My Best Decision Professionally 

First time I've ever donated. My Senior engineer has this ethos with everything he does. You are truly helping me crystallise this mindset by just voicing it out. Massive thanks! Believe it or not. You're an inspiration many

Good video and message I will never forget the moment when software engineering clicked for me. I'm self-taught. It was four months into the first job. As a software engineer, I felt I knew what I was doing for the first time. Before that moment, I thought: "Am I able to do this?" After that moment, to this day: "How long will it take for me to do this?" “You can’t learn everything, but you must convince yourself that you can learn anything…” - John Carmack.

Dude I'm 100% there with you. There's nothing I can't do... there are only things I haven't done yet.

I actually developed this same mentality but because I had to. My past employer had the main SAN fail and corrupted all the VMs across 4 hosts only a month into the job. Over 30 VMs needed to be restored and the backups weren't complete. I thought... this is impossible and can't be done. However, if I didn't do it, I'd be out of the job. At that point I was so mad that the company had such bad systems and instead of just walking off or just trying to get everything back the way it was. I said... "You know what, forget this, I'm just going to upgrade all the system to where they should be or just fall on my sword trying." For the next 3 days, I worked on about 30 minutes a sleep per day and restored active directory and base systems for function in the company all using a new server image I created. Called up a friend to help with the implementation of a new Citrix farm, as the old one was 6.0 and moved to 7.x. Restored all the SAP financial systems and within 2 weeks, not only was everything back, but everything was actually up to date and in a far better position. From that day forward, I have never thought of a problem too big. Only that it is going to be FAR easier to fix than that crazy situation. Once you do what you consider impossible, you will never think anything is impossible again.

This is such a big thing. At the end of the day every single concept that A human understands can therefore be understood, and is never too hard to understand.

After having a stress attack over a deadline catching up to me due to bad project management AND thinking I wouldn't be able to do it, this really helps me mentally.

I'm the same way. It's not that one can't figure things out, it's just how long that journey is. I remember joining the Labs team in 2014 and there was no guarantee that the team would exist a year in so we had to quickly create business value as we grew so we could stick around. I also remember Social Mountain. 🙂

This is something I've thought about recently while teaching myself mathematical logic: the further I progress, the more difficult the proofs become, and sometimes it feels like I've hit a dead end. I think "this is way beyond me, I'm not gonna be able to proceed any further". And time after time, I manage to pull through! Sometimes it feels like trying to break a big rock with a small hammer, but with persistence, that rock will have to give!

One of the books that had the most impact on my life is "Mindset" by Carol Dweck. She describes how the Growth Mindset that ThePrimagen exhibits in this video is the more successful approach over the Fixed Mindset in which people limit themselves, thinking "Nah, I don't have enough talent for this to succeed."

These are my favourite videos of yours, dude. This and the last 'vim as your editor' video. The just fucking do it mentality. Being reminded there's no shortcuts and you have it in you if you just try. Appreciate you, man.

I used to have a kick ass mentality, there was nothing I couldn't do. Team Get Shit Done! Now my current job has broken me, every attempted step forward is met with a big F you, not today MF'er. Like constantly telling a child they are stupid, they start to believe it. I am now team Get Nothing Done. The best decision I can make right now is to walk away from a demoralizing, negative and unfulfilling job. Even the boss's dog hates me! (⁠´⁠;⁠︵⁠;⁠`⁠)

man you're constantly demonstrating what a great human being you are

The flow of your videos man............ Such a smooth transition from shit-talk to real-life-actual-serious-and-helpful-advice to back to shit-talk. Absolutely killed it man, and of course I'll keep this piece of info securely in my info vault and try to shift my gears towards this mentality :^ ]

Man this hits so close to home, and just at the right time, thank you Prime!

Love it! I was asked to go to China to teach our coworkers about our fronted. Was I scared? Yes! Did I grow as a person? Yes! Living in regret is way scarier than public speaking.

I'm not actually a programmer, I'm an FX Animator, and I've absolutely had my fair share of imposter syndrome over the years. But I recently got asked to do an FX Design job, taking on more of a Lead role in the production and I'm so glad I said yes. Of course I've been terrified that I won't be good enough, or I'm not ready yet, but so far I think things are going well. I've designed a bunch of FX, shaped a significant amount of the look of the project I'm on, and hopefully I get to do this again cus I'm really enjoying the extra freedom it lends me x

so simple and so true, if you spend enough time you'll eventually solve the problem at hand

This is the right mentality to have! Amazingly put into words and examples. It's such an important way of approaching new things. Its also called the student's mindset FYI

This is right on, especially for us self taught devs. Preach it prime!

