Honest thoughts about self-confidence

marsh — Wed, 12 Apr 2017 23:04:16 +0000

Hey

Young game dev student here. This is my first article and English is not my main language, but I'll do my best.

I recently joined the dev.to community, so I thought,
hey, let's write something,
but that didn't go very well...

Writing is hard

My first idea was to write about a custom data compressor I'm working on. It's a really cool thing and I learnt a lot about .NET libraries and memory management / operations. But the more words I put in, the more I thought to myself:

'well, to be honest, this is just an experiment for yourself and most people may already know anything you learnt'

So... What's the point?

Then I thought: okay, I'm just a student after all, maybe I can write about my experience studying Game Development in college. Because I learnt ( and I'm still learning ) a lot of things, things that can't be taught, but rather learned by working with real people in real projects. Which is a thing that I didn't appreciate this much until I started actually doing it since in high school they really emphasize on personal work over group work / integration.

But then again, as I wrote this new article, a voice kept repeating, in the back of my head:

'you know, most people here already have years of experience working on big or small projects, this is not really contributing to anything whatsoever'

so then again... what's the point, right?

And so on.

But not only writing is hard

And the real problem here is that this somehow extends to pretty much every aspect of my life. Whatever I do, no matter the field or the effort I put in, I'm always so hard on myself that I just don't think it's worth showing it to the world. Maybe sometimes I tweet something, or post it somewhere if I'm really proud of it — but inside I can't help thinking that it's not good enough.

Don't get me wrong, I do know that I'm just studying, and eventually, if I work hard enough, I'll make great things.

But I really fear that when that day comes, if it ever does, I won't have enough self confidence to share it. And what's worse, I fear that even if I share it with the world, and even if the world happens to love it, I may keep feeling like it's not good enough.

Now I'm having some flashbacks of this post about the Impostor Syndrome. I agree that it's okay to feel like a phony sometimes, but...

does it ever come to a point when you are really satisfied with your work?

Am I being too edgy? I don't know... I've been struggling with these thoughts for days, it's almost 1 am here and I don't have coffee.

And after thinking of this all over and over, I always come to the same conclusion:

'dude, chill. It's okay, just do your thing, enjoy what you're doing, and stop overthinking'

Yeah. That's my mantra. But then,
what's the point of this article?

Okay, now I'm just forcing this gag, but THE POINT is that I know there must be more people out there concerned about this, but I just haven't found any thread / blog / whatever throwing any light at it. The guys at wait but why have really good articles about similar topics, specially the ones about procrastination. But I don't know.

I hope this makes sense somehow, and if it does not, at least in the future I can come back here, read it and laugh really hard :P

DEV Community: marsh

Honest thoughts about self-confidence

Hey

Writing is hard

But not only writing is hard