I was looking through a magazine I frequently pick up, Lenswork, and found the site gapingvoid through one of the articles.  In the site, I came across one interesting article about creativity, "Never compare your inside with somebody else's outside".

The article's fairly interesting, pointing out one should not do something s/he loves for money.  The point of view was that one would always fall in love with it and not be as monetarily successful as one could be.

It's true I am still naïve concerning this topic; I am still trying to make a living doing things I enjoy doing.  Truth be told, I have consequently sacrificed the monetary aspect for enjoyment.  I still believe I can eventually be successful.  It is unfortunate I do not have any proof to back this up.

Anyway, let me get to the main reason for this post--the article's topic sentence.  I have always been ahead of my colleagues when it came to my core interests: web application programming, photography, and air hockey.  Coming from the world of academia, I feel sinful because all three are self taught. 

Being self taught, I have always had an interest in how I measure up to those who do what I do for a living--especially since I am trying to make a living by creating web applications (and some photography--I don't bet on air hockey).  My main question is "Am I good at what I do?"  Unfortunately, I have always been surrounded by those who do other things than what I do, leaving me at a loss for how to compare myself.

For years now, I have walked a dangerous line that can easily break one's confidence.  My situation offers me no choice but to gauge my competence by two means: 1) Comparing myself to others and 2) Comparing myself to where I think I should be.  Both are dangerous as it's essentially comparing my inside to others' outsides. 

The main problem is that I have no idea what hardship others have gone through to create what they have.  For instance, I can think there's no way I can create an "eBay"-like site's application code because I am comparing myself (and what I know on the inside) with those at a corporation.  (Hint: I am also shunting 100% of the development work on myself, forcing an "I must know it all to succeed" attitude when there were more than 100 developers for the "eBay" site, sharing their expertise.)  I also completely ignore the fact that the site's code has undoubtedly undergone numerous revisions since its birth.  If that was not enough, the fatalistic part of this point of view is yet to come: My comparison forces me to turn out near-perfect code to match my outside perception of "eBay".  Obviously, there's a large amount of things the developers have to work with and trouble code that could break, but I don't see that and cannot factor it into my comparison.

Using this comparison, it seems impossible for me to come close to those my skills surpass.  I know this, but there's one positive light: motivation.  If I use this astronomically flawed comparison logic, it will force me to keep improving.  The bad news is that it skews my perception of the world.  But when that's the only avenue of perception available to me, I guess I have to take it.

I need to be in a company with others who do what I do...