In general, I like the empathetic tone of the article, and I appreciate that it addresses an emotional facet of software development. But nevertheless it triggers some little part of me w/regard to telling people what they should or should not do, or what they may be proud of.
I worry for someone who reads "You also have a duty to your future self to release the project" and "...you tell yourself that you are the kind of person who ships" and takes that to mean "if you don't release it, you're failing yourself" and "you're the wrong kind of person if you don't ship."
On an emotional level, I think it's better to start from a place of (unconditional!) self-love, and go from there, rather than beating yourself up because you're not meeting some blogger's expectations of how you should act.
And just to be clear: I don't think the author means it that way, but that's one way it can come across, to some people, in some states-of-mind.
I've generally found it more useful to phrase things like this in terms of "I" rather than "you". As in: "I had X experience when I did Y" rather than "you should do Y, so that you will feel X." It's a common mis-step in giving well-meaning advice, I find.
EDIT: Also, I'm sure there are plenty of people who really do benefit from advice being given in this more pointed way, and I realize it's a bit onerous to always write and phrase things for a "safest common denominator," but I think it's worth keeping in mind, at least.
When I read Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, the book was written in second person point of view (using you/your vs I/my or they/theirs).
It sounded like the former emperor was talking directly to me, but later I found he was writing to himself. He never intended for his works to be published.
With that in mind, it may be possible the blogger, Aaron Francis, in this case is also speaking to himself.
As an aside, when I see people beat themselves up for not being able to face their struggles with the stoic reflection of Marcus Aurelius, I want to remind them that unlike them, Mr Aurelius was extremely wealthy, one of the most powerful men in the world, and absolutely blasted on opium for most of his day.
That sounds like it would complicate life, not make it easier? His wealth and power is predicated on him being the leader of the friggin’ Roman Empire. I don’t see that as an easy life.
Being an emperor and even trying to do a good job is damn near impossible in my eyes. Lot of respect for that. My tiny life sometimes overwhelms me already.
Because you (presumably) have to deal with every tiny thing in your life. Even having to buy and cook food can feel overwhelming when you’re busy trying to accomplish other things.
Marcus Aurelius had slaves. He was the emperor. He did not have to worry about the multitude of minutiae required just to continue to exist.
When it seems to you rich people are able to achieve more, remember that’s because they need to do less. If you did not have to think about basic necessities, you too could do more of what you dream about.
No, because I am less capable. It’s sometimes simple like that.
He wasn’t “rich people” like some Russian oligarch. He had shit to do and deep moral obligations. Millions of lives depended on it. Things of vast strategic importance stretching both thousands of miles and many decades.
Slaves don’t manage your long term ambitions and juggle your various mental and moral anguishes. They keep your house clean and provide you with food, sure. But to be honest, as a rich Westerner, I’m not too far off that.
He didn’t dream about standing knees deep in foreign horse shit managing the nitty gritty of brutal wars for the continued existence of an empire that looked solely at you.
All this could be handled with great nonchalance and incompetency which would have made his life relatively easy. But he decided to try and do a good job, now that’s something to take serious.
I get that “rich people” have some leverage, but this is another thing altogether.
You know yourself better than I, obviously, but if you're assuming that because your path differs from theirs, I think you should have some doubt that the difference is because you are less capable. It may be that you have different values.
While I believe in equal value of human life, I don't think we are in any way equal in abilities both inborn and acquired. People like Aurelius are rare and dismissing him and his accomplishments as "rich people have it easy" doesn't do justice to both his skills and rather significant sacrifices. More importantly, it absolves us from taking a look at ourselves and the state of our lives.
He seems to have resisted, or rather, his particular ethical framework provided the power to resist two very big and very real problems:
"Mo money mo problems" (~Socrates)
"Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely" (~Shania Twain)
> I don't think we are in any way equal in abilities both inborn and acquired.
Well, sure, I didn't say anything that disagrees with that at all. But you phrased it in a more general sense of being less capable.
Perhaps I read it wrong, but that didn't sound like you were saying "I'm less capable at X", rather that you were saying you were less capable in general. That was the sentiment I was pushing back on.
And I wasn't even saying that assessment was wrong. I was just saying that it's the sort of sentiment that can easily come from incorrectly underestimating one's self and so deserves a deeper look.
Ah, I see. Thanks for the clarification. I was going for “less capable at X”, but an emperor is quite a big job so he’s better at 75% of things that actually matter in practical life: planning, strategizing, managing, coercing, negotiating.
He was a fine emperor, but I have my specialties. Also, I have a good simple life for which I am grateful. Being an emperor sucks.
I believe he was making a pretty decent joke there. At least, I'm pretty sure he knew that Socrates didn't literally say "Mo money mo problems", either.
When Marcus Aurelius' status gets mentioned as a counterpoint to his philosophy, I like to remind people of Epictetus, which, born a slave, arguably lived the very opposite life of Aurelius and still ended up with a similar outlook on life.
