I've had the pleasure of being part of a Formula Student racing team at my university. 3 weeks in now, and it's brought back a lot of feelings.
It's a familiar rush. A kind of hope and anxiety that propels you to think ahead. Yet it is clear that execution must be exact. Planning ahead is nothing without precision and focus down to the very second.
It is in these times that I get scared. Not because I can't do it. But a fear that I would get pulled in so deep, I would be sacrificing everything to be as good as my teammates and to create the final product.
Building a racing system is far different from what I had done earlier in an earlier student technical organisation. I was responsible for making the battery systems for a student rocket team, and that experience felt very lonely. My systems was a dependency of just the avionics system of the rocket, which was essentially just a monitoring and launch system. The rocket itself could fly regardless. All you had to do was launch it, and at a high enough altitude the avionics would trigger the rocket to separate and release the parachuting system. The battery systems would simply monitor usage; the system I designed could still support the avionics as it ran in parallel to the battery.
Now that I'm developing the racing system for a car, every system works together to make sure that the car works. Without a working battery management system for the car, there would be absolutely no power delivery. No working battery management system, no safety systems, no guarantee that the car would be able to drive reliably.
And when you have a driver, a life on the line, and a huge 600V battery pack right behind him delivering 140 amperes worth of current - you don't want to screw up. At the worst case it is a module that would be equal to about 86 kg of TNT. It wouldn't explode like it, but it would kill anybody within a couple meters radius.
With such risks in mind, it is not in my best interest to not be the best at what I do. Nor is it in my best interest not to learn how to engineer in systems, rather than individual modules.
4 years of university would not have prepared me for such a task. It's the closest to high performance as I can get, even with internships in mind. The way I see it, there is no choice but to get good.
At the time of writing I am 23 years old. Through trial and error, procrastination, and 'living' this life I have learned that if you want better for yourself it is really as simple as immersing yourself into only doing those things that contribute directly to that 'image' of you getting better. No amount of self-care, no amount of body hacking or tracking can lead you to become the person that you would be proud of being, if you don't jump right in.
Yet there is the obvious question of 'what about the other things'? We all have other interests too. I am not just a technical person. I have a lot of pride in enjoying other things that I am good at or enjoy - visual arts, music, learning languages, indulging in other sciences apart from electronics, business and connecting with people. Before I chose electronics I wanted to become a chemist. I still have an affinity for chemistry. These are all important to me. I struggle too with thinking of opportunities in other areas of my life that I sometimes feel I neglect and potentially stunt growth in.
And the rest of the things that make life worth living - friends, health, and good sleep - those are all important. It's a matter of factoring those other pleasures of life in to my need to get better at what I do and achieve results. Not the opposite, which I used to make the mistake of earlier. I think that lot of people tend to think of the opposite when they think of 'work-life balance'. It's this idea of 'harmony' that gets conflated with a 50/50 balance. It is not feasible to have this when you are aiming high and have high standards for yourself.
There is no right approach to appease those thoughts and temptations either. So called 'polymaths' born and forgotten throughout centuries I assume have surely had issues with this curse of wanting everything. Benjamin Franklin, Al-Khwarizimi, Shen Kuo - all had interests that spanned more than just their domain. This is found in recent figures too, like Von Neumann, whose mathematics background contributed to areas spanning computer science, economics and biology. I am not an exception, and I suppose this restlessness will continue to haunt me for the rest of my life. It bothers me. It sometimes detracts from the actions that provide me the most value per unit time. In my case, it is designing algorithms, learning good practices with electrical design, learning semiconductor and quantum theory, learning a wide range of software and hardware stacks - tasks that seem impossible, but achievable.
I refer back to my earlier point in this case. What kind of actions, done consistently overtime would position your future actions to have the largest impact? How do you become a person so good that everything you touch is instantly better than what it was before you reached it?
To be that person you must allow yourself to be pulled in. To be an impactful person requires you to have the highest standards. You have to accept that you have to be difficult, within good reason. Let the results speak for themselves. It's not that the rest of your interests and obligations can wait; it's that your consistency in pursuing excellence is the dependency that allows you to pursue other interests in the first place. So you shouldn't be scared of 'going all in'. Everything depends on you going all in. And if you feel the pull, and if you are scared of getting good - embrace it. It's a simple choice between the fear of pursuing that path and the related sacrifices, or the fear of your life becoming something you do not want it to be. You are free to choose. How hard it is doesn't matter the moment you choose your path. If you know that is what you want, then make it happen.
As I said earlier, the curse - or blessing - will not cease. I know I will continue to want more. Probably the most annoying thing it brings is the feeling that you keep starting over from scratch. That there is always something to learn. And that you will never feel like it could be enough, because things can always be better. Probably the biggest hardship that may come from this is when it comes to raising a family at the same time. Taking care of the people you have is possibly the biggest challenge to giving in to success. There have been many a man who regretted not spending time with their loved ones in his pursuit of excellence.
But I'll leave that for another time. Despite these declarations, one thing is gravely certain. The only other dependency on your journey is our mortality as humans. So, no matter how deep into something you want to go - do not forsake your health, your sleep, and don't forget that you are still human. And so are the others around you that may care for you, who may love you, or hate you.