This is not a post about the infamous impostor syndrome in tech.

This is about the fact that we as humans prefer to blame everything else except ourselves to avoid the necessary transformation needed to become what you need to become in order to do what you need to do.

You blame the economy, the boss, politicians, society for your lack of power, skill or the plain circumstances that are determining your own destiny.

The only way to free yourself from those circumstances, is to focus on what you can control.

If pride is what is holding you back, you must leave it behind in order to go further.

Trust your intuition

Most of the great mistakes I have made in life had a premonitory feeling or intuition about the specific situation I actively decided to ignore.

When the company was not doing so good and there were rumors of layoffs, I ignored the urge to assess my situation and to take preemptive measures.

When I had bad feelings about coworkers or a certain manager, and was eventually stabed in the back, I told myself I was being paranoid.

Dragons that are not killed when small grow up to become monsters of rage and fire, sometimes eating you whole.

If you keep making the same mistakes again and again you most likely need to tune your intuition and grow wiser.

I am here to tell you, and to tell myself, that if you think that you are not as good as you need to be to do something up to a certain standard, then you are probably right about it.

You need to train harder, develop your skills further, get your shit together and stop procrastinating on that thing, start working and focusing harder on what you deep down know that you need to focus.

The burden of proof about what your intuition tells you rests on you to find out.

You will eventually pay the price of failure or the price of success and to have what others don’t you will need to do what others will never do.

The plateau

Some years ago I felt stuck on my career.

I was a couple of years out of the university at a comfy remote job during Covid, but I felt I was not progressing in terms of knowledge or skills.

I had achieved some educational certifications but did not feel like they were helping me get to where I wanted to go or achieve the outcome I wanted to achieve.

One of the things I found is that I participated in a couple of online hackathons and CTFs and was not able to compete with the other participants.

I felt I was not trusted at my work, being the junior developer of the team.

I was isolated due to the pandemic and had no technical mentors that could help me improve as an engineer or to point to me blind sides in my process.

The worst thing I could think of was staying a perpetual junior with many years of experience.

I began to ask myself in what directions I could grow, what was the meaning of what a Senior engineer is and what true excellence in our field looks like.

One of the reasons I started this blog was precisely to explore that idea.

Over the years I landed other jobs that would ask of me to be that senior engineer, in some of them I would be able to deliver, in others I would not.

And so my experience grew.

Ground yourself on truth

With experience, I learned that the true diferentiating factor in engineering is not only the raw knowledge you can fit inside your head.

It is a combination of many skills and experiences you need to have in your interaction with reality.

Storage and retrieval of the right information is obviously required, but you also being able to tell when you do not enough about something because you do not have the right information.

You need to know how to do research, how to efficiently navigate the ocean of information in order to reach the hard rock or core central origin of truth and assess its validity.

You also need to know where you stand.

I was never too interested in sports, probably due to the way I was raised, so I never understood what was competition about and what was its true purpose.

The true value of competition and challenge is not to indulge on the extasis of victory, as sweet as it might feel.

It is a mechanism from which to extract information about the best way to achieve a certain objective.

Competition does not exclude cooperation, as we can see in team sports, where it is not the best player but the best team that achieves victory.

The true value of competition is information of where you stand in the competence hierarchy and to become witness about what human capability looks like when pushed to its absolute limits.

While research is a skill to reach true information, competition might be a tool to optimize on skill.

You need to keep learning, and you need to compete at whatever level you are currently on.

The mark of a craftsman

What I feel that was holding me back in many ways has been lack of attention to detail.

You are as good of a craftsman as the level of attention, the depth of that attention to the details of your work and the intensity you put in by unit of time.

Accepting this has very important implications, some of them deeply spiritual, on how you execute your work.

One of them is that extreme focus requires the absolute abstinence of everything else, extreme disregard.

The search of quality becomes a refinement of simplicity.

For a software engineer it means that you need to choose a programming language or a specific kind of role within a company or a specific stack for developing applications.

For an entrepreneur it means locking in on a business that is making money and not disengage or get distracted by shinny things.

The good news are that you only need to get good enough to a point after which you can diversify again with the same strengh of focus into another area.

But in order to get to the other side of the needle hole, you first need to shape yourself into something sharp that can go within.

Conclusion

I will conclude with some points of action from this article.

Get the control back on your attention, know where it goes and what is draining it, focus on what matters and track your time.

Learn to research and to assess the truth or validity of information.

Find competitions or challenges around your area of interest and express yourself through it in order to find out where you stand.

This journey is far from over.