctional company just urinate away everyone's contributions. Spend that extra 10% energy of yours in searching for a better situation.
Thanks for sharing this. “Keep burning the candle at 110% … It takes something from you that you aren’t going to get back.” That’s something I’ve been feeling but haven’t been able to articulate after a prolonged sprint. It’s not quite burnout because it doesn’t erase your capability right away, but it takes a compounding toll.
I'm fairly exhausted today, but I've shared on HN before that I absolutely feel this. I was in the military in a high stress role (about 20 years in), nursing an autistic child through chemotherapy, and still being a parent to my other child and supporting my wife.
Notwithstanding the other intense stress I went through in that career, I feel that I used something up making it through that. If you want more of the story feel free to look through my comments; I've talked about it in more depth a few times.
This really resonated with me. I taught myself programming while working full time minimal wage job, I spent a year or two learning then an additional 2 years job hunting. Then I got a job and kept grinding, working like crazy for 3 years.
But with our current market, I've been out of work for a year.
I need to keep fighting harder than ever, but I don't know if I have the strength anymore. I feel like I've lost something, I don't know if it comes back
> I am not the same person I was before that endeavor, and don't feel I really ever "healed" from it. It's very difficult to describe.
Ironically this describes it perfectly in a way that no single word can. It's somehow more than burnout, it's an actual alteration. I've tried to come up with a psychological explanation. It's something like the brain recognizing a very large pattern, or more specifically a dead end. The mind consists of feedback loops that must tie back to rewards. Modern work is so abstract from the rewards, computer programming even more so. I think we grow up developing our psyche like some list of rules we cobble together over time, but it's not a unified theory. Eventually the brain realizes it's working harder and harder with no tangible payout, the contradictions in the rules accumulate tension. Life somehow tricks you into spinning your wheels at full speed, nothings really happening, you're not sure how you got there, and you don't really have an exit plan. Then it all comes crashing down.
This is the curse of counterfactuals you can't answer.
I was pretty directionless in my younger years, but reasonably smart and driven. I was in the Army and in my late 20s and decided to get into software and went back to school full-time while still serving in the Army. Possibly somewhat predictably, I also went through a divorce at the same time. But I was awake at 3 AM or so every single day, studying for several hours, going to work, studying at lunch, coming home, studying some more, on and on for a few years, and that was all I did. It was work of some sort, nonstop, with no other concerns.
It "worked." I got through the program, re-skilled, left the Army, at this point have quadrupled any salary I ever earned before getting into software.
But beyond that basic brutality of the experience of being mentally on at all waking hours on all days, and those waking hours often being well beyond 16, I ended up going through severe spinal degeneration in my mid 30s, obviously exacerbated if not outright caused by sitting too much, that ended in three surgeries in the span of 16 months, several years of intermittent disability and forced bed rest, cerebrospinal fluid leakage, an inability to walk without assistance for a while.
I ultimately got through it and seem to be basically okay in my mid 40s. Was it worth it, though? I have no idea. I'll certainly never do anything like that ever again. Physical health has become and will remain for the rest of my life my number one priority. I might deprioritize eating properly, sleeping enough, and consistently working out for a few weeks or even months here and there, but for years at a time? Never again. It's not just the severity of the experience itself. I'm not even sure the experience itself is all that bad. You get so high on the feeling of productivity and accomplishment that the difficulty of what you're doing barely even registers, and time flies when you're occupied nonstop. But I have no way of ever knowing how much it contributed to effectively losing half a decade of my life to a level of physical disability that doesn't normally happen to a person before they turn 70, during what was supposed to be the prime of my life.
It's possibly the reason I don't have kids. My wife at the time left me and by the time I remarried, I was in such bad shape that I couldn't even pick up my cats, didn't feel capable of raising a child when I couldn't even consistently get out of bed, and decided a vasectomy was a better option at that point. Again, I have no way of ever knowing if this would have happened anyway, but assuming the answer is even maybe no, was it worth to give up the chance of having kids to burn a little bit more brightly when I was 28? Fuck no, that isn't worth it.
I mostly agree but I have interpret it differently. There are three reasons for "keep going" no matter what. First extreme adversity, second extreme expectations, third extreme few dimensional discipline due to childhood reasons.
Burn out, depression, emptiness come out due to perceiving unfairness with respect to the outcomes. Even if someone ends up overcoming adversity or overachieving, the serotonin response just isn't there, because that is not how it worked in the first place.
