October 2023
Hello everyone!
Something slightly different this month. A lot of fun stuff has been happening but I have often found that as the year goes into closing, I often feel much more introspective.
So as I shared in my last month’s update, I’ve been posting a bug a day on my threads/twitter/insta. Mistakes are inevitable but also if you have tried to do things, you also know mistakes arent always inexpensive to make. Not just physically but also emotionally. Atleast for me, everytime I would do something wrong there would be some voice in my head that would be sitting their like a critic on a high horse and critiquing what I am doing.
“She really fails to understand the limits of her competence” “She often thinks she can handle much more than she has capacity for, and this is a demonstration this phenomenon” My inner critic uses a sense of righteous superiority to always put me down. Even if I end up making efforts despite whatever my inner critic says. there is still always a certain amount of effort that needs to be put to silence it. Not easy.
And it is in service of this, that I had decided that I want to maintain a bug log. And now that I am 10% of the way through (slightly more than that actually) I thought it would be a great moment to talk about what are my learnings. So here are 5 key learnings that I have had in the last 50 days (ish)
I make a certain flavour of errors more than other flavours. Often time, it is the same thing that I will keep forgetting and that will show up in a lot of different ways in a lot of different places.
Shame and embarrasment (or the anticipation of those) are strong demotivators. And they are extremely covert in their operation.
Often times, the things that I feel are the most embarrassing are the ones that open up spaces of connection. Everytime i have shared something that felt “too vulnerable” to me, I have found someone who replied who related to it.
Advice, help and suggestions can come from any direction. Often times the collective knows a lot more than I might know myself. Examples include a friend telling me to get a massage gun to deal with muscle soreness, which really changed my recovery.
I probably ignore a lot of my mistakes because of some twisted relationship with identity. When things ask a question of “what does it mean for who I am” they are a lot harder than when the question is “I did XYZ”
I still havent fully understood the last one, but i’ve got something like 90% of the journey remaining so I’m sure I’ll figure out at some point.
Okay quick general life updates. I did a demo day with the Gen AI community! Fun stuff. I did inktober more or less fully, figured out the art direction for my game and made some serious progress on it. Charu and I did a very valuable playtest for our game. Kahran and I started interviewing folks which is super exciting! And you should definitely give the podcast a listen.
Hope you have a wonderful november and I will see you in a bit.