Nothing is more important in your material life than optics. The stories you tell yourself to live. The narratives that are woven in your subconscious mind get propagated through different filters and biases, and finally manifest in your future self. People advise you to think positively precisely for the same reason. The way you portray yourself in your mind weighs something in the path forward.

Since I got into college, I primarily interpreted my current standings in a glass half empty way. There was always something incomplete in the way I saw myself which resulted in dystopian dreams and prophecies of my future. To this day, I can’t get enough of these half-empty views and takes of myself. Let’s take an example to dig deep into what I mean. Imagine you worked on a project where your effort moves the needle by 5 degrees. At the end of the day when you measure your progress, it isn’t much compared to your friend who just delivered a banger project and reduced their team’s engineering budget by 10 percent. Without you knowing, a narrative keeps popping in your mind, “man, I haven’t contributed anything significant to my project and I haven’t learned anything new” even when the reality is a bit different. This sort of narrative sucks the joy out of you and knocks you into a downward spiral w.r.t your professional career. This doesn’t mean that you should just inflate your contributions like that friend of yours in your college final semester project. Rather it should be that something along these lines, “I wrote some code, made some decisions, learned something”. Now that you can objectively measure these things you can evaluate yourself much better than that negative critique whom you’ve been using till now. This effectively helps you to answer everyone’s favourite question, “what did you do till now ?”.

As I said, having no-bullshit narratives help you to get your current standing of yours and clear some air in that buzzing mind.