A fatal flaw in the "be really hard on yourself as the mechanism to achieve" plan is that even when you achieve you absolutely cannot believe it, because you've really overtrained being hard on yourself. You see a systematic undervaluing that robs you of true information about your work.
So, one of the hallmarks of maladaptive high achievement I look for, as a psychologist studying productivity, is inability to really celebrate.
A lot of people believe, basically, any kind of achievement is good because you got there in the end. But in fact maladaptive achievement is a whole cycle that leads to long-term breakdown, and it's a breakdown we have measured in learning science a lot.
I think there is a lot here that could be learned about how certain software teams function. In our Developer Thriving work, we focused on factors that predict *sustainable* achievement for this reason: flexible, celebratory, human centered.
@grimalkina I wonder whether the taboo on mentioning ambition (at least in some circles) and the difficulty of getting reliable skill assessment is connected to the achievement issue you've described.
https://www.harihareswara.net/posts/2018/the-ambition-taboo-as-dark-matter/
PyCon just rejected my talk submission,* so I'll try to finish and post this draft that I've been tapping at for ages. My current half-baked theory is that programmers who want any public recognition from … | Cogito, Ergo Sumana | Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
@brainwane oh my goodness, completely. I have so many thoughts about this. To me this also connects very deeply with strong cultural norms we employ as groups to keep people "in their place" in power structures -- that's a more sociological complement to my original post here which focuses on the individual cognition.
The idea that "true craft" never talks about itself is really interesting and to me, quite rooted in field specific beliefs that success = brilliance and brilliance = obvious
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Sumana Harihareswara