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On proving yourself | thesephist.com

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Since I began my research and prototyping sabbatical four months ago, I’ve had a lot of time to reflect on all of the factors that help me decide what I work on, and how. One of the things I’ve realized is that I used to be driven very much by a need I felt to prove myself – prove to myself that I could accomplish certain things I saw other people doing, and prove to other people that I met some certain standard I felt that I had to meet to be “interesting”. Like any bright-eyed engineer fresh to the Valley, I wanted to start a company. I wanted lots of followers on Twitter. I wanted to be on the front page of Hacker News and Product Hunt. I wanted to have given a talk at a conference. I wanted friends who told me about all the cool, secret things big companies were working on, and friends who had money to angel invest or stories from when they were early at the unicorn startup du jour. It’s the stereotype, and it’s the butt of many, many great jokes on Twitter about the tech culture,

Since I began my research and prototyping sabbatical four months ago, I've had a lot of time to reflect on all of the factors that help me decide what I work on, and how . One of the things I've realized is that I used to be driven very much by a need I felt to prove myself - prove to myself that I could accomplish certain things I saw other people doing, and prove to other people that I met some certain standard I felt that I had to meet to be "interesting". Like any bright-eyed engineer fresh to the Valley, I wanted to start a company. I wanted lots of followers on Twitter. I wanted to be on

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