This is just the thing that I needed to hear. Thank you for making videos like this!

Needed to hear this. Have no issue thinking that way, but it stems from thinking I'm shit🤣 hard to remember to see how far you've come when the problems never get "easy"

I always come back to this video, straightforward no bs and very encouraging

Finished my first project at my first full time job last Thursday. I'm more comfortable with frontend but was hired as a backend engineer cause I knew enough . The project was given to me at my 2nd week and tbh I was and still am overwhelmed. I have a lot of imposter syndrome, made a lot of small mistakes, and a bunch of hurdles. But even then, I knew I'll be able to do it somehow. Good thing I have good and understanding seniors to help me with how I should approach certain things. At my lowest point during that project where I'm questioning if I'll be even be able to pull this project off. I stumbled upon this vid and gave me the needed pep talk to continue. That experience really gave me the confidence and validation for myself that even if I'm not good atm, I'm competent enough right now that I will be. Thanks Prime for helping me through my self taught dev journey!

Well said. I say the same thing in my podcast and to the hundreds of programmers I work with. Don't say no, be open to the opportunities that surround you everyday but most people don't see. Seize the moment and trust your experience and instincts. Find a mentor. Be a mentor. I could go on for 30 minutes about every opportunity I simple discovered and took. My career was like a Disney ride through the technology industry! I make sure every new job is a new challenge compared to what I've done before. People are paralyzed with fear of failure. You need to get over that because you will fail a lot. One mentor once told me if you aren't failing big enough that you get fired every now and then, you aren't taking big enough risks. Still letting that bounce around my head 38 years later but he was telling me to challenge conventional wisdom when it wasn't, Try new approaches that shatter golden calves. Fail fast and often. Eventually you will land at a place where the vibrations are just right and you operate at your highest. It's such a fun and always surprising industry we're in.

yes this has been my mentality too after the 3rd year in my college. I finally understood I am capable of solving anything if I put my mind to it.

Same with doctoral thesis. Most people have a very conflicted relationship with their doctoral thesis. You know it inside out, every problem, every compromise that you had to do because the data were not exactly right, "if only I could have done this or that" or "if that they it hadn't been raining", etc. And then you see other people's thesis and they are so nice, so meaningful, so full of great data. But in reality they are exactly the same, you just do not know their work inside out as you know your own.

100%. The biggest advancements in my career have come from me saying yes to the big, scary and uncertain problems that others thought you'd be crazy to tackle

I'm a mediocre engineer at best but using this simple logic in the video I've been able to be also a mediocre 3d animator, learned a few game engines as well. I'm able to contribute on any project I'm in just cause I was interested to tinker with shit others didn't have / want to. Even if I know that shit will take me 2 or 3 weeks more than, lets say, Prime need, Ama still do it cause why not.

I REALLY appreciate these nice and short vids that get straight to the point. Tried watching the twitch streams but there’s just too much tomfoolery and exaggerated malarkey.

It's like that movie quote, when it's feels scary tu jump in that's exactly when you jump, nice video prime!

Yep, I need to adopt this fully right now. Thanks!

“Driving a Lambo, writing PHP” lol

Ah man.. Prime, I never thought I'd feel like crying man. You have no idea how much you're helping me mentally right now. I just graduated 2 months ago, started my first real software engineering job where I'm more accountable for an actual project. There's a ton of pressure I've been feeling the past few weeks trying to deliver on time and being anxious if I actually deserve to be an engineer. It's tough running into more difficult problems compared to just working on fun side projects to get hired. I'm constantly feeling like I might get fired because some of the problems I run into are so overwhelming. Even worse when the requirement is seemingly easy yet it takes me a long time to figure out. Everything you said here just feels like a good pat in the back, man. Thank you!

Great advice!!! I have to tackle a bug in a language I don't know on a platform that's new to me... and I was dreading it until watching this video.

Can relate. I've found the feeling "can do anything" years ago. We completed a 1300 km bicycle trip in less than 13 days iirk. The trip was fun and very hard. Now I understand how many dangers we avoided and I thank God for that. Starting from that, I try to be patient while solving problems. Often I forget and rush, feel bad, forget about the problem for the few days, return back, and solve it. Or, don't return to the problem at all. That's also fine. Patience and enjoying the process are a few parts of feeling good for me. As one book says, "the road is made by walking".

