Replies: 24 comments 10 replies
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Yihui, thank you for sharing this very real story. It is encouraging to know that even someone like yourself, whose tools fundamentally changed how I work on a day to day basis (in a good way!), has had struggles with procrastination. I feel inspired to do more, and plan better. Again, thank you for sharing! |
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Yihui: I cannot thank you enough for your time and generosity for sharing your personal journey and lessons learned through your experiences. I will echo Nicholas' view that your story inspires me to be much better at many aspects of my work and other collaborations. It's been an honor to have you on my podcast and you are always welcome back anytime! |
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Hello Yihui. I wanted to just say that this was a very powerful blog post, thank you for sharing it. I recently purchased Dalio's book, after having been indoctrinated in the thought process by a number of former Bridgewater alumni and I must admit, it's really helped me a lot. I think I am becoming a better thinker and a better partner because of it. I hope you find the same. In my 1:1s with direct reports I often ask "do you have any questions" or sometimes I ask: "Is there anything I can do for you?" I am finding that, like you mention, those are hard things for people to respond to. I will look to try to find a better way to actually accomplish my goal. Thank you again for sharing, and I am at your service if you ever need anything. |
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Yihui: when I first saw this post, I knew I needed to procrastinate really reading it until I could devote my full attention to it - I am very glad that I did. Let me add my voice to Eduardo's - I, too, am at your service. |
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Yihui, thanks for sharing your personal story. It was very powerful, inspirational and educational. Sharing a similar cultural background, I am also learning how to strike a balance between freedom and execution. Thanks for sharing again! |
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Thank you for sharing your memorable events with us. The "putting official work aside and pursuing side projects" struggles you went through would probably resonate with a lot of phD students. Yet most of us either forget the past pains or pretend that they never happened. I'm impressed by your picturesque recount of the less glamorous parts of the past and how you imbibe strength from it. Very encouraging indeed. |
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I think you're a very brave and thoughtful person, thanks so much for sharing this Yihui. It also seems to me that some of the challenges you mention (choosing among the many projects out there, being bludgeoned with issues, overcommitment) are just really hard problems, perhaps especially in our time and in (open source) development. Maybe it's a privilege, but also a tremendous burden. I imagine others might face similar stressors (I know I do, though at a much much lower level of competence), and perhaps we can learn from how you took them on. Your story reminded me of this quote, apparently by Ian Maclaren:
So I'll try to remember that when benefiting again from your and your colleagues generous work, and when posting an issue. |
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thanks for sharing!! though would love an abstract... |
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Hi Yihui, This is such a great post and I have learned a lot from you. As a fresh graduate student in an (kind of) industry job, I am facing what you were facing. One big change is loss of freedom but gain of money. It is very hard to fight with procrastination too. One of my ways is to set up a time frame for each issue/question, just like doing the exam on 8 hours per day (2.5 mins per question). This way will stress me to get things done in a very short time. By the way, I am glad to hear that you have recovered from the past crisis. Hopefully your salary is recovered too.:) Just remember that many of our works are heavily depend on your packages (especially "knitr") so you are very important! |
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Yihui, your story is as helpful as it is brave. I think so many of us can relate. |
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Thanks for your post . Yes , it’s really difficult to say ‘No’ sometimes at work or in personal life and end up working half-heartedly .... |
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Hi Yihui, I am touched and inspired by your story. You are amazing! I have asked several questions on R to you, and always got prompt replies from you. I know you work very hard, but have never imaged that you have been dedicated to the R community like this. Thanks for your work, and hope you can really enjoy both life and work! |