I didn't know about the opium. He mentioned not getting addicted to things in the book. I bet he was talking about all of the things he had done wrong in his life. Do what I say not what I do.
Romans didn't consider opium an addiction as much as a medicine. Same as many of the drugs we now consider illicit. Marcus Aurelius was taking opium every day for "stomach issues" (krohns or similar perhaps?) and "nerves".
> it has realistically speaking no negative side effects.
Realistically speaking, that's not true. I did some voluntary experiments on myself during Ph.D. corrections process and, besides resistance, when coupled with a lot of hard work for a prolonged time, it's certainly very unhealthy for the body.
If you regulate your consumption and pair it with good sleep, it's a boon. Otherwise, it's a slow-killing drug.
I think moderate consumption is a function of tolerance and the specific metabolism of the person combined. I remember reading a comment in HN, where the commenter had a genetic trait which slowed caffeine metabolism by 4 times. So, he had it inside his system 4 times longer, and caffeine had no positive effect on him. However, let's not digress.
I'm not a body hacker, and I don't like to mess with my body much, however I had limited time, this was once in a lifetime situation, so I had to put some regular hours to finish my Ph.D. corrections.
Also, it's worth noting that I'm an avid black tea drinker since 6 or so. I didn't change my tea consumption habits through my life.
First, I read about resetting caffeine resistance/dependence. The method is simple and clear: "Give up coffee for a week. You'll have headaches in day 3-4. Endure. You'll be fine". Then I started to consume coffee to the point where I felt productive, yet not tipsy. I have a Starbucks mug, it's "Tall" in Starbucks parlance. I started with two cups. One morning, one after lunch. As the resistance built up, I started to increase in a controlled manner, to the same line. Productive, but not tipsy. I was putting 10-12 Pomodoros a day (250+ minutes of truly deep work), and my mind was mushy and tired everyday at ~5PM. I never pushed my body beyond that point, because I needed that brain tomorrow. Left my desk and got rest.
I finished everything on time, left coffee for ~3 months, had the headache on day 4, alleviated with 2 sips of coffee that day.
As of today, I drink half a "Tall" every day, and feels enough. If it's too stressful, I also drink another half on the other half of the day, and these are my findings about my body.
Considering I'm not in "battle mode", I can really work well with half a mug of coffee/day.
Coffee shorts my hunger regulation and appetite, and makes me lean to sugar. That's not good. Considering my brain has less brakes and way higher idle than most people (per my doctor's words), this is double bad. So regulating coffee has a net positive effect on everything.
I can reliably build and reset coffee reliance/resistance now, since I know how my body reacts to caffeine.
I always think 10-12 hours ahead since it's caffeine's life in your body. Will I be awake 10 hours later, or will I be battling against caffeine to sleep? This is important for me.
Coffees with mild/mild-high caffeine concentrations works best for me. I don't like high-caffeine or ultra-caffeinated coffees. They make me tipsy causes heart palpitations and creates stress for no reason.
Black tea is a good aid for sustaining my focus. It improves focus, but doesn't create the same stress on my body. I can almost drink infinite amount of coffee until 2 hours before sleep, and it'll keep me collected and focused. What I live is it doesn't create an illusion of being not-tired by priming the body, so I can reliably feel how tired I am and plan accordingly.
Hope this helps, and please don't hesitate to ask for further specifics.
Perhaps you know if this makes any sense or if it's just a personal impression of mine.
I started taking coffee at 20, for some two or three years, I later started taking black tea instead. One teaspoon of Twinnings Earl Grey, to be precise.
Thing is, by any calculation I do, a cup of coffee ought to have more caffeine in it than the cup of tea. Especially since I sometimes had not one, but two cups of coffee back then. I can still do this, if I'm travelling or I spend the day outside for some reason I'd rather take coffee than tea.
Problem is, tea wrecks my sleep in a way coffee just doesn't. It feels as if tea stays with me way, way longer than coffee does. If I ever take more than one cup of tea in a day I know that I'll be feeling it the next day, maybe even the day after, whereas with coffee, as long as I don't take it too late in the day I'm largely ok. Sleep does worsen somewhat but nothing I can't manage.
It puzzles me, since as far as I know it's caffeine in both cases, I don't understand why my metabolism seems to act in such a different way.
> Black tea is a good aid for sustaining my focus. It improves focus, but doesn't create the same stress on my body.
Black tea contains 30–90 mg of caffeine per cup (and some theobromine and theophylline, which are similar to caffeine, and also stimulants.) Giving up coffee because of the caffeine but dinking black tea instead is self-defeating.
I'm aware, but as some studies [0], and my body, shows, their effects are not similar. Black tea doesn't make me tense and causes heart palpitations for me. Instead, I keep my calm and being able to focus.
I don't reduce coffee because of caffeine, but because it affects my appetite, makes me tense when I drink too much, and causes heart palpitations and makes me uncomfortable. Black tea doesn't do any of that.
Have you ever tried Yerba Mate? If so, what do you think about it? I have found it to be similar to green tea and its derivatives, but it seems to have has less pronounced physical effects -- especially compared to coffee.
