Your personal quests

What push you the most.

Learning takes time. To be good at something, you usually need not weeks or months, but years. But does this always have to be the case? Are there any skills that do not take years but can still dramatically improve you? There are, but there are just a few of them.

For example, in the tech world, communication is a skill that does not take decades to learn but is crucial. Yes, learning how to communicate properly takes time, but much less time than other equally essential skills like programming.

Knowing this, we developers still avoid improving it. Some people, even at the senior level, avoid it by distracting themself with improving skills that take more time or aspects that they are already good at, like technical.

The underlying reason is that humans favor tasks we excel in over those we struggle with. We also tend to improve our strengths and overlook our weaknesses.

This tendency actually makes sense. Your strengths require minimal effort, offer comfort, and make people admire you. Your weaknesses drain your energy, cause discomfort, and harm your image.

While developers usually have strong technical abilities, improving communication skills can be scary, as it is not our innate strength. Most developers work better with machines than with people. That does not mean developers can not work well with people; we can; it's just that we will need to put a lot more effort into this than an average person.

Although there are many cases that it's better to laser focus on improving our strengths and completely ignore our weaknesses, there are still situations where it's better to work on our limitations.

If you play games, you will know that the 2 most popular ways to level up your character are by completing quests or killing monsters. Completing quests usually gives more experience than killing monsters. Games are designed this way because doing quests is more fun than killing monsters, and to keep doing anything, even just to keep playing a game, having fun is important. To complete a quest, you have to either rescue the princess, find a hidden treasure, or beat a boss,... Quests give you chances to explore the world the game created. While killing monsters is fun, you will be bored fast if that's all you do.

I like to think that killing monsters in a game is like improving skills that need both effort & time (let's call them "type 1 skills" from now on, for short), and finishing quests is like improving skills that need much effort but little time (let's call them "type 2 skills"). Like quests, type 2 skills push you forward with a stronger force by putting you outside your comfort zone.

Suppose you are driving and you see a boulder blocking the road. To move forward, you have 2 options: to use an alternative route or to remove the blockage. If you use that road sparingly, switching to another route can save you time and effort, even if this alternative road is longer. But if you need to drive on that blocked road every day, then over time, the longer you evade the blockage by using the longer alternative route, the more time you will lose.

Type 2 skills are usually your biggest blockages. They are things that you struggle with. You suck at doing these. You avoid them with excuses and feel uneasy whenever you think about them. They are your fears.

We do everything to avoid facing our fears. If the boulder on the road is your fear, then instead of dealing with it directly, you will either use another route, dig the underground paths below it, or fly above it with a helicopter. You will use any other way, even the absurd ones, just to avoid dealing with the big rock ahead of you.

You can keep using the alternative route to avoid the boulder, but your growth will be hindered if the boulder is still on the road. Dealing with fears should always be prioritized first.

Finishing quests in a game not only gives you ample experience but also unlocks new areas so that you can do new quests or kill monsters that give you better experience. The same goes for your blockages. Dealing with them will unblock your current road and open all the roads that your unblocked road leads to.

There are similarities between how games are designed and how our society is systemed.

Suppose you and I play the same game but not together. Then, no matter how different you and I are or how different we play, our overall experience will not be mostly alike. If it's a shooter game, you and I must both ... shoot. We may shoot differently, but we still shoot, nonetheless. The game will still challenge us the same way and offer the same set of rewards.

The same to our societies. If we live in the same culture, that culture will expect the same things from us and reward us with the same things.

But unlike how you play games (where you have to follow all its rules), there's more flexibility in how you live your life. You are still being told what to do, but are told vaguely: be kind, study well, be a good employee, love your family. Life does not tell you exactly what to do, like "kill 30 monsters at map X," because, unlike game characters, we are inherently different.

Since life can not tell you the exact thing to do, it also can not give you what you really want, and that's good. Unlike games, you are allowed to spend your whole life finding and doing only the quests that interest you.

And because those personal quests will be much more related to you, they reward you better. Having a basic vanilla ice cream is not as fun as having your exact favorite ice cream, which can have a mint flavor with chocolate chips, drizzled with your favorite dark chocolate sauce, and topped with some mint leaves.

So, how do you find your personal quests, which are the only quests that are important to you? How do you find your mint chocolate chip ice cream?

Fears can help, because you only fear what you consider important. You fear death because being alive is important. You are afraid to ask your crush out because your crush is important, to you. Failures scare you because what others think about you when you fail is important. You can use your fears to trace back to their sources and find out what matters to you.

Fears not only show you what matters but also prevent you from getting too close to them. Fears afraid that you may hurt them or be hurt by them, which are usually wrong. Fears are both pointers and blockers to what you want the most, so let's use what it's good at (being pointers) and discard what it's bad at (being blockers).

So, how do you deal with your fears? It is to realize how boring and repetitive fears are.

"My fear had always been boring to everyone else, but it wasn't until mid-adolescence that it became, at last, boring even to me. Because it was the same thing every day" - Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear

Do you know what repeats the most on your daily basis? It is not your routine, meals, or the people you meet daily. It's your thoughts.

We have repetitive thoughts all the time. We can't stop dreaming about our love, and catchy advertising songs keep popping up in our heads.

You may know that your thoughts are repetitive, but you may not know that 90% of your thoughts are repetitive.

Interestingly, we are unaware of how often our brains keep bringing back the same topics, but what's even more impressive is that we feel okay with it. Have you ever been bored with your thoughts? You may not. But rewatching a movie that you are not so crazy about will bore the hell out of you. Isn't it strange how we are so tolerant of our repetitive thoughts but so harsh to anything that repeats, as long as they are not on our minds?

We feel uneasy expressing our fears, so we just let them grow rent-free in our minds. Since everything in our minds is repetitive, fears are also repetitive, and hence, they are also boring.

But, like our thoughts, we do not see our fears as boring. Even if we see, we feel okay with that. Let's not be okay with that. Let's relocate fears to where we can easily see their boringness.

I like to move them to paper. Instead of jumping right into the solutions for my fears, which is intimidating, I start by defining my fears with questions like: "Why/When/Where/How does this scare me?" or "Am I being scared, or am I just confused?"

Answers to these questions usually come right at the moment I start asking. Even if the answers do not come immediately, as long as I keep asking, eventually, they will come.

As long as you continue, you will keep coming up with new questions and answers. The more questions and answers you can come up with, the better you understand your fears. I also recommend you to have this talk.

As you keep going on, there will be a point when you start coming up with solutions for the fears you once thought were impossible to do anything about. It may take some time from the moment you come up with solutions to the moment you actually implement them, which is toooootally fine. As you repeat the process like writing the same sentence "Now that I know there is one potential way, but I am still not ready for it" again and again and again every day, it will bore you so much that you will actually try the solution just to get out of this loop hell. Everything is less scary through the lens of boredom.

The first ways usually don't work, so the best you can do to them is just to understand why, remove them from the "possible ways to strangle my tedious fears" list, and move on to new solutions. Just remember you have your whole life to deal with these little shits. There's no need to mourn the failed attempts because you will find something that works soon, which, although not brilliant yet, can still twist your fears into something smaller and more pitiful. Just bit by bit, day by day.

"I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain." - Frank Herbert, Dune

I like to confront my fears in the morning when my mind is fresh and there is all the sunlight and bird chirpings, which make my fears look small. This is a battle that we can choose the time and place for, so find the most suitable for you. Fight them. Dwell on them, or they will dwell on you.