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Yihui, this is a very touching post - thank you for writing it and sharing it with all of us. A lot of what we do in the outer world is simply a deflection from the issues we face in our inner world. But when we are ready to look at those issues with unflinching honesty and take steps to remedy them, we can heal ourselves and grow into better human beings. If our ability to love ourselves is diminished, we use the love and praise we receive from other people as a substitute for self-love - while this works well as a temporary solution, it can also create a perpetuating addiction (as you seem to have discovered) of wanting more and more love and praise. To get other people's love and praise, we have to "perform" and "do". In contrast, to get self-love, we just have to "be". Loving ourselves for our intrinsic value transcends the fickle world of "performing" or "not performing", of "doing" or "not doing". It really sounds like you have made big strides in bringing more self-love into your life and you feel more grounded and balanced for it. For many of us, the first half of our life is spent battling ourselves and our demons. It's when we learn to make peace with ourselves that the second part of our life can really blossom. I think all people should strive to learn how to feel good inhabiting their minds and bodies so they can enjoy life more. This requires hard work but pays off enormous dividends. Procrastination, perfectionism, creativity and learning go hand in hand. I wonder if we procrastinate more over tasks where we know upfront there is no scope for perfectionism, creativity and learning to unfold - the tasks are just too boring and mundane. Our minds like to be challenged and stretched and these types of tasks provide no intrinsic rewards. One way to tackle them would be to add an extrinsic reward to them so that our brain can still get its "kick" after completing the task. All my best, Isabella |
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This is one for the bookmarks! Truly epic. Thanks for sharing. |
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DT may not be your favorite work ever, but I have to tell you it was that package specifically that got me the results that a CFO wanted. And those results got me where I am today. And on top of that, when I had questions about the package, you were always much cooler than you could have been (and a lot of open source maintainers are). Thank you for that. |
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wow, Yihui, I just finished the first part of Dalio's book and i thought about you and read this post. I am speechless. I saw a lot of parallels and similarities between your journey and mine, though I can't hold a candle to you in terms skills and passion toward open source. This post has been super inspiring and very timely for me in a time of uncertainty and my personal journey of finding my purpose in life, and learn to "just be". |
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Yihui, it is a very encouraging story. I am a mechanical Ph.D. student and am struggling for graduation. I did not like my major, and feel so comfortable and inspired when writing my first R package. I often ran into the same situation as you did before: the conflict between what you want to do and what you have to do. For me, I want to become a software engineer in the future, although right now I only know R and love it. On the other hand, I have to deal with a lot of academic stuff, which I really don't like, before I can graduate. Thanks again for sharing your personal journey and it is really inspiring. |
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I really need to read your blogs more often. I empathise a lot with what you say here. I love my passion projects and I really wish I have more time on them but alas responsibility kicks in. Thanks for sharing Yihui! Admire your openness and reflectiveness and meticulousness of your reference links :) |
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I'm glad to know that you found some of my posts useful. For the reference links, yes, I often have tons of links in my posts (some are quite subtle), so you need to be a little cautious not to be led astray :) When I read Wikipedia pages, I often forget what I was looking for originally after clicking those links to go from one page to another, and yet another...
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Your posts are certainly technical useful and psychologically insightful. It reminded my own PhD time when I was trying to survive those meetings haha. I also have a tendency not to tell people what I'm doing (not because I'm trying to keep it a secret but sometimes I find the whole conversation inefficient when I'm trying to figure out things) nor am I good for asking for help. But I've become a whole lot better at communicating since then (it's amazing what you do for survival haha). |
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yihui I find great resonance with your personal assessment. for some of us, we need to work on our own stuff and be done w it. |
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Once in a while I always have to come back to this blog post to remind myself, that it is a process and not a one-off event, to become the better version of yourself. |
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It is a process indeed. Believe it or not, I've been experiencing my second career crisis for a few months and just walked out of my first-ever breakdown, but this time I probably will not write a blog post about it (for complicated reasons). This year has been incredibly tough. The pandemic has so many unexpected consequences. I've been thinking hard about what the pain was trying to remind me of learning. I guess the first lesson to me was to be more tolerant with other people: we could be standing right in each other's blind spot. I got hit in a blind spot really hard this time. Anyway, in this particularly difficult time, I'm particularly grateful to people like you for your care. All the best!