If you look at a static point in there will always be grievances, if you look at an imaginary future there will always be grievances but if you have been mentored to look this as a movie, see where you started, and you see what you have ended up achieving it will be a lot brighter. Most of the people do good with their lives.
That mentor was very, very wise. I've had the same thing happen to me twice now. It happens outside the realm of career as well. For me it was a baby in the NICU and the rest of my life still needing serious attention as well. Something changes in your brain maybe. It's sad because while often 'stamina' will gain you things, this feels like a loss without a gain.
I was also finishing a CS degree (at WGU), and had a very stressful job. I started having chest and stomach pains, then I got shingles, then I was diagnosed with celiac disease, all in a very short time.
I quit the job, finished my degree, and still struggle with the chest pains and celiac disease.
So I feel this. I pushed through the stress for a time, and it took something from me--goodbye delicious gluten.
Maybe the stakes is just lower now? But anyway, yeah I can relate. It's like the mind has renewable and unrenewable 'stores'. The unrenewable ones are just buildups of life experiences that you can transmute into work in a certain way. But once you harness it, it's done. Probably.
I wish I had realized this when I was younger. People overestimate raw intelligence and underestimate sheer persistence. Just staying with a problem longer—pushing past the point where most would quit—feels almost like magic. Time + focus can take you incredibly far.
Stubbornness might just be the most valuable trait a scientist can have.
Which comes from "The Procrastination Equation" by Piers Steel, an academic focused on motivation. I haven't finished the book since it's pretty self help-y, but I do like the equation. Here, expectancy is perceived likelihood of finishing the task, value is obvious, delay is how long until the payoff, and importantly, impulsiveness is the general impulsiveness of the task doer.
Reminds me of what Steve Jobs said: "Focus is about saying no". That resonates with me in that very often when I'm doing a task I was passionate on and now I'm not so passionate on it because there are 100 other things Id rather be doing. To have the stamina to persist by saying no to the other things is what gives people a huge advantage. "No, I won't stop running" or "No, I won't switch projects cause this shiny object is more interesting". I think having the stamina to keep persisting is a huge advantage, but it often comes at you saying no to all the other things you'd also like to do.
I'm pretty good at filtering out distractions that come to me as they're assumed to be a distraction unless I see otherwise. I have more trouble filtering out ideas that I have myself as I often feel they could be relevant even though they haven't passed similar vetting. What resonated with me was Warren Buffet's "Two List Strategy" aka 5/25 rule.
Aquinas addresses the virtue of perseverance and the vices opposed to perseverance in Q.137[0] and Q.138[1] of the Summa, respectively. A virtue here is "a habit that directs us to do something well, or to omit something". Perseverance allows us to avoid forsaking "a good on account of long endurance of difficulties and toils".
As a virtue, it holds the mean between the errors that flank it on either side, avoiding effeminacy and delicacy on the one hand, and pertinacity on the other.
Effeminacy "withdraws from good on account of sorrow caused by lack of pleasure, yielding as it were to a weak motion", while delicacy "is a kind of effeminacy", but while effeminacy "regards lack of pleasures [...] delicacy regards the cause that hinders pleasure, for instance toil". In other words, effeminacy shrinks from things, because of the lack of pleasure, while delicacy shrinks on account of the discomfort caused.
Pertinacity holds on "impudently, as being utterly tenacious". It resists course correction.
I used to work at a big-tech branch in an Asian country where the academic talent was more concentrated relative to here in the bay area (due to the lack of local competition). What I noticed was that all of these academic elites from wealthy family had the stamina. They worked longer, they focused better, etc. I'm not sure they were aware of that but it was definitely noticeable.
Since then I have become skeptical about grit or hard work as an equalization factor: You sure need it but they have a lot of it.
I remember I used to complain in graduate school about the insane amount of work I had taking four engineering courses every quarter.
Then I learned that my cousin in Asia studies more than 12 hours a day. Goes to sleep at 11PM and wakes up at 6AM to study. She is in high school and her life is literally study, eat, sleep, repeat until the college entrance exams. High schoolers in the US are incredibly stressed about SAT and college application prep too, but its much worse in Asia where your entire life trajectory depends on a single set of exams that optimizes for maximal studiousness and pure g factor.
But I think stamina is something you can build over time. I also think it is a function of how interested one is in the work. I can work forever on some tasks, but some others are like chewing glass and I tap out in less than an hour.
in china this is called "eating bitterness", the idea of enduring hardship, overcoming difficulties, and forging ahead. it is not just academics, but everyone. it's chinese culture essentially.
