My upbringing has caused me to be reliant on other people to show me exactly how it’s done instead of allowing myself to learn by tinkering. I don’t tinker to figure things out on my own at home. It’s become my mode of thinking and how I approach the world. I suppose my slow feedback loop is a result of discounting and wariness toward my own experience in favour of facts/wisdom from some “authority”. I think my "laziness" to debug code is really being afraid of not knowing how to fix it. Honestly speaking, the knowledge deficit does not matter as much as the panicky state. Fear blinds and dulls your senses, it exaggerates the problem in your mind and makes it seem bigger than it really is. It’s weird because I could be independent in daily life but when it comes to expert knowledge this happens.

I allow myself the permission to tinker to explore and learn. I allow myself to do as many small experiments as possible to learn as much as I need. I still have some resistance towards picking up tools and learning new ways to debug.

My unfamiliarity with tinkering has affected the way I parse instructions. When I receive a vague, densely-packed verbal instructions (high meaning to word ratio), I don’t have the confidence or prerequisite tinkering experience to try things out. That mode of being is nonintuitive to me. My main method of learning was by copying what other people did. Sometimes that results in awkward situations, sometimes that results in losing friends etc. That’s a story for another time.

It seems like short, unclear instructions slow me down more than clear and concise instructions. For example, they would seem to understand it and get right to work. Or maybe they’re pretending to understand, I don’t know. On the other hand, I will ask questions and seek to clarify as much as possible; sometimes the questions I asked helped other people, sometimes they don’t. Either way I’m usually the guy who asks the most questions. That’s something I should be careful about since that’s relying on my social capital and other people’s goodwill. The former is dependent on chemistry and social affinity, while the latter is dependent on luck. Both are limited resources and very much context-dependent.

I am unfamiliar and uncomfortable with making decisions under environment with imperfect information. The reason is because I’m not used to working fast and improvising as needed. I prefer instructions to be a set of clear delineated tasks before starting on them. I have poor instruction-tasks conversion skill, likewise I have a hard time converting tasks into an actionable pithy instruction too. In my opinion, people who are good at that are also good at staying on top of ongoing discussion and the meta-discussions. They are well-attuned to changes in conversations and react to it swiftly. They have an excellent ability to understand what people want and address their concerns before any misunderstandings occur. People like that tend to be influential and good at giving instructions; they have leadership qualities.

Last updated: 25 July 2021