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Sometimes, our shared thoughts become the mirror through which others are able to reflect their lives too. That is mostly what you've done/doing by publicly sharing your profound thoughts and personal experiences. Sorry to know that you have had to endure another period of personal challenges. Wishing you all the best as you turn the corner and feel better again. I'm glad to have come across your work and mostly importantly interacted with you. It's not easy to be this candid with oneself in a public sphere. I'm rooting for you to overcome your current crisis. |
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Hi, Yihui, This year is tough. Everyone is going through something. I am, too, doing some thinking about my career, about my purpose in life. But I don't want to consider it as a crisis/breakdown. I'd like to think of it as transformation. I have been doing a lot of thinking and reading too. Anthony De Mello's book "Awareness", and a recent read "10% Happier" by Dan Harris have helped me a lot. I highly recommend them. |
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Very inspiring stories. Thank you. |
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Hi Yihui, I discovered your blog only recently, and it is heartening to read the words you write, especially this post. When I first read through some of them, I could only be intimidated by the sheer amount of work you have done. However, posts like this and a few others, make it more relatable that every one of us started out making dumb mistakes and then the truly efficient ones are those that learn from them. I have a hard time deciding to focus my energy on one project (general projects, not computer-oriented), since several other projects, sometimes unrelated, fight to occupy my curiosity. Your words offer me perspective and hope in resolving problems in a manner that future me would be proud of. Thank you for writing these words, and being honest with ups and downs in your life. I seem to be on a marathon reading all of your posts. |
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Thank you for the kind words!
Yes, I have written too many posts these years, but have slowed down quite a bit since the pandemic. I'm hoping to pick up the marathon in 2023. You should feel lucky if you can't read Chinese :) |
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Hi Yihui, thanks for sharing. I just came back from your most recent post in 2024 and read about your “issues” at the beginning of your career. I only had two statistics courses in my life but I was surprisingly drawn to your story and even cried when seeing you got hurt, but eventually found the cure. It is interesting to see how people at different stages in their life, sharing different experiences and passions, could find resonance with each other. Perhaps it is because I am also a person that “always has some issues” and ridiculous OCD, and the cause of both is, not unexpected, a share of empathy and intolerance of imperfection. There is unlikely to be a cure once and for all, and I believe the process of solving these issues itself is probably the meaning of life—like how you are into debugging, I find sharing words with the communities an interest of mine. I was also surprised by your unwavering effort in developing packages, platforms, and resources for the use of R in China and beyond. As a student who once used them in class, I would say that your passion in career as a software engineer has far-reaching impact (I am also a person bad at accepting praises but this one is true from the heart). It is true, as the quote you shared above, “every decision you make, from what you eat to what you do with your time tonight, turns into who you are tomorrow.” In a world as today, many find it impossible to stick to what they like and not yield to the pressure of life. I was moved by your persistence and I truly hope in another post, perhaps ten or twenty years later, you are still on the way to the future you have always dreamt of. I hope life could “hurt” people with dedicated pursuit like you less so that they could still choose to “believe.” I like how you end with “the future” section in each and every one of your posts. I was not a straight A student throughout my whole life and managed to work out the right answer for each stage, but words as such make me believe that there is always the possibility, and the need, to search for something new, something unexpected tomorrow. In the end, this is what enchanting about creation, right? Oftentimes I turn into the world of arts, literature, and history for help and a moment of relief. I am not sure whether those texts or images from thousands of years ahead of me would provide any answer into the future. “Don’t let life randomly kick you into the adult you don’t want to become.” Hope we can all follow these words and answer the heart’s true calling. I once wrote a retrospective on Cillian Murphy in student newspaper, and there is a quote that I find empowering and would love to share with you: “I can’t remember which director said it, but he said it takes 30 years to make a good actor.” Who knows how many years it takes to excel in life, but not giving up is the answer with no use-by dates. |
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Hi Cindy, I read your comments last night and I was so very moved. Since I have been inundated by messages and emails in the past few days, please forgive my brevity. One major thing I learned from the comments from almost six years ago was that we can gain enormous support from others when we are willing to open our vulnerable heart. It certainly takes courage to (publicly) admit our failure and talk about setbacks, but once you truly believe that no one is perfect, you will have the courage to allow yourself to make mistakes and admit them. You no longer need to be harsh to yourself. In the mean time, you will allow everyone else to make mistakes and it will be much easier to forgive them, too. Frankly speaking, I have never taken this to my heart until last year. I have always been vulnerable (and will continue to be so in the future), and the change last year in me was that nothing could easily hurt me anymore. I have learned to be a little nicer to myself, and lower my expectation of other people. I believe you will never cry again because I get hurt by anything. From now on, you can celebrate on everything, good or bad, that happens to me. (BTW, not sure if you have listened to "Eyes on me"---I just sang this song this afternoon while doing karaoke at home, and your comments came to my mind.)