Regarding stamina defined broadly as it is in this article: One of my favorite quotes comes from an unlikely source: Mike Tyson.
"I don't care how good you are at anything. You don't have discipline you ain’t nothin. Discipline is doing what you hate but doing it like you love it"
This reminds me of one of my favorite quotes I try to live by..
"Tenacity is a most underrated quality in life. We all speak about talent, intelligence, glamour. But tenacity is the common thing for every successful person in life. Maintain that motivation to go from A to B and to keep your focus on that target without any weakening. That is called tenacity; stamina in your motivation."
- Arsene Wenger (Legendary Arsenal FC Coach)
> It’s contributing as part of a team that, let’s say, has posed a challenging experience for all involved. It’s returning for another go at a problem that has repeatedly turned your mind into oatmeal ... It’s the ability to chip away at goals despite a lack of visible progress.
To bring in some LinkedIn-level grandstanding here: I deeply agree, especially with this part of the quote, when it comes to leveling up my career in software. The problems get more and more abstract and muddied and the difference between engineer levels sometimes comes down to who gives up and who doesn't.
Stamina without Persistence is rather useless. Applying persistence constructively is the major differentiator in my view. The notion that a majority of humans reach a level of effort, in daily life or their pursuits, where stamina becomes a factor is likely single digit percentage of the population, say in the US. Stamina maintaining an addiction or survival as a homeless person is not the same as multi-hour Twitch streaming, so to speak.
Stamina is often fueled by stimulant drugs which exert a toll on the user. I used five unique ones this morning, and I know it's going to be tough to get proper sleep. As long as one uses their time well, there is no substitute for work-life balance.
I would argue the original post is talking about stamina on a different scale. Stamina over years. Not over the course of a day or week, fueled by stimulants.
An activity or thing that holds deep meaning to you personally will be the stimulant to one's stamina. Love for your child will allow you to take care of him/her despite being insanely sleep deprived. I think the concept is much more broader than just work.
That isn't stamina, but perhaps a corrective for the lack of stamina. The stimulation is meant to increase pleasure, hence making it easier to stick with something. Stamina means the ability to endure the lack of pleasure in pursuit of the good.
[+] [-] JohnMakin|1 year ago|reply
He said something like "if you keep burning the candle at 110% like you have been for long, you'll find that you often can find something deep within you to keep going, but eventually, this can run dry, and it doesn't really regenerate. It takes something from you that you aren't going to get back."
I don't mean minor stuff like, "oh I'm really tired today and I don't want to go to school." I'm talking like, very difficult coursework + stressful job + major life calamities and personal loss all compiling at the same time in a way that you just want to crawl into a pit and die, yet, you keep going - that kind of willpower/stamina whatever you want to call it.
He was right. I think he was alluding somewhat to burnout, which I think is related but somehow different - I am not the same person I was before that endeavor, and don't feel I really ever "healed" from it. It's very difficult to describe. feels a little like anhedonia, like a part of me has been missing since then. When I get in similar circumstances now, I find it harder to summon whatever it was inside of me that "kept going."
I expect I'm still healing because I'm only ~10 years removed from this, but, sometimes I'm not sure.
[+] [-] munificent|1 year ago|reply
About seven years ago, I was working full-time at an amazing but consuming job, raising a family, and surviving the pandemic. I was also writing every single day on a large textbook. Then within the span of about six months, my dog got sick and died, my mom got cancer, and a few friends and family members died unexpectedly. I kept writing every day while dealing with all of that. I literally wrote in the waiting room while my mom was getting CT scanned. I kept working on the book as the pandemic reared its head and politics went insane.
I got through it all and finished the book, but I haven't felt the same since. It's like some nerve in my soul got burned to a cinder and is no longer able to fire.
I've spent a lot of time in therapy which has been amazing, but I'm still not what I'd call all better.
My hypothesis is that I spent so much time compartmentalizing emotions like anxiety, grief, sorrow, and hurt in order to keep moving forward that I got too good at stuffing them in a box. The only way to avoid being overwhelmed by them was to sever my connection to all of my feelings, which meant I lost access to joy, humor, whimsy, and passion too.
I'm working to rebuild that connection, but it doesn't come back easily.
[+] [-] saulpw|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] brian-armstrong|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] djeastm|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] neilv|1 year ago|reply
Not only for whether it's ever worthwhile in your role and how you benefit, but also for pacing.
