Falling Into Analysis Paralysis

Dig deeper if you’re hesitating

It’s been a while since I wrote my last entry! It’s been a busy period with the adaptations needed in one’s life after they become new parents. It’s been challenging to say the least. However, writing new entries doesn’t take as much time once you’ve put your mind to it. Which brings up the first question I’ve been pondering ever since I decided to write a blog: Is this platform a digital garden for me to test out new ideas or more a place for me to unleash and make sense of my inner world?

This blog entry is clearly one of the latter. And this is not a journal entry either, which would be rather more personal in nature. These entries stay on the web for the foreseeable future (unless I take them down myself).

And the answer to the main thesis of this blog entry is ofcourse also: all of the above. This was one of the primary reasons I have categories for each of the main topics I’m planning to be writing on. So deciding to write on one topic does not at all preclude the other. That micro-decision, however, is where the issue begins. It presents the perfect opportunity to ruminate over getting certain details right that don’t really matter at all.

I know that I certainly fall victim to this now and again. I’ve been thinking for sometime now to finish writing the series on the scraper. There remain a number of ideas remaining to tackle in that series and there’s a few lazy shortcuts I took I’ve been looking to rectify.

Then on the other hand, I have the third part of the series on decoding myself. The values that I’ve chosen to base myself off, to guide me through life if you will, leave a lot of room for interpretation. Circumstances over the past few months, with the birth of our daughter, a change in job, the industry I’m working on, and I’ve even started having regular jam sessions with a band as a drummer. These are exciting times and have left me with a lot to reflect and ponder over.

This explains the stream of nature blog entry we have here because it’s a reaffirmation of what this blog is ultimately about: mostly unfiltered expression.

It’s about showing up: make it happen!

Most of my efforts so far have focused on setting up the website, learning the different pieces of the puzzle when it comes to statically generated websites. My goal was always to avoid spending too much time editing the content that I put out. The tools we have today allow us to run into loops editing things to our hearts desire. For example, I read somewhere that some of our favourite bands, when they recorded albums, would only get one take to record the whole thing due to technology constraints of the time. These kind of constraints mean that firstly, you need to have mastered your material to the point where you can do everything in one take and secondly, that some mistakes are bound to creep in. I think there was probably a far more tolerant view of these mistakes at the time.

When it comes to my writing, I can be quite accepting of it’s imperfections. That is, unless, I’m actually writing software. In the imperative paradigm of programming, where you have to give the computer complete instructions of what needs to be done, for the program to perform as expected, we need to provide sufficient instructions. Hence, these instructions require a certain amount of rigorousness, thinking of different edge cases: some of which you are only bound to find at runtime or when the users of the software use it in unexpected ways.

I was hesitating to write because I have been inundated with a rush of new information, whether it was from technologies I was encountering in my recent role, or technical books I was reading at the moment. The book, Designing Data-Intensive Applications, for example is a classic and has left me with a lot of food for thought. It’s fundamentally changed the way I look at any application I work on in the past. However, writing an article discussing it becomes more of a research endeavour, demanding a somewhat rigorous attitude. And hence, the procrastination.

The key takeaway here is that it’s more important to show up, to write blog entries, whatever they may happen to be, than to curate the non-existent entries you will have on your website. Clearly I had projected this website to be more of a technical playground and was stuck to that idea instead of letting the entries come and for the website to organically grow as it will.

The tendency to go for over complicated solutions, or planning for solutions to problems that don’t exist yet is far too common. I see it all the time amongst developers, and I catch myself doing this far too often. I recently spotted this in a drumming context, where I saw how different playing in a band can be compared to practicing on your own. Since the past few months that I’ve been playing drums with a guitarist and bassist, it’s increased my sense of musical awareness and forced me revisit some basics I had started to gloss over. Concretely speaking, I had been drumming at a bpm of about 70-80 for most of the past three years I had been practicing. Suddenly, I needed to play at almost double that bpm because that’s how fast most rock is played.

Best to accept vulnerability when you’re aiming to show up

I read the book, Who moved my cheese, in the beginning of last year at what may have been the best possible time to read it. I had started on my freelance journey about six months ago and I had to start looking for my next mission soon after returning from holidays. In many ways, once you become a freelancer, you have to come to terms with accepting uncertainty. I had been a permanent employee at the same company for all of my professional working experience and it’s very easy to become detached from the realities of looking for new opportunities. This book punches way above it’s weight, for the amount of wisdom it imparts in a very short number of pages. The key takeaway? How to keep a healthy mindset about change and reframing it such that you see change for what it really is: a chance for you to encounter something, perhaps much better than what you could have possibly imagined for yourself.

The truth is we all think we know exactly how things will play out and most often than not, it’s the fear of change and uncertainty that’s stopping you from taking that next step. That’s where vulnerability comes in, where you take a step, not knowing all the details. This was around the time that I was doing a lot of reflection on my values and I had realised that my list of values had one half that I perceived myself to be naturally good at while there was another half which I tended to ignore. Turns out the values I was ignoring were the ones that were key to handling uncertainty better and that allowed me to remain exposed in vulnerable situations without pulling my hair out as I might have done not too long ago.

Key ingredients to staying strong when feeling exposed

What purpose do vague words like the ones below serve us anyway when we’re faced with a challenging situation?

1. Acceptance
2. Faith
3. Simplicity
4. Humility

Personally, I’ve found that it’s good that these words are ambiguous. At different points in your life, they can mean different things to you. Nonetheless, I find that the key to withstand vulnerability is to remember that not ever situation calls for a complex solution. We need to be embrace Simplicity in our actions, have Faith that we’re on the right track. We need to Accept that not everything pan out as we’d want and remember to stay Humble since it’s very likely we were at least partially wrong about any meaningful endeavour we take. Do we need to fear making mistakes? Why should we? Fear makes life interesting because it means you’re pushing yourself out of your comfort zone. I guess we can ask ourselves, if we’d really like a life without fear.

Circling back to this blog

I don’t know what this blog will be about. I don’t have to put any labels to what it be a few years from now. I don’t even have to care what it will look like a few entries from now. It’s more important to show up, write and let it take on a life of it’s own.

Thank’s for reading!