One of the biggest things I hear that constraints talented individuals is the “fear of failure”

But what it is it truly? A thread.

I was talking to my very talented friend who is applying for business schools in the US.

She said “what if I don’t get in? What if the effort is not worth it?”

“Will I have wasted so many months? What will I have to show for it”
I have heard this so many times, including in my own head.

The fear of failure grips a lot of us, from doing things that we think we should do, to questioning the effort we have put in something.

We ask - is it worth it?
What we are subconsciously doing is that we are tying all our efforts, over days, months, even years, to one single outcome.

That one outcome is usually one socially accepted metric.

It could be money, a promotion, getting into a college, getting an award.
This psychological sleight of hand probably is an evolutionary outcome of optimizing effort to outcome.

It also is an oversimplification that makes it easy for us to “process”

If the hunting process fails, curse yourself to course correct so that you do it right later
But what we forget when we undergo this is that we are not the same person anymore.

We have grown, become wiser, become stronger. We are now at a higher platform than we were before.

We can leap even further now.
It took me years to let go of my hunting instincts.

People call it “love the process”, “go with the flow”, “find you Ikigai”

For me, the simple question you have to answer is “am I better than yesterday”

If the answer is yes, the outcome doesn’t matter.
Life is non-linear, but we love straight paths

Years of effort may suddenly breakthrough one day. If you grow, and are true to yourself, there is nothing better than that

Trying to over-engineer your life, tied to outcomes, can leave you unhappy

Instead, work go with the flow

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A brief analysis and comparison of the CSS for Twitter's PWA vs Twitter's legacy desktop website. The difference is dramatic and I'll touch on some reasons why.

Legacy site *downloads* ~630 KB CSS per theme and writing direction.

6,769 rules
9,252 selectors
16.7k declarations
3,370 unique declarations
44 media queries
36 unique colors
50 unique background colors
46 unique font sizes
39 unique z-indices

https://t.co/qyl4Bt1i5x


PWA *incrementally generates* ~30 KB CSS that handles all themes and writing directions.

735 rules
740 selectors
757 declarations
730 unique declarations
0 media queries
11 unique colors
32 unique background colors
15 unique font sizes
7 unique z-indices

https://t.co/w7oNG5KUkJ


The legacy site's CSS is what happens when hundreds of people directly write CSS over many years. Specificity wars, redundancy, a house of cards that can't be fixed. The result is extremely inefficient and error-prone styling that punishes users and developers.

The PWA's CSS is generated on-demand by a JS framework that manages styles and outputs "atomic CSS". The framework can enforce strict constraints and perform optimisations, which is why the CSS is so much smaller and safer. Style conflicts and unbounded CSS growth are avoided.