Discovering that I am mediocre

You came to the worst place. HN is like instagram but for tech people: here you won’t find pics of engineers having a nice coffee in Paris, enjoying a beer in a beach in Asia or people unpacking their latest gift.

But here you’ll find people telling how normal is to make over $250K/year, how incompetent are those who don’t release software properly (like those at CrowdStrike), and that doing a hundred leetcode problems is normal if you want to have a nice job (how you dare not to take job prep seriously!).

I’m trying to quit HN, but it’s hard. I don’t have instagram so I need to decompress somewhere.

To the original question: we all are mediocre.

You can't win at the comparison game. (Wanting to be "exceptional" is such a game.)

Why can't you win? Let's say you're doing tennis. You play with your friends. But you're determined to be exceptional, so you take some coaching and you practice a lot. Soon you're beating all your friends. But then you move on to playing a different group of people - people that your coach knows - and you enter tournaments. If you win all the local tournaments, you start playing in state tournaments, and then regional ones, and then national ones. You keep upping the comparison group. That's why you can't win that game.

Same thing with money. If you're the richest person in the neighborhood, you move to a better neighborhood, and then you're not the richest any more.

Christianity says that humans have worth, simply because they are made in the image of God. Not because of what they do, not because they're better at something than someone else, just because of what they are.

You need to grab that, or something like it. You are worthwhile for being you, not because you can "achieve" or "do" or "do better than".

I went through this course, the Yale Course on Happiness, a couple years ago. I think it is really valuable for understanding what will bring us happiness and/or inner peace. I was told I was very smart when I was young and as it has turned out, at least at programming, I'm not that great. (I retired a year and a half ago). I think a lot of people are working as hard as they can, and trying to act like they're not. The people you're comparing yourself to may be working as hard as you are. I think the happiness course is really good though, here's the link: https://online.yale.edu/courses/science-well-being

Let me just say that any day in my professional and intellectual life that I interact with someone showing "innate interest" in topics at hand and a healthy amount of "refusal to give up", is a good day for me.

If you're looking for some honest, profound, and witty reading in terms of intellectual self-doubt and brilliance, skim through _I've Been Thinking_, the excellent biography of the recently deceased philosopher, Daniel C Dennett.

You're witnessing the contributions of perhaps a thousand people here on HN, but keep in mind there are millions of silent lurkers who feel exactly as you do. You are not mediocre; you are simply not the best.

Too often we assess our own worth by comparing our talents with our 'peers'; but that group can vary by quite a bit. If we are surrounded by people with less talent than ourselves we feel an inflated sense of worth. If we are in the midst of people who are more talented, we feel inferior.

This applies to sports, academics, professions, and other areas as well. For example, I am a decent golfer (can regularly break 80) and if I play a round with golfers who struggle to beak 100, then I feel really good. If I play with scratch golfers, I wonder why I am so horrible.

We are living in unprecedented times. Social media (HN included) has created a stage for all 8+ billion of us to “compete” with each other. By definition almost everyone will be mediocre. I struggle with the same imposter syndrome as a software engineer. I am slowly realizing the only solution is to spend less time online.

never been easy for me and I've always had to work exceptionally hard

That’s how it is for most people most everywhere most days.

But are you better than you used to be? If you're in an org where you're given more and more complex tasks as your experience grows, work is never easy. You're constantly working at the upper edge of your abilities.

One thing I have found helps is to mentor someone more junior than yourself. You then realise how far you have progressed.

There are also other skills you could max out - likeability, communication skills, writing skills, presenting etc that could still make you stand out.

It’s not just about trying hard that beats the mediocrity, there’s also the macroeconomy and the politics in the global scale, plus a lot of untold coincidences and personal anecdotes in the personal level that you just happen to not know.

And maybe you don’t really want to be pushed to become “successful”.

I’m turning 29, and I decided to believe that, hey you can try your best, but the rest is not up to you.

Most people I know of exceptional ability in programming end up exploited by business people. The majority do not capitalize on the skills they bring to the table, aside from working a good job in big tech if they decide to go that route. Don't underestimate the degree to which all workers are exhausted, and that it is likely less correlated with your talent than you think

Most people are mediocre and they're fine with it. What reason do you have to beat yourself over it?

Are you making the mistake of comparing yourself to people who doesn't really exist? Many people make the mistake of taking the best properties of several above average people, mixing it into this impossible amalgamation of a persona and then comparing themselves to that ideal. It makes it seem like everyone around you is so much better but the reality is that each of these people just do what they can and they all have things they're absolutely terrible at. And it's often stuff you take for granted; I thought that cooking was something anyone can do because it just seems so simple but then I've watched the smartest guy I know struggling with very basics of it.

Since no one else did, I’ll say it: you may not be exceptional for your technical skills (or maybe you are), but your work ethic and fortitude. It takes a broad set of skills to make up a high performing team, and you possess some important ones. How do your coworkers feel about working with you?

Go out at night, lie on the grass, and look at the sky – there are 100 billion stars out there, only in our galaxy, and an even bigger number of other galaxies.

All of us are tiny and so beyond insignificant – even Archimedes, Leonardo, and Einstein.

Enjoy the good things in life; at 35 you are still young, even if you don't think so.

I think you should narrow down the scope of what you want to be exceptional at to the point where it won't take up all your time. Then understand that it will still take a long time but maybe knowing that you are still making progress towards it will be enough to convince yourself to relax and "brainwash" yourself in the other direction

The trick is making the discovery of own mediocrity your first step, not your last.

