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Joseph Wang
The important thing is to not care about being the best.
You may not be as good as someone that has a lot more experience than you, but if you let that stop you then you aren't going to be better than you are. One of the good things about going to MIT is that you quickly figure out that you will *NEVER* be the best. There will be computer programmers, physicists, and other people are are better, faster, and just plain smarter than you are. After you figure this out, you just stop caring.
The other trick is the "chess boxing strategy." Find two or three random fields and be the best at the interaction between the fields. You might not be the world's best computer programmer. You might not be the world's best truck driver. You might not be the best speaker of Danish. But without too much trouble you can be the best Danish-speaking/truck driver/computer programmer in the world.
There's also the fact that technology changes works in your favor. I've been programming C++ for 20+ years. However, right now I'm struggling to learn how to program web technologies like Ember and Angular because I haven't had that experience, and so there are lots of people that have been using those tools for one or two years, and are much better at it than I am.
And finally one nice thing about programming is that it's a toilet fixing problem. There are a lot of people that may be fixing toilets. Unfortunately they are busy doing other things, so you are stuck with me, and as long as I'm "good enough" that's enough to make a job out of it.
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The important thing is to not care about being the best.
You may not be as good as someone that has a lot more experience than you, but if you let that stop you then you aren't going to be better than you are. One of the good things about going to MIT is that you quickly figure out that you will *NEVER* be the best. There will be computer programmers, physicists, and other people are are better, faster, and just plain smarter than you are. After you figure this out, you just stop caring.
The other trick is the "chess boxing strategy." Find two or three random fields and be the best at the interaction between the fields. You might not be the world's best computer programmer. You might not be the world's best truck driver. You might not be the best speaker of Danish. But without too much trouble you can be the best Danish-speaking/truck driver/computer programmer in the world.
There's also the fact that technology changes works in your favor. I've been programming C++ for 20+ years. However, right now I'm struggling to learn how to program web technologies like Ember and Angular because I haven't had that experience, and so there are lots of people that have been using those tools for one or two years, and are much better at it than I am.
And finally one nice thing about programming is that it's a toilet fixing problem. There are a lot of people that may be fixing toilets. Unfortunately they are busy doing other things, so you are stuck with me, and as long as I'm "good enough" that's enough to make a job out of it.
See Questions On Quora
Continue reading...
