What the above comment is about applies to so much in life, from education to careers because at their core, they are competitions.
> If you're in a competition, the. By definition you're doing the exact same thing as everyone else.
Not true.
There are people who play competitive, ranked, games 3 hrs a week and are happy with being in the top 50% of players
And there are people who spend 30hrs a week in a game and are profoundly unhappy they're only in the top 5% of players.
Those wind up being two very different paths, and it applies to way more than just gaming, like education, which I can speak from experience to that
From a young age I would spend hours upon hours on computers working on my games and random ideas. Even in school I would skip classes to work on my own projects in a computer lab.
My parents felt it was a complete waste of time (especially since it became a huge drain on my performance at school). I didn't have nearly as many close friends as I should have, didn't form a lot of the bonds people growing up do, it ruined my relationship with my parents.
At the end of the day through luck or something I scraped through high school with a .1 above failing GPA, dropped out of community college after failing 2 semesters and started a career in tech by freelancing.
Now 5 years later and the positions I've taken are consistently higher seniority than my friends who did CS in college, so it worked out, but at what cost?
Those years I lost, not even talking to one of my parents for over a year despite living in the same house, wasn't really worth it.
But it was an obsession, I didn't obsess over programming because I wanted to have a great career one day, it was because I couldn't help it. It was almost like an addiction that I got lucky enough to have double as a marketable skill.
It's crazy how much article really resonates with my experience, almost annoyingly so since I feel like a bus ticket collector sometimes, sure tech is a marketable skill, but you sure build a lot of unimportant stuff
Flipping light switches is not a competition... I wasn't being literal. I mean a great number of important things in life are competitions even if we don't see ourselves as competitors.
-
But actually I disagree with saying Ramanujan wasn't competing with anyone, he just wasn't trying to compete
Plenty of people would consider any academic field a competition, even if not everyone in the field is there to compete
The competitive nature of the mathematics field easily have to do with why Ramanujan was not taken as seriously as he should have been at first. A "competitor" was coming with claims to grand contributions and that already created friction, which when combined with other factors about his non-traditional presentation became roadblocks.
What the above comment is about applies to so much in life, from education to careers because at their core, they are competitions.
> If you're in a competition, the. By definition you're doing the exact same thing as everyone else.
Not true.
There are people who play competitive, ranked, games 3 hrs a week and are happy with being in the top 50% of players
And there are people who spend 30hrs a week in a game and are profoundly unhappy they're only in the top 5% of players.
Those wind up being two very different paths, and it applies to way more than just gaming, like education, which I can speak from experience to that
From a young age I would spend hours upon hours on computers working on my games and random ideas. Even in school I would skip classes to work on my own projects in a computer lab.
My parents felt it was a complete waste of time (especially since it became a huge drain on my performance at school). I didn't have nearly as many close friends as I should have, didn't form a lot of the bonds people growing up do, it ruined my relationship with my parents.
At the end of the day through luck or something I scraped through high school with a .1 above failing GPA, dropped out of community college after failing 2 semesters and started a career in tech by freelancing.
Now 5 years later and the positions I've taken are consistently higher seniority than my friends who did CS in college, so it worked out, but at what cost?
Those years I lost, not even talking to one of my parents for over a year despite living in the same house, wasn't really worth it.
But it was an obsession, I didn't obsess over programming because I wanted to have a great career one day, it was because I couldn't help it. It was almost like an addiction that I got lucky enough to have double as a marketable skill.
It's crazy how much article really resonates with my experience, almost annoyingly so since I feel like a bus ticket collector sometimes, sure tech is a marketable skill, but you sure build a lot of unimportant stuff