I completely agree with this, it has opened several doors for me and I suffer from a crapload of impostor syndrome. Nothing feels better than showing the impostor within me that he was wrong.

Just true! 🙂3 years ago I coudnt realise to be in business... but now seems just normal part of my life

Very true, I have had this mentality since i started working day 1. I have been dominating at my different jobs. I never say no. I do whatever is being asked. Doesn't matter if it's a shitty 20 year old codebase or whatever. From never saying no, I now have professional experience from Python, C#, C++, C, Swift, JavaScript, Java, etc.

Thank you Mr Primeagen! Having a "I can do it. No biggie" attitude is perfect. Another important point that you can probably address in the next video: being stuck in learning/tutorial hell. Happens to me a lot when I am learning a new concept and have to consciously put effort to wrestle myself out of it. I enjoy learning new stuff so much that, when I am stuck in this "hell", I don't get shit done anymore as I spend all my time learning all the intricate details of that particular concept/language/whatever that I am reading about. Funny now that I think of it, I don't even know your actual name! Yet have made a tremendous impact on my life already. Thanks again!

Don't expect every opportunity to work out easily. I once got in a project (embedded C, power electronics) that we quoted for 3 months and 1.5 years later we "finished" it. It was the hardest thing I ever did, and in the end we realized we kinda sorta solved a problem no one else was stupid enough to even try... Hardest thing I ever did, biggest financial loss our company had in the last 10 years, and although finished, never actually made it into production, but in the end a highlight I can still be proud of and my managers see it the same. Try and even fail sometimes, but never accept defeat.

This video changed my life, you solved a mental dilemma I was having, thanks.

You're not wrong Prime. AND I KNOW IT but my brain is trying to come up with reasons why I still don't do it. BRAIN SHUT UP! We did it before, we can do it again!!

PHP: got it Lambo: next problem to solve I agree but at the same time I feel like is saying to someone "stop being depressed". Tho a good reminder that you are capable it's always good 🤘

its called self efficacy

I actually came to that conclusion years ago when I learned about the idea of a turing machine. Any problem that can be solved, can be solved with a turing machine. Humans are definitely turing complete.

Man this is a great channel to have found rn, on a new backend team where things are complex + new so i appreciate the words

I just recently found out about your channel and I love it. There are so many valuable things I have had confirmed from you. I am trying to have the same approach as you have in regards of not saying no to things I dont know. Those are just extra challenges and so far I have overcome most of them, now and then there are some that are not worth it but then I externalize with which I also had a lot of problems. Some of the problems were due to imposter syndrome, but some I think might be related to behavior related to ADHD for which I finally reached out to get diagnosis. How I wish I could find someone like you as a mentor, but even this channels serves the purpose, partially in that role.

Thanks for this video, it's really inspiring. I have the same mentality as you but still experience imposter syndrome. Never thought of using this "I know I'll find a way to make it work" mentality as an imposter syndrome countermeasure.

I'm currently a college student, and one of my classmates asked me to help him create a simple web app written in PHP. At first, I didn't really like the idea of investing my time in learning PHP because, from what I know, there are better languages or frameworks to invest in. But I still took it because I'm curious, and I enjoyed it. Since then I have kept taking risks for the sake of knowledge.

Needed this right now man, thank you.

BROTHER, YOU ARE THE BEST!!! You oooh really helped me!! THANK YOU VERY MUCH!

Always look forward to a video from the two ti... ah, I mean ThePrimeagen!

I have slowly been realizing this. I began thinking to myself "in the end, its just code, im good with code, it'll just take longer but its just code" I have approached so many things thinking I wouldnt be able to do it, to then be able to do it, sometimes doing it pretty easily too,

So this is basically just self-confidence, and imposter syndrom is to a large part a lack of self.confidence. Personally I have something of a similar outlook, but more in terms of "I know it will work out, it always does", which is a form of self-confidence built up over a long time and lots of successes, especially successes where you are pushing boundaries in some way, such as less effort or working on things you are not an expert in.