For example, if you're a startup cofounder, in a good team, and you win big if the startup wins big, then you might put in that 110% frequently -- but you save your superhuman 200% bursts for emergencies, so that you can reliably put in close to 100% every day, not start making fatigued huge mess-ups.
For another example, if you're a series B startup hire, being paid below-market, with 0.01% stock options that will never be worth exercising, and the founding team turns out to be bad at everything except raising ZIRP money and beer-pong-- then you should still do right by your good teammates, and also be professional in general, but don't spend years burning yourself out at 110% while watching the dysfunctional company just urinate away everyone's contributions. Spend that extra 10% energy of yours in searching for a better situation.
[+] [-] kolyder|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] CobaltFire|11 months ago|reply
Notwithstanding the other intense stress I went through in that career, I feel that I used something up making it through that. If you want more of the story feel free to look through my comments; I've talked about it in more depth a few times.
[+] [-] donjjju|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] disambiguation|11 months ago|reply
Ironically this describes it perfectly in a way that no single word can. It's somehow more than burnout, it's an actual alteration. I've tried to come up with a psychological explanation. It's something like the brain recognizing a very large pattern, or more specifically a dead end. The mind consists of feedback loops that must tie back to rewards. Modern work is so abstract from the rewards, computer programming even more so. I think we grow up developing our psyche like some list of rules we cobble together over time, but it's not a unified theory. Eventually the brain realizes it's working harder and harder with no tangible payout, the contradictions in the rules accumulate tension. Life somehow tricks you into spinning your wheels at full speed, nothings really happening, you're not sure how you got there, and you don't really have an exit plan. Then it all comes crashing down.
[+] [-] nonameiguess|1 year ago|reply
I was pretty directionless in my younger years, but reasonably smart and driven. I was in the Army and in my late 20s and decided to get into software and went back to school full-time while still serving in the Army. Possibly somewhat predictably, I also went through a divorce at the same time. But I was awake at 3 AM or so every single day, studying for several hours, going to work, studying at lunch, coming home, studying some more, on and on for a few years, and that was all I did. It was work of some sort, nonstop, with no other concerns.
It "worked." I got through the program, re-skilled, left the Army, at this point have quadrupled any salary I ever earned before getting into software.
But beyond that basic brutality of the experience of being mentally on at all waking hours on all days, and those waking hours often being well beyond 16, I ended up going through severe spinal degeneration in my mid 30s, obviously exacerbated if not outright caused by sitting too much, that ended in three surgeries in the span of 16 months, several years of intermittent disability and forced bed rest, cerebrospinal fluid leakage, an inability to walk without assistance for a while.
I ultimately got through it and seem to be basically okay in my mid 40s. Was it worth it, though? I have no idea. I'll certainly never do anything like that ever again. Physical health has become and will remain for the rest of my life my number one priority. I might deprioritize eating properly, sleeping enough, and consistently working out for a few weeks or even months here and there, but for years at a time? Never again. It's not just the severity of the experience itself. I'm not even sure the experience itself is all that bad. You get so high on the feeling of productivity and accomplishment that the difficulty of what you're doing barely even registers, and time flies when you're occupied nonstop. But I have no way of ever knowing how much it contributed to effectively losing half a decade of my life to a level of physical disability that doesn't normally happen to a person before they turn 70, during what was supposed to be the prime of my life.
It's possibly the reason I don't have kids. My wife at the time left me and by the time I remarried, I was in such bad shape that I couldn't even pick up my cats, didn't feel capable of raising a child when I couldn't even consistently get out of bed, and decided a vasectomy was a better option at that point. Again, I have no way of ever knowing if this would have happened anyway, but assuming the answer is even maybe no, was it worth to give up the chance of having kids to burn a little bit more brightly when I was 28? Fuck no, that isn't worth it.
[+] [-] selimthegrim|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] antman|11 months ago|reply
Burn out, depression, emptiness come out due to perceiving unfairness with respect to the outcomes. Even if someone ends up overcoming adversity or overachieving, the serotonin response just isn't there, because that is not how it worked in the first place.
If you look at a static point in there will always be grievances, if you look at an imaginary future there will always be grievances but if you have been mentored to look this as a movie, see where you started, and you see what you have ended up achieving it will be a lot brighter. Most of the people do good with their lives.
[+] [-] Justsignedup|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] redleggedfrog|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Buttons840|11 months ago|reply
I quit the job, finished my degree, and still struggle with the chest pains and celiac disease.
So I feel this. I pushed through the stress for a time, and it took something from me--goodbye delicious gluten.
[+] [-] the-grump|1 year ago|reply
I went through a similar period near the end of my studies and can relate to your current disposition.
