When Fixing Yourself Becomes the Blocker

Your side project is not a referendum on who you are

Many engineers want to learn new skills or work on side projects, but it feels hard.

There’s a lot going on in an engineer’s day and in regular life, and something I hear often in conversations is:

“I need to be more organized.”
“I need to be more disciplined.”
“Once I get that sorted out, then I’ll start.”

And it makes sense.

These kinds of goals usually require sustained effort over time. Of course you’d want to feel confident that the effort you put in will compound and actually lead somewhere.

But where I’ve seen people get tripped up is that the goal gets replaced by:

“I need to fix myself.”

It becomes a moral issue.

Before I can work on the project, I need to become more organized.
Before I can learn the skill, I need to change how I function as a person.

Now all the effort is going toward becoming a different person.

That’s a tremendous amount of pressure to put on yourself.

And so the actual goal doesn’t get worked on.

A simple goal like learning a new skill or building something on the side becomes emotionally loaded with:

“I’m broken.”
“I suck.”
“I need to change first.”

What I’ve noticed is that once a person realizes that they’ve made self-transformation a prerequisite to progress, something opens up.

They can take all the effort that was going toward shame and redirect it toward the thing itself.

Because you don’t need to fix your entire life before you can work on something.

And once you remove the pressure to become a new person before you start...
starting becomes a lot easier.