Serguey Asael Shinder – IT Professional

For a long time I was busy and shallow.

I touched a lot of things every day
and went deep on almost none of them.
I’d start something hard,
feel the discomfort of not getting it yet,
and drift — to email, to a “quick” task,
to anything that felt like motion.

I called it multitasking.
It was just fleeing.

The work that mattered stayed on the surface,
because the good part of hard work
is on the far side of the boredom,
and I kept quitting before I got there.

What changed wasn’t a tool.
It was a decision I had to make again every day.

One thing. Long enough for it to open up.

Because it does open up —
but only late, only after
the part where it’s tedious and you want out.
That’s the toll. Most people won’t pay it.
They skim, and they call the surface the whole thing.

So I started closing the door.
Killing the notifications.
Sitting with the hard problem
past the point where it stopped being fun.

And the work got deeper,
because I finally stayed long enough
for the depth to show up.

Depth never happened to me.
I had to decide it —
mostly by deciding what I’d refuse.

The refusing was the whole skill.

– Serguey Asael Shinder