To be great, be good repeatably

On habit building- If you&#x27;re like me and have tried time and time again on enforcing new habits and failed time and time again: try mindfulness. It&#x27;s easy to not live in the moment, especially so when a tech centered world makes it so easy to live vicariously. It&#x27;s okay to make lists of things you want to accomplish and do, but it&#x27;s not okay to do that often and not do what you originally set out to do. It will become cyclic.<p>Be mindful in the morning and reflect on it before you go to bed. Be in the present and realize you are the one making the decision whenever the situation arises. Taking action or not, be present and mindful of your decision.<p>I&#x27;ve found simple google calendar reminders put me in the situation where I have to make the decision to take action or not. They don&#x27;t require any interaction (apple reminders will stay until they&#x27;re cleared) and they tap me on the wrist and present an option: Run? Write? Work on project?

&gt; &quot;No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich&quot;<p>That almost sounds like sarcasm to me. I currently live in South East Asia and you know who gets up early every morning grinding 12 hour shifts with little to no vacation? The million of poor people who don&#x27;t earn much more than &quot;survive&quot; money.<p>Okay, probably it&#x27;s about context so if you are in a first world country you just work hard and the wealth will come pouring in? Still sounds like sarcasm tbh.<p>Of the top of my head the five most well-off people I personally know didn&#x27;t work harder than the average and I am sure wouldn&#x27;t say so about themselves, either.

I spent the last few days writing this piece as I was reflecting and frustrated with my short-term progress (or lack there of). This led me to consider what I think greatness even is, which was almost therapeutic to think through.<p>Curious to know what people think about this. Can &quot;greatness&quot; really be achieved quickly?

This post is amazingly written. I have been thinking about things related to this topic and how to implement them in my life. It&#x27;s been only a few months since I actually started thinking about this. I realised that I am an average person but slight burst of decent things in time. And to become great I have to work towards it.<p>I have learnt that building habits is a big part of this. You need to build good habits to actually reap the benefits of the compounding. My thinking of habits came from Anki. While reading up on Anki, I noted the benefits of compounding and consistent effort.<p>What I am still trying to achieve is the iterating process. To figure out the right inputs to get the desired output. Once I saw there are a lot things that I need to do parallelly, I created a schedule to work on them everyday, but that was very difficult to follow. Something or the other was left out. So i had to drop a few things from the routine. I am still trying to find a good way to experiment and find the right path. This blog post gave words to what I am trying to achieve, and how I can approach it.<p>Thank you for writing and sharing it.

IMHO I&#x27;ve found greatness is also very much a result of environment as well. Not just in the &quot;you are the five people you interact with most&quot; kind of thing, but also in the kind of bounds you face when shipping greatness. It definitely impacts your scalability curve. Shipping a great product and having business impact is kind of an O(1) deal; people see the great product, git blame the source or look at release notes, and find out you&#x27;re behind it, and then think you&#x27;re good at programming. Shipping a bad product because of business or technical org constraints and then having to explain to people the design decisions and compromises you had to make is very much not an O(1) deal. I think the former definitely lets people stand on their own two feet and merits, while the latter concentrates power in those who control perception.

I wonder what Alexander the Great would think about this. Did he think he achieved greatness? Was he happy and satisfied? Or did he suffer from the impostor syndrome like many &quot;greats&quot; of today?

In my personal experience, many people (including yours truly) give up because we have vague ideas of what exactly great is. What exactly does it mean by being a great programmer? Peer adulation? LOCs per day ? I believe that until anyone finds a decent enough definition of what great is for him&#x2F;herself, it is rather hard psychologically to achieve anything resembling greatness. &quot;If you can&#x27;t measure it, you can&#x27;t change it&quot; Peter F Drucker.

&gt;<i>“No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich” - Outliers</i><p>Yeah, billions of hard working people would disagree. Tons of factory workers woke before dawn (and worked 10 hours or more) and never got anywhere...

This is why Shaq is the Big Aristotle