I’ve had a strong opinion on how people should concentrate their effort for a long time. I sometimes argue with people about this. The argument I have the most problem with goes along these lines: “Work hard and you can do anything”. If you ask me, the person saying this is either naive, ignorant or lying. Almost as bad as this classic: “Just be yourself”. If you have bad attributes then absolutely change them if you can. Similarly, there absolutely are things you can’t do or achieve. There are things that, no matter how hard you work, simply aren’t going to happen. However, I wouldn’t say that I’m pessimistic and this absolutely does not mean you should just go full tang ping [1]. The opposite, ranking things that you could use your time on with this mindset just turns the choice into an optimization problem. It gives focus. Much better than instinct alone.

Some time ago I was talking with an acquintance about this and couldn’t quite communicate my point to them in a way they could relate to. They held the opinion of “We should all just follow our heart”. I decided to make a concise explainer that I could refer to in the future. It’s taken a while, but I had a day off on Sunday and decided to check out Svelte/SvelteKit along the way. It turned into a sort of interactive blog post. I’m not putting it here because it would be a pain to get Jekyll and a static build of a Svelte website to work together on Github pages, if it’s even possible. Instead, the link can be found below.

You can navigate the game with the up and down arrow keys.

Sources

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tang_ping