You know how people can detect bullshit, danger, opportunity, rats, and cheesecake from a mile away? I think I've developed one to detect shortcuts. I've had the opportunity to take a few over the years, mostly due to my impatience. I've tried quite a few of the hacks, diets, and get-rich-quick schemes, only to later realize that if I had stuck to what I was doing at the time for the next two to three more years, I would have been in a much better place. I've avoided hard work and commitment to goals like my life depended on it. I'm glad I took so many shortcuts though - valuable lessons spent chasing something for years when I had the ability all along to get what I wanted, the hard way. Turns out I love this path. It's like going on a quest. It's the classic story of a man having to prostitute himself first, looking for himself in the world only to find out that he was enough all along. The things he needed were always in the palm of his hands.
One of the keys to success, I think, is the ability to work towards something not knowing if it's ever going to work out, not seeing any results for months if not years. It's hard, but turns out I love this feeling - the love for the journey, the patience and the courage to go at my own pace and do things my own way. In my eyes, I've already won life. I live life on my terms, and I'm getting better at this as I go along. I'm able to show up as myself, letting go of the things that don't matter and focusing on one single task: becoming the best programmer I can become and getting rich along the way. Also, as a small side mission, to get as strong as I possibly can. Plus, having some proof along the way that you have done something like this before helps me do it again. The timeline gets longer from start to finish as the goals become more ambitious. I'm honest with myself, so I don't care how long it takes.
Some Things Are Just Hard
Starting a business, for one. I was naive to think that it would be easy. At the same time, I'm glad I thought that way; otherwise, I would have never started. I guess that can be true for a lot of things. The thing is, it's hard because you are doing something that you have never done before, has a lot of moving parts, and a lot of things need to be just right for you to even be able to survive, let alone succeed. Luckily, along the way, you meet the right people. You recognize them by how unbalanced they are. Usually means they work a lot. I've come to love work. I'm still working on working effectively and reducing the time between having to do something and doing it.
Some Obvious Shortcuts That I've Noticed
These might not apply for you as I think it's very personal. The first one is A.I. As it's the hottest topic now, let's address this first. Knowing me, I see this as a crutch. So a lot of times I go read the friendly manual like a caveman. I use it; it's the best search engine that we've had so far, for one. It's also a great place to gain a mental picture of a new concept. But I never rely on it to build entire features for me. If I'm not working, I almost never ask it for code. For that matter, when I'm building things for myself, I build as much as I can without using libraries. I know me - if I find a crutch, it won't be long before I start leaning on it completely. I'm glad t3.chat has a limit on how many messages you can send in a month. Claude only has about 100 messages; I think this is perfect.
If anything, I'd like to use the concept that A.I is built on to solve problems that might have been otherwise unsolvable or really hard. I'm yet to find a problem that needs this, but I keep my eyes open.
At the same time, I feel objectively better as a programmer. I've been building projects that are on the edges of my comfort, and I find that I'm able to do it. The more of these I do, the more I know I can figure this out, as I have done in the past. Recently I wrote my first driver by reading the datasheet. Currently, I'm building a linter in Zig so that I can build my very first compiler.
The other shortcut is diet. I've tried almost all of them under the sun: Intermittent fasting, Keto, Carnivore, Vegan, and maybe more. They do tend to work, but it's not long before I'm back to where I started, at best. It wasn't until I decided to address the root cause of the problem - I had these stories in my head around food. I had to face them, question their accuracy. Believe it or not, to work on this, I had to give myself permission to eat whatever I wanted and cancel out any guilt or shame that came after. This is not for the faint of heart, as initially I gained more weight. It wasn't until month four or five where I started to notice my eating habits greatly improve. Food was no longer as enjoyable as I thought it once was. It's only been about eight months, but I'm getting leaner a little bit every month. The progress is not drastic, and for the first time, I'm eating like a normal human being. It has become easier the last couple of months though.