thinking a lot about thinking

not about some interesting problem or the latest events in the world, but more about the way your thoughts can change the way you feel, cause you to or stop you from doing things you want to do

recently i had quite a huge mindset shift, i have a good tech job, have always built things, and studied interesting subjects, code is more than half of my waking life, i felt like so long as i was enjoying that process and living my life i could kind of coast

the early days of my internet life was filled with posting about random projects i was doing, but something changed and i retreated into a shell i don’t remember creating for myself

this all changed a few weeks ago, saw reports that grok was finally available in the uk and the newest version was available that happened to be seriously competitive with claude and gpt4o, so i decided to upgrade to premium and give it a shot

best decision ever

from there i started trying to use x “seriously”, following things that was interesting to me, trying to find people posting about grok and enjoying some of the discourse there, so many tech people doing so many interesting things, but also so many talented people who didn’t seem to be doing anything at all

i saw a lot of myself there, i had never built in public, it had been over a decade since i shared a progress picture or talked about some idea or project, i made a few levels in a game and that had a certain element of shipping, but apart from that all of my projects were just for me or friends

was i sabotaging myself?

it took one hell of an effort but i pushed to eventually reply after lurking for a few days, after all what was the worst thing that could happen, if it flopped and not even a single person liked it or saw it then i don’t lose anything, maybe i look like a dumbass on the internet but really who doesn’t at some point

the reply went down well

not like skyrocketed into vitality type of well, but i remember the relief when the original poster liked it, a short dialogue ensued, it was good.

after that i started to reply more, some flopped and some were incredibly well received, one of them was even shared by multiple people i looked up to in the tech community, a few of them flopped but by this point i didn’t care

the next jump was to posting on my own profile, not just replying

that… actually didn’t feel like much of a hurdle, i knew it was something that i didn’t feel comfortable with but by this point i was already used to just throwing thoughts in the box and hitting the big post button- so this was exactly the same thing

suddenly i was posting about what i was doing, random thoughts i had throughout the day, the occasional “take”

• i started having regular interactions with people who had a vibe i enjoyed
• i started posting about my personal projects
• i started writing articles
• i started a community for people who do stuff and ship

turns out… i had been sabotaging myself

there was no real threat yet i made myself feel threatened, the anxiety around putting your first thoughts out into the world, the potential for failure, or worse the potential to be outright ignored, all of these things floating around in my mind, but none of it real

turns out… you can just do things

not talking about code or projects, definitely you can do those things too, but in general if you want to do something and find yourself talking yourself out of it over this weird anxious inner monologue- silence that. do the thing anyway, go reply to someone you look up to, go get involved in a discussion you have thoughts around, go post what you are thinking about or doing

i regret it took me this long, but no turning back now

〆 alia