I think it's a balance. In some cases, the act of giving means much more to the giver than to the receiver, especially when they want to be a part of something larger than themselves.
I think the author’s point is that by exposing oneself to feedback, you are on the receiving end of the growth in the case of error. If you hand off all of your tasks to ChatGPT to solve, your brain will not grow and you will not learn.
I’m in this position now. The longer I’ve been in it, I’ve come to realize can be summarized as:
You experience some the benefits of being a manager but bear all the responsibilities of managing others. It becomes challenging to make sound judgments when you must consider two different perspectives of a problem. Essentially, you’re taking on the duties of two jobs. I’ve found it incredibly difficult to step back and allow the team to make decisions without my input. My technical bias compels me to intervene when I perceive a decision as clearly incorrect. However, this approach hinders growth and may be perceived as micromanagement. While it’s a challenging position, it’s an excellent opportunity to explore management and determine if it’s a long-term career path you’re interested in.
I have taken a thorough look at the source and I very much enjoyed it.
The project highlights the utility of Bazel more than I have seen before. How long did it take you (and others) to become as fluent as you are in Bazel and working with it?
Additionally, you (Will) seem to have a very intuitive grasp of build processes in general, notably many of the scripts are fun to dive into and have a very clean design. How did you familiarize yourself so well with those sorts of concepts? Do you have any recommended readings or side-projects you’d recommend tackling to get experience with?
Having self-control can give a false sense of self-righteousness, and if you're not careful, this will lead to you eventually caring about how you look and you will do whatever it takes to maintain the image of self-control/responsibility. If you carefully analyze this, you are now basing your self-worth on external appearances, therefore you are giving your control away to anyone who can see this projection. Anyone experienced with controlling others can sniff out this projection and then use it against you in this way: "We need to think about the importance of handling this (X) responsibly. What do you think we should do?". Now they are telling you they think you can make responsible decisions on an important decision, stroking your projected ego, and they've activated your want to act responsibly to do something for them.
Now, it doesn't always mean that this is a way someone is manipulating you. Self-control is realizing that this ego-stroke feeling of making you feel important does not mean to need to involve yourself or act. You need to separate the emotion from the decision-making process and realize that others can use your emotions to manipulate you. It's up to you to decide whether you can trust this person or not, you just need to be aware that the emotion could have been intentional or unintentional.
Here's an analogy that I think about from time to time. Imagine your life as a garden. You have a finite amount of days, with a finite amount of resources per day to plant new things or caretake existing things. Your soul represents the breadth and depth of your reach on any given day, but it is a fixed size and you must choose how much breadth and depth it has through your choices. Consider each day as an opportunity for change in this ratio of breadth vs depth, and over time this will play out as a spectrum between the two following situations:
(1) You can spend each day traveling to a new area, planting a new seed wherever you go, but never watering the same area twice. You get to learn about many different seeds, but you never get to stick around somewhere long enough to watch them grow into fruit-bearing plants. Your soul will be full of different experiences, but you will not be able to relish in the details of any particular area (i.e. pluck the fruit from your garden when you are ready to relax and are thinking back on your life)
(2) You can choose to focus on one or a few areas to add depth, learn the fundamentals of how things grow in those areas, and learn to care for and nourish them over time. In the end, you will be left with a beautiful garden that you have perfected and know every detail about that is full of fruit-bearing plants. You can wander this garden and eat the fruit from any of your plants.
Your soul has a finite reach. By focusing on one thing, you are neglecting to focus on another, and there is nothing you can do to change that. It's up to you to choose how you want to live, and not making a choice is also a choice. If you don't make a choice (i.e. a sacrifice of not visiting some areas or not nourishing the area around you), you will be left with the worst of both worlds: a decaying garden and no knowledge of how to grow anything.
You're right. I never said it was an unbiased perspective, so let me make it clear. The post was intended to help those who were like me. When I wrote the post, I wrote it as if I was speaking to my past self in a style that would have motivated my younger self; nothing more, nothing less.
I have no affiliation with the author of the book and stand to gain nothing from helping others. I still stand by my choice of The Daily Stoic. I resented the thought of reading self help books because my pride led me to believe that if I read a self help book, I was admitting I was weak. That said, the reason for the book is simple: the book is intended to take a year to read, one page at a time. I wake up each day and the first thing I do is open the Books app on my iPhone, load up The Daily Stoic and read the days entry. It takes me 2-3 minutes and reminds me why I am chasing self-discipline. I have done this every day faithfully for three years. I hate to admit, but a page was as much as I was personally able to commit myself to, a full book was too much for my pride to handle at first. So if you’re like me and can’t make time for a full book, I ask you to make time for a single page per day.
In fact I will double down on this book so much, that I will personally buy a copy for anyone who sends me an email [email protected]. No one will know you asked for a copy and I ask for nothing in return.
This is something I've noticed in myself and I'm glad there's research to back this, although this is an open secret to those who do master self-control. I've spent the last three to four years working on self-control and discipline after I hit rock bottom in my life and realized I had no self-agency. For me, having greater self-control led me to ensure I can focus on providing value where it matters in my life, and not getting caught up by the shiny object syndrome I was distracted by a lot when I was younger. Not every thought needs to be acted on, especially if the thoughts come from external sources. In regards to why it leads to power, as you make your way up the managerial chain, when you have greater self-control you are less prone to get "bullied" by other managers into doing work for them and you can stand up more for your team and you will be able to provide more value. For perspective, I would personally trust others who have self-control more than those who don't for time-sensitive and critical tasks because I can rely on them to regulate their emotions and give honest answers, as well as hold themselves accountable.
For someone, like me a few years ago, who is undisciplined and has not spent time cultivating self-control this is hard to hear. If you find yourself making excuses when you read this article for why the power hierarchy is against you, or that there is bias in the results of this study (as some of the comments here allude to), then you should consider reevaluating why you are making excuses. It's a sign that this post triggered you and your response was to make an excuse rather than accept a correlation that speaks to an underlying hard truth. Once you start digging into "why did I make an excuse" and chase that feeling over and over whenever you find yourself making excuses, you will start to realize that you can't think of a reason why you made an excuse, it's just what you've done and reinforced in the past. If you've read this comment this far and you have a spark of curiosity and relate to not knowing why you are making excuses, I suggest you take this moment to chase it down and gain agency over your own life. Some would say this is your red pill moment. 'The Daily Stoic' woke me up, I highly recommend it. Discipline equals freedom, my friend, and we sorely need you.