Ed Weissman, known on HN as edw519, writes about programming, bosses, and business, and collects his best HN comments.
HN commenters recommend his guide to participating in HN and his 'Best of edw519' collection, calling it full of useful lessons.
Most of your doubts and concerns were already answered by the wise old edw519 here: http://edweissman.com/53640595
Also please understand that self-pity is the worst use of your imagination.
I've been in your situation too and some of the things that helped me are:
1) Having a habit of exercising daily for 30 minutes. No compromise on this. This is a good antidote for depression.
2) A habit of getting up at 5 daily and doing the most important thing at that time. This habit alone can change your life and to cultivate this hard habit in a ridiculously easy manner please check this article: http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/04/how-to-get-up-right-away-when-your-alarm-goes-off/
3) Having a Vision Board. I use text instead of images. They are more direct. I change it every week to keep it fresh and inspiring all the time. As a part of the morning ritual, I stare at the vision board for about 5 to 10 minutes and is also close to where I sleep. It gets in my way whenever I’m distracted and not working.
I'm an aspiring Hacker too - currently at the 'aspiring' level only though. I'm learning Ruby by straightaway trying to implement the algorithms found in my college book - Design and Analysis of Algorithm. My work is hardly inspiring. But I start my day with some satisfaction that I’m one step closer to becoming someone like ed519 even if it would take me years!
Remember that the 10000-hour-rule is BS. I realized that I can have fun 'while in the learning phase' and I could…
is it only me or there is a (just one) line of code gone wrong on ed's comment handling server?
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You'll have to build an audience first. I read a lot of the mixergy Entrepreneur majority of the successfull ones all had audience or contacts before they had customers. An audience or contact is different from a customer because they are just people who are interested in you, whereas customers go a step further and buy. However an audience or contact allows you to make offers and build a customer base.
You can build an audience by making friends on hacker news, if you're known for making great contributions to the hacker community
you can build audience. So it's important to be genuinely interested in the community. Once you have an audience you can make them an offer, and if it's any good you'll have customers. And interesting recent example of this is edw519 ebook. Ed genuinely enjoys the hacker news community and people enjoy his contributions which are basically his comments/submissions. I doubt his intentions was ever to sell an ebook of his comments, but he is doing that now, and the site promoting it has been viewed 20923 times, and that's only because he is part of the community and has an audience. see:
http://edweissman.com/i-turned-my-hacker-news-comments-into-an-eboo
It's a small experiment on Ed's part, but it won't be worthwhile without an audience.
If you're interested in more specific ways to build an audience stay tuned.
Also read:
http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2011/04/the-easiest-way-to-succeed-as-an-entrepreneur/
I don't have much advice for emotional issues but you could try taking stock of how the day went. What was good and what wasn't?
If you have trouble remembering you could keep notes about what you're doing while you work so you can review things later.
If you identify misses on your part, you could start digging into what didn't work, why, and what you could do in the future[0]. Like a mini retro for yourself. Hopefully you'll be able to catch when you're slipping on something and implement a strategy that helps you improve. Are there software tools you could build for yourself to give yourself guard rails or automate error prone tasks? Could you have applied your focus elsewhere to get different results? Do you have knowledge gaps anywhere?
This works for things that are going well too. Are there ways you can increase your velocity or bring helpful stuff to your team?
Keeping notes on tasks and issues talked about during meetings is really helpful too. It's easy to forget details if you get context switched out of things or lots of time passes. Pay attention to what business is doing and other teams are up to too. Sometimes you can see patterns and suggest things that help the larger org in nice ways.
Don't freak out - you got this!
[0] sort of like this but probably less extreme - http://edweissman.com/Wiki0205.html
https://jrock.us/
https://jgc.org/
http://kaledavis.com/
https://aegir.sexy/
https://www.gwern.net/
https://jacquesmattheij.com/
https://danwin.com/
https://www.kalzumeus.com/
https://www.magic.do/
https://edweissman.com/
https://jakeseliger.com/
http://www.fogus.me/
https://www.stavros.io/
https://jasonlefkowitz.net/
https://minimaxir.com/
https://www.robinwhittleton.com/
https://ciexinc.com/
https://rongarret.info/
https://williampietri.com/
https://bpier.re/
https://joshtriplett.org/
https://ooer.com/
https://feross.org/resume/
https://www.brandons.me/
https://benjaminpbreen.com/
http://hokstad.com/
https://www.scott-a-s.com/
https://www.bermita.com/
http://tlrobinson.net/
https://ldpreload.com/
https://dotat.at/
http://xavvy.com/
https://correa.in/
https://adriann.github.io/
https://leclan.ch/
https://joeyespo.com/
https://pius.me/
https://adamierymenko.com/
https://drewdevault.com/
https://battlepenguin.com/
https://chris.improbable.org/
https://www.snellman.net/
https://ocdtrekkie.com/
https://www.cryptolotus.com/
https://www.gregkogan.com/
https://david.kitchen/
In no particular order. From: https://jessimekirk.com/blog/hn_users_links/. I went through about half of the list looking for personal websites to use as inspiration for my own.
What you said reminds me of something I read from edw512's book ( http://edweissman.com/53640595 )
> Buyers of software products, like small children, hear one word more than any other: "no". "No, it can't be done." "No we don't do that." "No, if you did that it would screw up everything else." "No, that's stupid" It doesn't matter if you're right, all that matters is that you're just another person saying "no".
> You differentiate yourself from others by giving the exact same answer, but with the word "yes" instead of "no".
> "Yes, in order to do that, we'd also want to look at..."
...
> As I've told my customers many times, "The answer is always 'Yes'. You may not want to do it once you understand what it will take, but the answer is still 'yes'."