Daniel Kramer

Since quitting my job I have started to more frequently meet videographers, writers, entreprenuers, and people creating content and sharing their subject matter expertise. I've become aware of a lot of people who have reached a level of skill I thought previously unimaginable. I believe what you're about to read applies to all fields, but let's for now use as an example the field I studied 5+ years and have done all my professional work in up until this point: software engineering. Legends like Andrej Karpathy and John Carmack create works public and impactful enough that their names are widely known even outside the zeitgeist of their immediate fields. But there exists another set of people too large for me to count or name. They aren't quite as widely known as the legends, and their skill level might not technically compete, but they are still leagues beyond what is considered normal. Let's call them "Pioneers". Why did it take leaving my position in the industry to become more aware of these Pioneers?

Starting Within The Pipeline

When we were in school, we naturally compared ourselves to our classmates. Practically none of us had a class with someone like Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates before they dropped out of college. (Even if we did, would we really have noticed anything exceptional about them from the point of view of "classmate" if school wasn't what they were inclined to focus their efforts on?) Hence, we likely had classmates that performed higher and lower in any metric we wished to measure as our proxy for skill at the time: Grades, Hours Studied, Best-Paying Internship, Number of Cool Side Projects on GitHub, or whatever else.

Other than that, most of the people we had available to look up to were course assistants and professors. Course assistants were just classmates 1-2 years separated. The best professors I'm aware of are not the best because of their skill. They're incredibly intelligent, and taught in an inspirational and unique way. But they were constrained by normalcy on two fronts: Teaching to a curriculum that is designed to get new students to understand basic concepts year over year, and researching influenced by what academia and nonprofit/government agencies perceive as valuable. It's an understandable trade-off to make to live in academia, where these constraints wear down the wild in you in favor of status and stability. We don't see many wild ducks that have made it to being tenured.

But for us students, once we graduate the whole world opens up for us, right? Technically that's possible, but if we were "responsible," the amount of time we spent existing without having a job lined up or looking for a job was effectively zero. In terms of relative skill that matters to us in the moment, we're just trading one cohort (classmates, professors) for another very similar one (job applicants, coworkers). Who were these coworkers before working? Mostly, students.

When I worked at IBM from 2020 to 2023, I'm sure there were experts approaching the status of legend, but they were rightfully cordoned off from most of the company (IBM's so massive that people on BOTH ends of any distribution work there - there a high enough likelihood some ill-conceived hires would disrespect their time). I made an effort to learn from the experts I did have access to. In the part of IBM I worked, handling internal tooling for the company, there's plenty of room for designing and implementing intelligent systems to handle scale and resistance to "trusted" but potentially malicious or incompetent actors. I learned from engineers with years of experience and expertise well more than enough to be called SME. I witnessed them achieve some truly impressive feats and dodge foot-guns they could only have known to dodge through past experience. But unfortunately nothing truly groundbreaking was happening. Taking it all in was immense and constant fuel for growth, but it never shattered my belief that with effort and focus there were a number of paved, marked roads from where I stood to any area of expertise, if I were simply inclined to take them.

Dissolving the Local-Global Barrier

Then I took one step off the career software engineering road by quitting, and realized how incredibly warped that belief was. We lived in a bubble founded on our relation to peers and the experts we had access to at the time.

Let's step back: the internet is a global community. At this point it's been multiple decades since this community has been available to us. But it still feels more natural to make comparisons from within a local cohort. Finding myself without a structured local cohort for the first time in my life, and with access to the internet, the world truly did open up. But in this now-global cohort, survivorship bias works in favor of showing exceptional people.

When trying to start my first company I found founders that created unicorn companies by being outstanding in every aspect of running a company - trouncing me on even the most technical skills I thought I had on lock. When looking at emulating content creators I see them more vibrant and energetic after 72 hours live a week than I am after 5, and meanwhile they pump out three great videos when I struggle to edit one mediocre one. I love programming and finance and learning and designing systems. I even chose The Right Thing™ to study in college. But compared to the current preeminent figures online I utterly suck at all of it. *They* are just so much better. The overbearing dread from continuously making comparisons could not be ignored. Why should I strive to achieve any given goal when so many people are in every way better positioned to achieve that goal? Isn't that just a waste of my and everyone's time? Processing all this was initially cripplingly discouraging, and shocked me into a paralysis for a while.

Though after a long period of consideration, that shock made obvious to me the tautology that there are no paved roads to exceptionalism. All of the founders and creators I found had to weave their own path into existence, perhaps taking a few steps on the paths of many creators before them and tying some of them together. These are the embodiments of "Pioneer" spirit I was talking about, that I had been missing before being thrust out of a cohort and the accompanying feeling of safety in comparative mediocrity.

Find an "X" to Pioneer

If I want to join another cohort and be charted along its path, I can probably do so. However if I want to continue to walk the path of a Pioneer, and I do, I am not going to win by being a copy of a Pioneer at their own game. Luckily, we all have the ability to define new games. For my efforts to be maximally worthwhile I have to find and play the game (X) that I am best at, and the only way I will be the best is if I have the motivation and skill no one else does. Getting to be the best at X will require me to train my ability to train while concurrently training my ability to do X while concurrently doing X. If at any point that sounds repulsive to me, then I know what I'm doing is not part of the X that I want (and therefore need) to be doing. My X is some combination of exploring the bounds of the systems of personal finance, productivity, privacy/freedom, coding, and advocacy for all of the above - there's still lots of work to be done to define it, and I don't want to prematurely concretize it.

There's still time! In a sense, getting the opportunity to taste the independence of a Pioneer has been a curse for me in the sense that it makes for a more desirable yet overwhelmingly more difficult life. As dumb as it feels to be at the skill level I'm at today, imagine where I'd be if I were still locked into the bounds of expectations from within my old local cohort, and hadn't gotten this shock to my system. Look at how different where I am today is from where I was yesterday, or last week.

To anyone with an adventurous spirit reading this, my advice is the same to you: find the skill-set you're best fit for through the method of considering how repulsive or attractive it would be to intensely train that skill-set. As long there's some stretch of a way to make that marketable, actually start intensely working to make that your livelihood. Ideally compare yourself to yourself over time. However if it feels natural to also compare yourself to others, choose to benchmark each skill of your set against the best in the world (in a forgiving way), rather than just those around you. Choose the people around you, not for comparison, but to cater to your growth.

Can we become the next legends of our domain just like Carmack and Karpathy are for software engineering? I don't know. Even though I take inspiration from them, that's not even my goal. Did the legends of today know they were going to end up as legends? I bet they've also encountered the same feeling of shock and uncertainty. I bet we wouldn't know their names if they hadn't then found their X which, in pursuit of it, allowed them to then embrace being a fool willing to test all odds. But I doubt they care they've become legends, or care where they end up from here, because to them pursuing their X is its own reward, and that's the same hope I have for us all.