Wanting it to be better than you can make it
Artifact: one specific thing you'd do differently on the last thing you shipped
1. The disposition
The single biggest predictor of whether someone will keep getting better is whether their wanting is ahead of their can.
The people who plateau are the ones who, when they look at their own work, see something acceptable and feel done. The people who keep growing are the ones who, when they look at their own work, see something acceptable and feel an itch — yes, it works, but it's not quite right yet.
The itch is the engine. It is also, slightly, a curse. People with it are rarely satisfied. People without it are often happy, and stop improving in their third year.
2. Why this matters more than skill
You can have all the skill in the world and stop using it. Skill without the itch becomes coasting; it accumulates output but not growth. You can have less skill and keep the itch alive, and you'll out-grow the more-skilled person within three years.
The mechanism is mechanical: the itch keeps you noticing. Noticing is what gets named. Naming is what gets practiced. Practice is what compounds. Without the itch, there's nothing to notice — everything is fine — and the loop stops.
3. How to keep the itch alive without burning out
The itch goes bad when it becomes generalized — all my code is bad, I am bad. That's not the itch; that's anxiety wearing the itch's clothes, and it kills careers.
The healthy version is specific. This function's name is not quite right. This boundary is in the wrong place. This test is testing the implementation, not the behavior. Specific itches you can act on, one at a time, with the loop from chapter 3.
Two practices keep it specific:
- After you ship something, write down one thing you'd do differently next time. Not three. One. Specific.
- After you read code that's better than yours, write down one thing it does that you don't. One. Specific.
The list is the itch, externalized. It's also your curriculum.
4. Try it
Save it. After a year of this, you'll have a list of the things that made you a senior — written by you, in your own words, drawn from your own work.