@BowTiedDravee
Last updated
Last updated
The second someone else is watching—or a clock starts ticking—your brain sharpens. Only when something’s at stake (a deadline, a public tweet, a $2 bet with a friend about doing what you said you would): suddenly, every minute matters. You stop getting lost in distractions and start focusing—because there are consequences now. Time is precious, and a huge amount of it gets lost to time wasters (phone, social media, etc.). Usually, you don’t need more time—you need more focus Want to prep yourself for focus? Don’t wait for motivation. Create consequence. Create urgency. Then watch yourself perform like you did the night before that exam years ago.
Reading something four times makes you feel smart and confident. But reading it once and testing yourself actually makes you smart (though not confident). Huberman mentioned the experience: kids who read once and got tested outperformed by far those who reread four times, all while being much less confident. The principle behind it is active recall, which some believe is the only way to rewire your brain. Don’t just stare at the codebase. Test yourself. Ask AI to make you a quiz. Explain it to someone (ever heard of a rubber duck? or Professor Feynman?). Struggle with it. That’s how you carve knowledge into your brain.
Sometimes your mind is racing. It’s chaotic. You may experience a storm of ideas—but you remain stuck.
Ever realized that the moment you talk to someone—even just a rubber duck, an AI, or by recording yourself—you start to hear your ideas clearly?
That's because the noise is real. You need to either calm it down (take a shower, a walk, meditate...) or speak louder than it to hear your thoughts.
When something feels heavy—the task you avoid, the message you don’t want to write, the bug you don’t want to dig into—that’s a weight you’re meant to lift.
That tension you feel? It’s your brain trying to rewire itself.
Most people walk away. Numb it. Scroll past it.
But if you lean in and stay with the discomfort, you don’t just move forward—you grow.
Bonus: In a competition, this is where most people stop. But the ones who are able to keep pushing? They find gold.
That moment when you try, fail, and feel like rage-quitting? That’s not the end—it’s the beginning.
Frustration is the spark of neuroplasticity. It’s your brain telling you, "This matters—change is happening." And change is painful.
As you age: this becomes even more painful and harder to handle, but the rewards of pushing through are extreme. Don’t waste your spark by being a quitter.
You need to see failure as a teacher for growth.
Sometimes it’s not laziness—it’s bandwidth. Too much is going on. There are cognitive loads everywhere that you might not even notice: unfinished tasks, emotional weight, background stress, unread messages, context switching, that meeting in 2 hours with a difficult customer.
Clear space before you blame yourself. A foggy mind isn’t a weak one—it’s a full one. You're a human being, not a machine.
You don’t need to be the smartest, the strongest, or the most talented. What you can be—is relentlessly better than you were yesterday.
Every time you choose discomfort over ease, your willpower stat levels up. You've defeated your current self, and unlocked the next version.
Slowly. Painfully. Permanently.
Spot a weakness. Win against it. Enjoy becoming a bit better.
Doing more doesn’t mean getting better.
Without a feedback loop, you’re just repeating and reinforcing a behavior, not improving.
Growth only happens when you pause, reflect, and ponder: “Did that work? Did I learn? Did I miss something? How can I improve?”
Progress requires course correction, not just motion.
Some misunderstand "line by line" as checking sequences of instructions.
Others see the paths leading to each line, and the effects each line has on the codebase.
They follow the levers an attacker could pull to draw blood — on the line, or from it.
There's pain in the implicit, the incomplete and the unfinished. They trigger a compulsive "I must know!" effect.
Open mysteries don’t just attract you - they haunt you, making you crave clarity.
Click baits abuse this mechanism.
Try to leverage it too, for learning and for finding more bugs.
Funny brain tease: if I tell you "In this function from a 1M$ live contest, there's a critical bug I found, that you will never find, I will get a unique finding" : What happens to you?