[+] [-] justanotherjoe|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] nh23423fefe|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] blueyes|1 year ago|reply
Focus = Energy - Distraction
and
Success = Focus x Time
The way you gain stamina is by doing things to increase your energy and decrease distraction. I wrote and talked about this here, fwiw.
https://vonnik.substack.com/p/state-changes-work-and-presenc...
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/stokedlive_focus-is-power-lea...
[+] [-] tomlue|1 year ago|reply
Stubbornness might just be the most valuable trait a scientist can have.
[+] [-] nh23423fefe|1 year ago|reply
profound
[+] [-] Rendello|1 year ago|reply
Which comes from "The Procrastination Equation" by Piers Steel, an academic focused on motivation. I haven't finished the book since it's pretty self help-y, but I do like the equation. Here, expectancy is perceived likelihood of finishing the task, value is obvious, delay is how long until the payoff, and importantly, impulsiveness is the general impulsiveness of the task doer.
[+] [-] akoboldfrying|11 months ago|reply
You're forgetting a term on the RHS: Luck.
Most people are either certain that it dominates, or certain that it's negligible.
[+] [-] magicmicah85|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] karmakaze|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] lo_zamoyski|1 year ago|reply
Aquinas addresses the virtue of perseverance and the vices opposed to perseverance in Q.137[0] and Q.138[1] of the Summa, respectively. A virtue here is "a habit that directs us to do something well, or to omit something". Perseverance allows us to avoid forsaking "a good on account of long endurance of difficulties and toils".
As a virtue, it holds the mean between the errors that flank it on either side, avoiding effeminacy and delicacy on the one hand, and pertinacity on the other.
Effeminacy "withdraws from good on account of sorrow caused by lack of pleasure, yielding as it were to a weak motion", while delicacy "is a kind of effeminacy", but while effeminacy "regards lack of pleasures [...] delicacy regards the cause that hinders pleasure, for instance toil". In other words, effeminacy shrinks from things, because of the lack of pleasure, while delicacy shrinks on account of the discomfort caused.
Pertinacity holds on "impudently, as being utterly tenacious". It resists course correction.
[0] https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~ST.II-II.Q137
[1] https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~ST.II-II.Q138
[+] [-] flakiness|11 months ago|reply
Since then I have become skeptical about grit or hard work as an equalization factor: You sure need it but they have a lot of it.
[+] [-] wcfrobert|11 months ago|reply
Then I learned that my cousin in Asia studies more than 12 hours a day. Goes to sleep at 11PM and wakes up at 6AM to study. She is in high school and her life is literally study, eat, sleep, repeat until the college entrance exams. High schoolers in the US are incredibly stressed about SAT and college application prep too, but its much worse in Asia where your entire life trajectory depends on a single set of exams that optimizes for maximal studiousness and pure g factor.
But I think stamina is something you can build over time. I also think it is a function of how interested one is in the work. I can work forever on some tasks, but some others are like chewing glass and I tap out in less than an hour.
[+] [-] em-bee|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] unoti|1 year ago|reply
"I don't care how good you are at anything. You don't have discipline you ain’t nothin. Discipline is doing what you hate but doing it like you love it"
[1] Mike Tyson Fighter's Coldest Quotes Of All Time https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fz9JUENem78&t=100s
[+] [-] keithxm23|11 months ago|reply
"Tenacity is a most underrated quality in life. We all speak about talent, intelligence, glamour. But tenacity is the common thing for every successful person in life. Maintain that motivation to go from A to B and to keep your focus on that target without any weakening. That is called tenacity; stamina in your motivation." - Arsene Wenger (Legendary Arsenal FC Coach)
[+] [-] ip26|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Ancalagon|1 year ago|reply
To bring in some LinkedIn-level grandstanding here: I deeply agree, especially with this part of the quote, when it comes to leveling up my career in software. The problems get more and more abstract and muddied and the difference between engineer levels sometimes comes down to who gives up and who doesn't.
[+] [-] 6stringmerc|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] sage76|11 months ago|reply
All these advice pieces are garbage. Easy to say, but then you put in thousands of hours of practice and dont seem to get any better.
[+] [-] naveed125|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] uuwee|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] OutOfHere|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] dghlsakjg|1 year ago|reply
An analogous comparison: someone that has to wear a knee brace to exercise would not be said to have strong knees.
[+] [-] mcdow|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] pat_space|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] uncharted9|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] lo_zamoyski|1 year ago|reply