Myth of 'Are you Doing Enough?'

In the past 8 years, my career trajectory has been a roller coaster of unreal magnitude. People looking from the outside might feel like I’ve made some insane progress, and my life is pretty sorted with decent savings, good work, and a stable (relatively) personal life. But during all this, my experience from my POV has been a different picture altogether. There has been one nagging question bothering me all the time: “ARE YOU DOING ENOUGH?” because to be honest, it never felt like I was.

Just to give you some background, I’m a civil engineering graduate without any foundational CS, math or statistics knowledge and have been working as an Applied Data Scientist for the past 8 years. As of 2024, I’ve been interested in AI safety and ethics research for the past 3 years and really want to crack into it. So in a nutshell, for all my professional life, I’ve been playing catchup with whatever I’ve wanted to do. Initially, it was with ML fundamentals and trying to learn as much variety as possible, be it forecasting, recommender systems, search, deep learning, reinforcement learning, YOU JUST NAME IT!! If it involved math and CS somehow, I would be interested in that. Never once, did I felt like sitting comfortably wherever I was and just enjoy life.

So an obvious by-product of all this juggling was a constant comparison with other folks present in the field and obviously (me being me!! 😕), the comparison was with accomplished folks in the field who have been working in that niche for multiple years (in other words, WAY MORE TIME THAN ME!!). I always had this urge to be able to learn all the tricks of that trade immediately and just master that niche.

During all the comparative analysis I did to determine how I could reduce the gap between me and others (while obviously ignoring the obvious ones 🤪), I just put my foot on the gas pedal and was at it studying or working on projects, but at the end of the day, it never felt like I was doing enough to catch up, and whenever I compared again with others, I was always on a backfoot. This idea got ingrained in me so much that I almost believed that their systems were optimized to unreal extents in terms of productivity, focus and yield and to chase that I literally gave up on my hobbies and all kinds of entertainment (read as “rest” or “break”) but that feeling never went away.

My mind wasn’t far behind in playing games either, it always moved benchmarks and goalposts while doing any kind of comparison, just so that I could arrive at the conclusion that I’m not doing enough!!

I still struggle with this idea to this day and there are days I spiral like the bestest lattu you’ve ever seen in your life. But slowly I’m getting to terms with the realisation that there is a high probability if you are asking yourself this question, YOU ARE DOING ENOUGH!!! already. The fact you are introspecting and trying to better yourself indicates that you have already explored lots of ideas and you are on the right path.

In the end, I would just recommend one thing, don’t give up on your hobbies and fun projects, they make you a complete and interesting human being, because on the work side YOU ARE ALREADY DOING ENOUGH!!.