This is so true. Whenever I’m feeling daunted by a task in front of me I usually avoid it for as long as possible. I can usually get the ball rolling if I ask myself: what is it that I don’t get and how do I learn about that thing? You just have to trust that you can learn new things and that it’s ok not to know immediately. That’s what makes programming fun and fresh.

I really needed to hear this. Thank you.

This is a great reminder man. Agree wholeheartedly. Always volunteer for the things you don’t know how to do.

Prime is my programming coach at this point. Straight bussin fr fr, no cap.

Awesome advise! Awesome mentorship! It helps being a masochist and loving the pain of embarrassingly sucking at something until I don't.

One of my favorite videos of yours (although I’ll happily watch just about anything from you). Big inspiration for CS students such as myself

"I don't want to watch the game , I want to be in the game" - ThePrimeagen

When I told my boss I want to take on more backend tasks and challenges/ new tasks that are not what I have been working on, he said "ok but I expect you to do it at the same level and speed as you do the tasks you do have experience in". Like LOL as if that is even possible, I am all for taking on challenges but you have to be somewhere where your boss understands that it will be, well a challenge for you if it's new.

Great one, thnak you!

Love this so much. If it wasn't for me taking the time and learning the computer testing system at work and be willing to learn Perl, I would never be in the position I'm in now. It has grown my knowledge so much and love it.

Sometimes it's not fear of the task, it's just laziness. And I'm speaking for myself 'cause I've make these excuses instead of be making those gains. Glad to have that father figure to keep me on the Sigma Grind.

I was task at work with creating the base architecture for a library so our team ca interact with the seller partner API from Amazon. The authentication is done using sigv4 from AWS. How ever I read the documentation, I couldn't get how to implement it correctly, but I pushed through on and we now have a custom signer that we can use internally and that since it's custom we can make modifications to fit our processes. If I though it was just too hard to implement, we probably would be running some half-assed code from stack overflow that we didn't really understand.

As someone early in their SWE career, this is definitely something I needed to here, and I'm sure there are drones of others who are early (or even not-early) in their career that need to here this as well. ThePrimeagen really out here being the SWE content creator we need, but don't deserve.

The obstacle is the way. Marvelous vid and mindset, Mr Prime!

this is so true, I see all kind of people making themselves miserables and is very, very sad. But this is also fault of management, your job is not the most important in the world, people fail and please, just take the risk

Had to create an outlook plugin for a client lately. I really didn‘t want to do it because I didn’t have a lot of time and the only way to get some information was the official Microsoft documentation. I did it anyways and when I had to hand the project over to my colleague last week I actually realized that I knew so much stuff that wasn‘t even mentioned in the docs and I found and reported several bugs with office.js. It is such a great feeling to be a „pro“ in a specific area.

I think imposter syndrome in a new workplace for me comes from not knowing what my coworkers know. I join a team knowing some things that seem obvious to me, and I don't know if they're obvious to everyone around me. They also use nomenclature that I'm unfamiliar with, and discuss problems at a different level than what I'm familiar with. So at the end of the day, I'm thinking "do I know way more than them about this, or way less? And if it's less, would I be wasting their time to make them explain it to me?" But the reality is, you don't want to stay in that "too afraid to ask" mentality forever, because it will only get worse the longer you go. For me, when possible, I think the best way to break the ice is to shoot the shit with them about non work stuff as much as I can. See them as a human, understand how they communicate, develop a mutual respect for each other. Then when you talk shop, you have that groundwork to build from. You know where they leave details out when they don't intend to, you know when and how best to ask for more details and how to gauge their response to being asked questions they do or don't know how to answer.

Funnily enough, this's one thing I don't recall ever having much trouble with, _as far as technical skill go_. Maybe it's because I taught myself programming (and a handful of other computer-related skills) as a teen with just library books and a lot of trial and error. I just haven't figured out how to apply the same mentality to "soft skills"...

I love these videos. Most of the time I the same mentality. I don't like to do frontend work but now my manager is asking me to do some shit on frontend, I was thinking fk it, I'm not a frontend engineer, but now watching your video I gained motivation

Liked and subbed! I'm actually starting to programming myself, learning everything through Udemy, and after a few classes, they give projects based on what you just learned, and at those projects my brain just goes blank, like i've forgotten everything i've just learned, but i still try and fail miserably, sometimes like i just don't know what i was doing. This video gave me inspiration to keep trying and learning! Everyone Here can and will accomplish their goals! Thank you and lets keep on learning/improving people!