For what it's worth, I think there's some recent research suggesting that it's better to praise kids for their effort rather than any innate ability or intelligence. This teaches them that success comes from hard work, and not just something you're either born with or without.

Of course, as adults, life isn't that simple. But anecdotally, I've met many people who lead perfectly happy lives doing perfectly normal things. They're liked and respected in their small little circles at work, with friends and family, etc., but otherwise unknown. When they die, they'll be mourned by a few dozen people who knew them well, and then they'll soon be forgotten. But in those few decades, they'll have left a positive impact in their immediate communities and relationships.

What's wrong with that?

There are 8 billion of us now... by any metric, the overwhelming billions of us will be mediocre in most ways.

If you want to seek greatness, you are free to do so, but that isn't the only path towards a meaningful life. You can also build pathways to happiness via relationships, side hobbies, community participation, music, art, travel, etc. Meet new people, try new things, have fun, learn to love more and more.

Your brain and your feeling of "self" isn't some static blob fixed in stone from birth. It changes both physically (as in rewiring) and conceptually (your "mind" and "self) with experience, age, success, failure, etc. The only way to let it grow that way is to try new things and meet new people. You'll start below average at anything at first, but then gradually get better (and perhaps develop more of an interest/liking in it) as you develop aptitude and gain encouragement and respect and mutual liking with others interested in the same things.

There will always be better, smarter, richer engineers than you. It doesn't mean they're automatically happier. Some are, some aren't. It doesn't really matter. They'll soon be dead anyway, like any other famous person of the past. What you're responsible for, and what you have control over, is only your own life over its few short years, and it's up to you what you wanna make of it.

If you're tired of chasing greatness unsuccessfully, there's nothing wrong with trying something else instead. Nobody really cares if you're great. We all know people like INSERT_GREAT_PERSON_HERE exist, but I don't live my life worrying about any of them. It's lonely at the top, as they say.

You can slowly brainwash yourself if you will yourself. Little baby steps can eventually change you into somebody else, hopefully someone happier.

Can you get outside more? Exercise more? Volunteer? Join some meetups? Take some classes? You don't have to be stuck in a vicious cycle of pursuing ever more intense engineering tasks only. There can be more to life than that if you want there to be.

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On a more personal note, OP, I think I'm the opposite of you: Math, programming, and most intellectual pursuits always came easy. I never really had to struggle with any of it, and consequently I never really learned to be self-disciplined and to work hard through something consistently. I give up easily, and never accomplished anything of note (and probably never will).

At 40 years old, I'm in debt, can barely afford rent, can't cook worth a damn, aren't exceptional at anything (but am just slightly-below to slightly-above average, i.e. mediocre, at a lot of things!) But you know what? I learned to make peace with it, and that's what ultimately got me through life despite the poor on-paper outcomes.

I'm in a happy & healthy relationship, am well-liked at work and in the community, have a lot of fun side hobbies, etc. People appreciate my little contributions, but nobody will write books about it or anything like that. That's OK. None of those things require exceptional ability or talent, just the acceptance of being "me".

Compared to you, maybe I'm in a less stressful place right now, but long-term, I think you're actually better off! You have a better foundation to build a balanced life off of. It's easier to add fun people and activities to your life than to fix financial problems and learn to work harder and more consistently. You have a strong base that you can "decorate" with fun stuff. I have a weak foundation that I've plastered over with distractions. You got this :)

It's very common to feel mediocre when comparing ourselves to our peers. It's similar to the Instagram effect; we see our own struggles and trials and see other people's successes and ask ourselves why it came so easy for them and so hard for us. The reality is that you're not seeing the whole picture.

I was an engineer at Google for a while and have a few very applicable examples.

When I first started I was being shown around and there was some art on the wall that was taken with a gigapixel camera that an engineer had built from scratch (~2005). 20 years later I still have no idea how I'd begin to approach a project like that.

A few years later I was on a team with another engineer who was in a model rocketry club. One day I asked how his weekend went and he talked about his model rocket launch. Turns out it was 15 feet tall, they had launched eastward from Nevada, and had almost made a full orbit before it broke up over the Pacific. I was embarrassed by how I had spent my weekend (I think I was brewing beer).

Then I was in the other position. Plus hadn't launched yet, but it was being tested and used internally. There was a hackathon and we built a kegerator. You would badge into it and it would post to Plus who was getting beer, how much you got, and what temperature it was. When the weight got too low it would post a poll for what beer to get next. When it got even lower the poll would close and the admin would be sent an email. That summer we showed it to an intern and we saw the same deer-in-the-headlights look of "oh god, if these people can do this like it's no big deal how am I going to succeed?"

I'm not saying that nobody is good or fast at their job. I'm just saying that you haven't seen the work, the failures, and the history that got them to that point. I'm sure there are things in your own history that I wouldn't have any idea how to approach, just like there are probably things in my history that you wouldn't know how to approach.

Instead of feeling like a failure try learning from them, get some familiarity, and eventually you'll see that some look when you tell people about your projects.

"Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for?" -- R. Browning

What does self-love mean to you?

You will find the same thing in your children if you have any lmao.

But seriously I got congratulations for you. Letting go useless thoughts is the first step towards finding the true self.

>work exceptionally hard to even be on par with others, it's only my innate interest in these subjects and refusal to give up

I mean, you're obviously not mediocre at least at tenacity and perhaps discipline? Lots of people don't have that, think about it.

Then, how are you comparing yourself to others (leading question yes). You're employed as SWE, how hard did you fail fizzbuzz?