My 3.5 months of silence

BERLIN

I focused on important in my life

On July 8th, I wrote my last post. It was just a letter of recommendation from my last employer. The Germans call it an Arbeitszeugnis or simply Zeugnis, they use the same word for school and university marks. It was drafted by my supervisor Ali, written by the HR, and signed by my mentor and Ali's supervisor, Christiane.... Before that, half of the year I had been doing different things to get a promotion at work to prove my competence to myself. It is important to my soul even now. The craving for it and the fact that I couldn't get it at work was weighing on me. I sought - partly correctly - self-affirmation through my blog. I wrote different things and culminated in a video about the Android app. The posts required different time investment, but the video proved to be the most challenging in terms of time and energy required. I asked myself, why am I doing this? I wanted to be read, I wanted readers, the number of them and the number of likes, to give me a sense of depth, as I called it. But what really matters to my soul is self-affirmation through professional achievement. I looked back at what I was writing and what I didn't like about other bloggers and realized that self-promotion in posts, career advice, and describing my path was not what would soothe my soul. It's superficial, it's easy. I don't want to read or write it anymore. It's interesting, and maybe important, to the early career guys, though I did not do this even early on my journey. Understanding life is born in difficult moments, turning points, when you don't sleep well, when you don't understand yourself, not by running your pupils over other people's lines. And so I want to write here the only advice from me to the reader, don't believe that someone knows how to live your life. What people have written is most likely for their ego or to make money off of you. Only you can and do know what to do in the next moment of your life. Learn to hear and trust your intuition. It will take you years to do this.

So why this essay? It's for my friends who read me, for my edification, maybe for others who are willing to think and read in an age of patchy thoughts and an endless stream of garbage oozing from everywhere. Here's what I want to write about: concentration is possible, but no more than a few hours a day.

For the first time in my life, I was doing something just for myself and no one was paying me for it. I saved enough to give myself time to do what my soul asked me to do. I first solved problems on LeetCode using the NeetCode plan, and when I finished I remembered that I always wanted to solve Algorithms by Sedgewick & Wayne. So I started solving all the problems from the textbook on the topic of graphs. I managed to finish only the chapter on undirected graphs, 99% of the problems in that chapter. My sleep became undisturbed. For the first time, I felt like I was doing exactly what I wanted to do and I was where I should have been. I was doing things differently, not the way I used to. I took a notepad and wrote algorithms on paper without a compiler. I memorized all the algorithms in the chapter and wrote them from scratch every time. I especially liked writing a step-by-step analysis of the algorithm's execution, it required some creativity and often it helped me to get closer to solving problems.

Here I want to point out the difference between Sedgwick's algorithms, competitive programming and interview preparation. The authors emphasize creating algorithms from scratch from simple to complex in the readers' heads. Yes, that's important, but they don't teach how to quickly write code and their solution is usually done through classes and layering of abstractions. It is unfortunately not applicable as written in the book. But if you've invested enough time to understand the ideas and build up your hand - you should have no trouble writing the solution through functions instead of classes and avoiding unnecessary abstractions. Competitive programming, in turn, requires quick problem solving. Maybe it is in some way the apogee of problem solving, although as I understood there are about 26 types of problems and all of them are just variations on these themes. Here it is not only important to find a solution, you have to write it in a short time. There is no prompting here. Finally, a technical interview is where the person evaluating you cares about how you think and whether you can write code.

I've read various works by Calvin Newport and occasionally re-read Deep Work. 4 hours max - was his verdict on concentrated hours a day for the most coachable person. When working, I could almost never accurately track my focus hours. This time, I just put it off. And I was usually only able to put in 1 hour a day, a couple times I got 3 hours out of it. And I was never able to systematically work on a daily concentrated basis. This observation was sad but also liberating. Here's why. I believed that I could, combining with work, achieve mastery in algorithms, math, German, text analysis. And now having almost all the time (I was dropping off and picking up my son), I was moving extremely slowly by my standards. But I knew that I had an accurate grasp of the material covered and could reconstruct any undirected graph algorithm from memory. This realization, led me to believe that I hadn't concentrated in the past. Work + x != concentration. And even work itself can't require 40 hours a week of concentration, it just isn't there. It's about 5 hours a week. Everything else is shallow work. And it's limited by the human brain not by a person's desire, attitude, not even by knowledge and skills.

Faith. Faith in yourself, your strength. Keep it. Don't let yourself or others take it away. Every failure, every mistake will lower your faith in yourself. Do what is important to you, what you are afraid of, what troubles your soul. Surround yourself with people who will help you grow. To push you and love you at the same time, without condescension and indulgences: when it is necessary to go through difficulties together and help, and when it is necessary to give the necessary nudges for growth.

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