I absolutely agree.
Me too. I rarely read books related to my profession. I read a lot of books on the art side instead. You made me think of one of my favorite books, Van Gogh's Letters (I read the Chinese translation since I'm very slow in reading English). If you liked my post, I think you will love this book as much as I do (you might cry more than once while reading). Many people know van Gogh by his paintings, but I was even more impressed by his letters. I don't know if anyone else has mentioned it to you before, but hey, I can sense your talent of writing letters like van Gogh. Do you have a personal website? If not, I can help you set up one. I'll be interested in reading more of your writings. |
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Hi Yihui, when drafting this reply, I am sitting in the corner of a cafe in Florence and, what a coincidence, having “Eyes On Me” playing in my headphones. Just last week I visited Musée d'Orsay in Paris and saw the Van Gogh exhibition “The Final Moments.” His writings and bold brush strokes, particularly with the bare roots painted on the same day as his suicide, stood out to me. “My life too is attacked at the very root," he wrote. I will probably pick up his letters to read on road as you recommend. It is a pity that I could not read in Dutch to see the world as he did. Van Gogh, among a few other artists I like, have the talent to appreciate solitude. Thank you for replying promptly in a busy day. I speak less in person but often felt like having a tones of words to spill out in writing, especially when reading thought-provoking posts as yours. Speaking of which, I once spoke to Coco Krumme, an applied mathematician and writer, and I also enjoyed reading her reflections on both professional pursuit and personal life. It would be wonderful if you could help in setting up a personal website! It has always been my dream to archive my drifting thoughts. Could I send you a book by mail after I returned to the US? I published book reviews sometimes and received some great copies to read last year, and it would be my pleasure to share them with someone I could have great conversations with. |
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I can't believe the coincidence... It's also hard to believe that this is the first time that I have publicly mentioned the Van Gogh letters to someone, and when I mentioned it, you just saw his exhibition. Anyway, my address is here: https://github.com/yihui/yihui.org/blob/master/content/en-vitae.md?plain=1#L13 Thank you! I'll work on the website as soon as I have some free time. It shouldn't take more than a few minutes if you don't mind getting started with a simple theme. |
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Hi Yihui, a simple theme is more than enough. Follow whichever option works best for you. Much appreciated. Within a few days I will also send a travel bookmark, which I have a hobby of collecting, along with the book. An interesting fact I learned in Italy is that the tradition of collecting souvenirs started with landscape painters such as Antonio Canal. If we were in the eighteenth-century Venice, I would buy an excellent painting instead of a bookmark for you. |
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Yihui, thank you for sharing your real story. I have experiences similar to yours, and this post is very helpful to me. I am afraid of making mistakes, and when I do make mistakes, I choose to escape them. After reading this post, I started to change step by step. Thank you for your sharing. COS is a very good community to help me learn data science. Thank you for your efforts. |
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My Early Career Crisis (2014 - 2015)
A painful transition of a fresh PhD from academia to industry, and from selfish open-source to product-oriented open-source
https://yihui.org/en/2018/02/career-crisis/
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