by Serguey Shinder
For a long stretch I kept a mental league table. It was made up of people I had never met, assembled entirely from the things they had chosen to publish. The polished repository with the perfect commit history. The conference talk where every slide landed. The engineer whose writing I read on a Sunday and who appeared to have understood, at thirty, something I was still circling at thirty-four.
I told myself this was healthy. Aim higher, learn from the best, keep the bar where it should be. And for a while I believe it did make me work harder, which is exactly what made it difficult to see what it was actually doing.
What it was doing was changing what I chose to work on. Not by much, and never in a way I would have described as vanity if you had asked me directly. But I started preferring problems that would look impressive if they went well, and quietly avoiding the ones that were genuinely useful and completely unglamorous. I spent a month on something novel that helped nobody, in a quarter where the boring migration everyone dreaded would have made four people's lives better.
The deeper distortion was in what I counted as progress. I was measuring myself against finished, edited, presented work, and I was doing it from the inside of my own unedited process. Their output against my afternoon. There is no version of that comparison that comes out well, and no amount of improvement on my side changes the arithmetic, because the two things being compared are not the same kind of object at all.
I found out later, as you always do, that one of the people on my list had been quietly miserable during the year I most admired him, and that the repository I kept holding up as a standard had been rewritten four times before anyone saw the first version. None of that was hidden, exactly. It just was not published, because nobody publishes the four rewrites.
What replaced it was smaller and much less inspiring. I started comparing myself to a specific earlier version of me, usually about a year back, on questions I could actually answer. Would that version have spotted this? Would he have known what to ask? Sometimes the answer is that he would have, which is its own useful piece of information.
I do not think ambition is the problem, and I have not become serene about any of this. I still notice the flicker when someone half my experience publishes something I could not have written. But I have learned that the flicker is a poor instrument, that it points at visibility rather than value, and that following it reliably led me toward work that looked like the work I wanted to be doing instead of being it.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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