Best decision I made, to take a 6 month break, after 3 months in a new job I finally got, was made tech lead of my team, 100% remote, living in a country with 50% living cost. That mindset you describe in the video is 100% the way to go.

Love the content you're posting, this is so useful, keep it up mate!

I've really only struggled with imposter syndrome very temporarily and I think that a big part of that was always choosing to believe that I could make it happen. I'm not sure where that decision came from, but you always do a great job of reminding me of that fact

Thanks Prime! I just joined a new job and was having a bit of imposter syndrome. I saw this video and worked some extra on the weekend and figured out how to proceed. I'm a lot less worried now

Seriously, I needed that! Very glad I watched that video!!

That's what i've done lately, i've forced myself to contribute to Clang and that's maybe the thing that i'll be pround of That's also how you learn new things

Thank you for sharing this. Ten years of programming and there's still always a niggle that "I’m doing it the wrong way, I don’t know enough and I can’t do it”. It’s weird how one forgets the past solved problems and hurdles in the moment because of fear … but this was great motivation. Will keep your ideas and positive energy in mind.

> I am in this video and I like it

this is great man. im just starting out my career. i ended up going the self taught route so i keep doubtong myself even thohgh i always find a solution and im two years in. i gotta enjoy the process more instead of worrying about the bad concequences

Another great message Prime ⚡ But I need to see proof of that 10.5 100m dash 🧐

PRIMEAGEN WHY WHY WHY WHY do you have to make so much sense? Gosh, thank you :>

huh. i like that we're on the same page with this. i had the opportunity to make video games, so i did it when noone else could. my boss wanted to reject the idea but i said "let me do this", so he let me. i have the opportunity now to teach some new folks php so i can move on to write even more rust code. because, you know what? nowadays you'll have to be an opportunist in order to get right where you want, or else you'll be dismissed without any second thought. and i've learned that the hard way.

You are big my brother! I love you

I'm in your situation at the moment, I'm afraid, after watching your video, I feel more scared now 🤣 thanks for advices, it's great to hear some positive thinking!

I think that Prime powers come from his hoodies.... now, seriously, I'll follow your excellent advise.

This is a big dog post, and more juniors need to hear it. It writes home to what my motive has been on the products I build at work and on the side when I feel like it, you’re either a cheetah or sloth in software-land

There's 2 things people hate: - long term benefit - putting fun into life itself And I'd say you don't hate them, you got them right, and I hope I do too in the future. What people want is: - immediate catchy (tik tok yes, Vim no) - to pause life and drink expensive coffees Not that this is bad, there are artists who split life into drawing and working for a job and they do well. Also if "risks" panic someone too much they can make life more frustrating for them. But as soon as you can afford the better route you should go for it.

If you tell yourself you can't do something you won't try nearly as hard as if you believed you could. In the context of lifting a really heavy weight off the ground, that extra oomph is the 10% difference that determines whether that bar stays on the ground or it goes up. So if you want to grow in any aspect of your life you HAVE to take on new challenges with the attitude of "I can do this". There's just no other way around it.

This makes me think of a Picard quote from TNG: "There's a way out of every box, a solution to every puzzle. It's just a matter of finding it."

My motto has always been ‘how hard can it be?’ Turns out the answer, often, is ‘very’

I guess it's that's not that simple, at least for me personally...I mean I'm constantly thinking - fu*k, this time I'm screwed, no idea what is going on and how to fix it...but then, after a day, two - or a week - I finally find the issue and solution and feel this relief...but then, 2 days later, another problem comes in, even more complicated...for me personally, this constant flow of errors/issues to fix is kinda exhausting...it kinda drains my 'mana'...at some point I'm simply unable to fix anything, cause I'm 'out of mana'...and that's usually when thoughts like "damn, I'm a total idiot" come in.

Lol, reminds me of all the crazy things I've thrown myself into. Good advice.

This is probably the best career and life advice you will hear

Great advice!! I got a job in webdev without ever having done any web programming in my *life*. I didn't know anything about HTML or CSS, let alone Typescript, PHP, MySQL, or even most of the basic stuff needed for using Git. If you're confident in your ability to solve problems and to learn on the fly, you can do just short of anything. Take those risks! You may mess up, but that's part of learning! If you truly believe in yourself, you can do anything.

thats it Imma now go take on hard problems and become a boss

This doesn't apply just for programming, gold content like always man.