When I was getting down on myself for something stupid I had done as a young person decades ago (and believe me, there is a long list of stupid), my friend interrupted and said,
Look how far you’ve come.
– Bruce Toups
Like most people, I talk to myself with far less kindness, gratitude and understanding than to anyone else in my life. My guess is that, for a lot of us, if someone talked to one of your children or someone else you love like you talk to yourself, you’d slap them across the face. I don’t know, maybe you’re less violent than me and you’d just send them a strongly-worded email. My point is, you would not put up with it.
Whenever I get down on myself because I don’t think a game I made is as good as it could be or I didn’t say the right thing to someone, I remember Bruce’s comment to me.
You don’t have to be having a bad day to make yourself feel better.
This evening, I was working on updating some code from a game, Forgotten Trail, that we made nine years ago. This year, we did some major updates on it, not everything I wanted to got done, but a lot of boxes got checked off the to-do list. Today, I was working on code written years ago and realized that I knew Javascript and CSS so much better than I did back then. Bugs that would have puzzled me, I knew the answer immediately. For example, the developer who had written one section of the game had put the Javascript at the bottom of the file because otherwise, it wouldn’t work properly. Glancing at it, his problem was immediately obvious and so was the solution – I added a document ready function so the script didn’t try to execute before all of the elements of the page were available.
Now, you may not be a game developer, but whatever is going on in your life, I will bet you have learned a lot in the last nine or ten years. Also, because some percent of people in the world are assholes (my estimate based on personal experience is 10%, your mileage may vary), I’d also bet you run into bitter, miserable people who feel the need to put you down and tell you that you are not a good whatever you are for some stupid reason. My favorite are people who tell me that I was not an engineer because I did not have an engineering degree even though I worked for a Fortune 50 company as an engineer, my title was industrial engineer, and I got paid every two weeks. Another one that makes me laugh is people who say, “You think you know a lot about judo just because you were a world champion.” Yes, actually, I do.
Neither you nor I are perfect, nor do we know everything about anything, be it every programming language or every martial arts technique – but look how far we have come.
