Sidelines
Do you know how it feels to be in the sideline, always watching as the event happens and see the others take action while you are there reflecting and thinking one day or some day?
It is how life has been for most of the time. Mostly because of skill issue and next is accessibility to the environment. It seems that environment also plays a critical role in fostering skills and talents and there is hardly anything someone unaware can do.
The first step to stepping out of the sideline is being aware you are in a sideline. Then you accept that there are others who just are above you but can fall back to sidelines with one minor mistake and so on.
Once this awareness is there, you start to notice the patterns and see how people like you got from sideline to the mainline. This happens through breakthrough, obsession, character development, environment change and what not. There can be a magnitude of events that we might not be aware which will effect these decisions
Let me tell you how that has impacted my career. I consider myself fairly good at understanding hard technical math and algorithms. I used to take pride in understand and reproducing something difficult. I learn quickly through examples and experience. So far in my career, I have been fortunate enough but never broke into the mainline. There were ideas and plans that I wanted to execute but will not be able to because of scale of things.
Every time it was inaccessibility to the resources that is required to run experiments. Even at the situation where it is available, there is no confidence because of the guilt, fear and being afraid to ask for the resources. This in-confident behavior is costing me quite a bit. Most of the time even when I asked, things didn't work out. Mostly because of skill issues (that I will admit). However, as I said, I can learn fast.
When these iterations require complex systems and resources, it soaks out the play time that is necessary to learn and build further abstraction. This is the danger of being in sidelined and wanting to go into the main one.
So how can we prevent something that happened to me and what can we learn from here?
Learn to maximize your environment and do not distract yourself with problems that are inaccessible to you.
Why does this matter?
One can spend their life lamenting and whining about what ifs and what could have been but that is not a fruitive action. Something fun, something nice is always out there and we can simply get rewarded out of it.
Every one of us has to perform an act and why not try out the act that we enjoy the most. Maybe we will eventually figure out what we want to do and not just maximize the resource?
What I am trying to say is, if you feel you are in sideline or have been in sideline for a long time, there must be something that is wrong within you. It is mostly the alignment. Part of living is figuring out how you can move from this feeling of being inadequate to accepting you are sufficient and maximizing the experience with what you have.
A trend that is emerging is called jestermaxxing or funmaxxing. It is simply acting in the path of least resistivity and enjoying.
Top athletes, actors, and performers are showing what it means to have fun and what it actually is. So maybe, we should just be doing that?
I am from gen-z and bunch you might or might not relate to what I am saying here.