ASNN

smart people, revisited

There seems to have been some misunderstanding regarding my last post. Whether virtually or literally (in my presence), a number of people rolled their eyes at my seemingly-defeatist evaluation of things. And while it was, admittedly, tinged with some defeatism, that wasn't really what I was going for. Let me try again.

I'm not a believer in the caste system. If there WERE a caste system, I'd be part of the privileged class, I suppose - I grew up in the nuclear family, plenty of comfort, plenty of education. After throwing all of that away (all except the family), I started from $0.00 and have worked my way up. I'm not rich, but I'm FAR from poor - above all, I'm quite *successful*, which is something quite different from being *rich*. (Insert line about "treasures in heaven" here.)

Yet I sometimes feel that I've hit my limit. It's not for lack of technical smarts - my mind and technical skills are often untapped in my job, as a lot of work is complex without being difficult. I haven't come close to hitting my intellectual wall since I first started as the Gospelcom sysadmin (without a single day of sysadmin experience under my belt).

Let me be clear about this: I'm not saying I'm not busy. In fact, I'm usually utterly swamped. But a large quantity of complex-but-not-difficult work does not quite provide me with the same satisfaction as does a quantity of simple-to-understand-yet-harder-than-heck work. The problem is that the former pays the bills, while the latter is (seemingly) something rich people do with their time.

This is my lament: I'm occasionally surrounded by people who have been able to do the fun, stretching work, while I've always sort of been stuck with the grinding work. (This is not unrelated to the fact that my choice of professions, system administration, is rife with grinding work, and relatively lean on the fun stuff.) The difference between the person who works on the fun stuff and me is not one of technical smarts, but one of business smarts, personal connections, and luck.

To me, the only significant item in that short list is that of business smarts. (It seems that only a crazy person would lament who he knows or doesn't know, or his luck. Maybe I'm wrong.) I have a goodly number of important connections, on one level or another, within the technical community. I've even achieved some level of recognition in certain somewhat-visible circles. And I've lived through one of the biggest economic booms in the history of the US, all while being employed in the very field that was the center of the VC maelstrom. I'd hardly call that bad luck.

So it's just business smarts that seems to have separated me from some of my peers. (Well, and money - but that's a direct result of the business smarts.) Between that and the extreme difficulty in "catching up" at this point, I tend to get depressed sometimes. It just feels like I could very well be designing forms or debugging rogue httpd processes or tcpdump'ing VPN traffic for the rest of my life. It seems so insignificant when placed alongside the things my peers are doing: large, visible projects that are changing the lives of millions of people and directing (or, at least, capturing) the future of the Internet.

Now, some people I've known throughout my life are in similar positions... but they don't suffer from the same anxiety, restlessness, whatever that I do. They would not have written a post like my last one. For me, I find it invigorating, awe-inspiring, and a little sad/discouraging to be around people who are like me, but who have "made it". And I lament the feeling that I'll NEVER get there because I'm just not quite good enough. That is the ENTIRETY of my last post, even if the words are slightly different.

Sorry to get so introspective and cranky and depressing/-ed. It's not like I wallow in it - heck, I usually don't even think about it. (Remember: I'm too swamped to even think about it. ;-) And I might not even be right, either with my facts or with my perspective, but that's just how I feel about it. Feel free to tell me I'm a dolt, but remember - it's far easier to criticize someone else's viewpoint than it is to offer a viewpoint of your own. I might have the wrong conclusions... so what are the right ones?

Posted by pcg at September 17, 2005 3:13 PM