"Along with learning and growing, I think I was also optimizing for recognition and validation. I said things I didn’t 100% understand (ex. impact billions) just to sound smart, posted resources in slack with a question that I didn’t really care about what the answer was, to give off a facade that I was thoughtful. Whenever I talked about the projects I worked on, I always felt a mild pang of uneasiness because none of them really amounted to anything, they were like trial runs of a game where I played it for a bit but it never really got anywhere, nothing real, nothing I truly believed in. It felt like I was lying to myself, that I was pretending to be someone I was not"
Yayyy this is such a great self-reflective post!!
"Along with learning and growing, I think I was also optimizing for recognition and validation. I said things I didn’t 100% understand (ex. impact billions) just to sound smart, posted resources in slack with a question that I didn’t really care about what the answer was, to give off a facade that I was thoughtful. Whenever I talked about the projects I worked on, I always felt a mild pang of uneasiness because none of them really amounted to anything, they were like trial runs of a game where I played it for a bit but it never really got anywhere, nothing real, nothing I truly believed in. It felt like I was lying to myself, that I was pretending to be someone I was not"
I was totally this for WAY WAY WAY too long