Work humiliates you

Day 282 / 366

It is true that if you want good advice, you won’t get it from some hotshot 24-year-old who got lucky and got successful quickly. You will get it from the 60+ maestro who has worked hard his entire life to get to where he is.

I was watching this podcast with Javed Akhtar and 3 comics thinking it would be a good passive pass time. But Javed Sahab gave out so many gems about work and life that I had to leave everything and make notes.

One thing that struck a chord with me was him talking about writer's block. He says that when a person sits down to write something, he would be disgusted reading back his first few drafts. He would think to himself, how can I write something so bad? It would be really discouraging, and cause a lot of people to give up. But only those people who brave their way through this would become good writers.

“Work humiliates you. Work is worship, maybe. But it does humiliate you. It will rub your nose on the carpet, and you will start feeling like you are a cockroach”

I relate a lot with this in programming as well. When you are working on a bug that you don’t know how to solve. You spend days, sometimes weeks on it, with no results. Imposter Syndrome kicks in, and you start feeling like an idiot who doesn’t know anything. And this is where most people give up as well.

This was just a tidbit, the whole video was really inspirational. I would recommend everyone watch it.