You might find it helpful to go through books written by therapists such as The Perfectionism Workbook and The CBT Workbook for Perfectionism to understand the causes of perfectionism and the beliefs and fears behind it.
This book isn't specifically about OCD but Overcoming Unwanted Intrusive Thoughts could be helpful as well. It talks about how to observe and accept thoughts, even if they're unwanted, repetitive or disturbing, instead of trying to suppress or fight against them.
I'm someone who was affected by Mixpanel's decision to end their messaging product.
I think having the ability to message users was a huge selling point for Mixpanel. It meant that you could track user events and details with Mixpanel and use them to send behavior triggered emails, push notifications and SMS on the same platform.
From what I see, it seems the issue was, they never realized or marketed how great it was having user analytics and messaging on the same platform. Their messaging product didn't have to be the best feature wise, it solved a lot of pain points.
No need to send your user events to a separate messaging platform, you could easily track downstream actions users took after receiving or opening a message you sent with Mixpanel to get more accurate conversion data as utms can be unreliable, it had competitive pricing (multichannel messaging platforms for large audiences are very costly).
Something that I realized is, negative thoughts and emotions are normal and part of life. It's the counterproductive or hurtful behaviors we may engage in, as a reaction to the negative thoughts or emotions, that we can try to avoid.
Feeling bad about having negative thoughts or emotions and being afraid to express them, only makes it more likely we'll engage in counterproductive coping behaviors.
> In contrast, most people who get in, finish college.
> In person education beats online education hollow.
This isn't really true.
"According to the National Center for Education Statistics, just 41% of first-time full-time college students earn a bachelor’s degree in four years, and only 59% earn a bachelor’s in six years."
Side note: I found it quite difficult to read the article with the fast motion animated gifs.
I noticed that animated gifs are increasingly used to "spice up" content, but in reality, their motion is distracting and can make it hard to read the surrounding text. A relevant still image works fine.
I don't necessarily agree with all of this advice. Yes giving talks, having a blog, etc. help but they are a medium to long-term play and you have to wait for leads to discover you or be referred to you. You don't have much control over when this happens, which is what causes a lot of the feast and famine cycles.
I have had success just directly reaching out to companies I wanted to work with. This meant I was at least proactively putting myself in front of them, instead of hoping they find me or remember me.
Came across this comment from another thread [1] that breaks it down a bit:
2. Focus on smaller to mid-size companies (large corporations likely have the tech team and contractors to cover almost of their needs)
3. (Optional) Search for each company on Linkedin and add managers with relevant roles (VIP of sales, project manager, marketing manager, etc.). The goal is to familiarize them with your name so they're more likely to open your email (step 5).
5. Reach out to the most senior person with a relevant role at each company with a personalized 1-on-1 email.
The key here is to review their website and business and share 2-3 ideas of what you can them build or fix (if there are any glaring issues or vulnerabilities). They may not necessarily use your ideas but the goal is stand out and help them understand how they can put your programming skills to use. Here's a template you can reference: https://artofemails.com/new-clients#developer
There are a lot of businesses out there whose teams don't have the capacity to build everything so they would be keen to have a reliable freelance programmer help them bring some features or projects out of backlog.
This book isn't specifically about OCD but Overcoming Unwanted Intrusive Thoughts could be helpful as well. It talks about how to observe and accept thoughts, even if they're unwanted, repetitive or disturbing, instead of trying to suppress or fight against them.