I stressed out one day. I didn’t even remember when it started. I believe it was because I felt obligated to keep up with new technologies after working on a full-time job. God knows when I’ll be let go, and God knows how a junior compiler engineer could survive.
Stress had always been a good thing for me. I managed to learn many things in school because of the fear of falling behind. It became harder to spread my energy on other things when I started a full-time job that consumed the most of my day. Sometimes I worked on eight extra hours a day to fulfill my anxiety.
“Probably I should work in a startup to do more meaningful things, given how much time I spent on programming everyday.”
“I may need to get back to network programming in next month otherwise I’ll forget them ALL.”
“Let me bring OCaml’s pattern matcher in my compiler before implementing OOP. But before that I need another month for cleaning up the damn backend code.”
“How would anyone know what I am capable of if I keep working on these internal tools and fixing these endless bugs!”
I had a lot of anxieties like these. Then it became not easy to focus whatsoever. I have a list of next interesting projects. That list had been growing quickly without any progress of current project. At times, I was frantic and felt my brain hurt when I took shower but I can’t stop talking in my head about the worrisome future.
I burned out at a point, lost interests in things around me. I have to stop my project for weeks. Did I have a lot of pressure from my job? Not at all. But why burned out? Well, everything can be life-and-death problem if your ego comes out. I lost a battle in an inner game, and later, I met this book.
Nonjudgemental mind was the first thing in the book that shed light on my mind. It made me question why previously I blamed myself so hard for not finishing my project. Blaming looked like a completely irrational thing. I Looked back and found the judgmental mind provided largely negative emotions that push me away from hard and important things. Take my experience on algorithms study and competitive programming as an example.
Lots of people think competitive programming useless. I used to hate it too. I’ve always been a guy that thought to take my time to build my skills. I especially didn’t like the frustration I had when I couldn’t solve a problem. The feeling was even developed to be my very first thought every time when I tried to work on algorithmic exercises. This feeling prevented me getting back to algorithms again and again.
Nonjudgemental mind is so valuable here. The first step towards a calm mind is to stop judging the result one would get. It was not easy for someone like me who has used to making judgment. As I kept coming back to reinforce a nonjudgemental mind, things were getting changed. Gradually I could stay on algorithmic exercises for a few hours. This was a big win for me, as it effectively helped me create an worry-free environment. Once I got into this mind set, I found it’s surprisingly uneasy to get back again (as I write this, I can’t understand at all why I blame myself so hard in the first place).
focus is another key word of this book. The more you want to take control, the easier it would be to lose the focus on what you’re doing. Also one’s ego would drastically hurt the ability to focus too. That’s why the author says “don’t try too hard.”
I had some similar experiences. I tried to save every piece of my drawing for checking progress when I started learning drawing. After all they’re a demonstration of my effort if later I really made it.
But the progress always seemed too slow. The progress on days when I drew for six hours was just as slow as I drew for a few minutes. This made the hobby less fun, as my focus diverged from the drawing itself. My mind was not at present anymore. Fortunately I met Nicolaides later and he said
A few (drawings) should be kept and dated as a record of your progress, but the rest may be tossed aside as carelessly as yesterday’s newspaper. Results are best when they come from the right kind of un-selfconscious effort.
That’s the moment when Nicolaides’ words were just like a mirror in which I saw the ugly part of my ego that liked prestige over arts.
This is just as what the author says, “it is important to be totally nonjudegmental, even unconcerned about your results.” I don’t think it is a coincidence to reach the same conclusion to have a nonjudgemental mind here.
Gallwey is such a good writer to convey his ideas that reading this book is just like collecting dots of my previous learning experiences that I can’t generalize.
Enjoy yourself is another big topic interesting to me. Here the author naturally derives the beautiful conclusion that the real competition is real collaboration, that is, only the competition in which you and your opponent put up new height to each other is a real competition.
This perspective is valuable. It answers the question why you should compete, and encourages one to strive for the best to exploit the value in a competition.
Given an nonjudgemental mind that focuses on present, with an attitude of enjoying and welcoming challenges, life must be as colorful as it is supposed to be. My wife told me that she didn’t have that many thoughts as I did when read the book. I think that actually means she has taken the way of learning naturally and put her ego aside. Because of my growing environment, I couldn’t be able to do that, but I believe I am on my way too.