It doesn't come with many positives. It steals energy from later in the day for now. Potentially leaving you an over stimulated wreck. And the level at which you notice is higher than it should be for you to dial in the optimum amount.
Much like nicotine, it fools the user into thinking the cessation of withdrawal is part of the positive effect, rather than just removing a negative you wouldn't have if not for caffeine dependence.
That is very dependent on the consumed quantity, and the time of consumption.
And is nothing compared to the next most frequently used drugs, alcohol and nicotine, hell it has plenty of positive effects.
So my initial statement I believe still stands that humanity could hardly happen upon another substance that they could use in such a huge amounts with minimal negatives.
You could say the same thing for most amphetamines.
I don't think caffeine is particularly harmful, but it is a huge stretch to paint it as purely beneficial and without side effects. As a point of fact most people getting their "morning jolt" are just treating the side effects of extended caffeine usage - they are physically addicted.
About once a year I spend a month doing no caffeine. Every single year it is quite illuminating to do through first withdrawal and then to experience the first cup of coffee. I recommend it, and you might change some of your thoughts on caffeine if you do this.
only if it has an effect on you, I tried it many times and the only effect it seems to have on me is the bitter taste and heart palpitations if I drink too much of it.
if I'm tired or sleepy and drink it, I'm still tired/sleepy but with a higher blood pressure/heart rate.
sometimes I wonder if it's just people that oversell the effect of coffee.
You might be like me and apparently 1/5th of the human population doesn't really feel the effects of caffeine. Basically goes in and out of your system without 'proper processing'. Been years since I read about it, so things might have become more clear.
I can drink coffee/red bull all day and it'll do very little. Can drink just before going to bed and sleep just fine.
I'll try to find the study on this again if you're interested.
Some coffees with high caffeine have this effect on me as well. I find that different brands of coffees have very different effects on me, I can even get a good coffee feeling from some decafs. I'm convinced it's the other alkaloids in there besides caffeine that I like
Many people have a sleep problem disguised as a caffeine problem. Also many people have a caffeine problem disguised as a sleep problem.
Taken now and then, sure, probably worth it. The part in which a lot of people's brains are seemingly unable to wake up without taking caffeine? Probably not good.
Is it known what the dosage would have been? I read elsewhere before that though they drank wine all the time, its alcohol content was very low compared to today.
Sword of Damocles is a bitch and a half. Access to infinite pleasure is ineffective in the face of paranoia and misery since they don't cancel eachother out i.e they are not collinear vectors in mind-space.
Having access to Aurelius' cleaned up mind chatter is a blessing.
Nuanced and valuable feedback, that I receive. Thank you!
I think your edit was basically going to be my reply, haha. It is hard to address every side of every potential topic in an article. I actually needed help softening the tone to end up with the final version you're reading today. I'm empathetic by nature so it's easy for me to write with empathy, but I'm still prone to generalizing my personal experiences!
> You have a duty to your past self to release the project. It’s a way to honor your work and sacrifice. All the time spent on the project is time you could have spent on something else. That time was not without cost.
Ouch!
I strongly encourage you to read up and understand the sunk cost fallacy. In general, do not let past efforts be the guide for future decisions.
I've quit a lot of projects in my life. And it was the right thing to do. Put another way, many of the valuable projects I've completed would not have been accomplished had I stuck to the projects I had sunk time into.
> You also have a duty to your future self to release the project. Every time you don't release a project, you're telling yourself that you’re the kind of person who doesn't ship.
If you tell yourself that every time you don't release a project, the fix is not to release the project, but to stop telling yourself these lies.
Despite the strong complaints, the article isn't that bad and does have some merits.
> Despite the strong complaints, the article isn't that bad and does have some merits.
I will likewise critique your critique:
Instead of creating a new thread you post directly to the author who responded to an unrelated message. Since the author is obviously responding to criticisms, why did you feel the need to expand a thread with a non-related article quotation you took issue with rather than start your own? It seems to me you wanted to ensure that the author read what you wrote because you felt it was particularly important for him to see it. I don't agree.
The article is about finishing projects instead of starting new ones -- it is not about when to cut losses. The two topics may seem related but I argue that they are not.
The type of person to leave an unfinished project on the table because it isn't 'good enough' is the person for whom the author is writing. It is not the type of person who can't let a project go despite the damage that project is causing to other things or despite the project being a lost cause.
Example:
The person who makes a bet 'if I risk X in exchange for A% of success happening and I lose, I can live with that, but I couldn't live with not trying' is not the person who makes a bet 'I lost X, which I couldn't afford to lose, but if I risk everything I have left or go into debt, then I can make back what I lost and be whole again'. One is an entrepreneur and the other is a gambling addict. The same type of difference exists in the two cases you present.
Your final sentence seems to be a half-assed acknowledgment that you found value in the work, but you are unable to give praise so the complements you use are negated put-downs (not bad, despite complaints, is not meritless). I think that this form of praise is worthless and makes you look petty. Stop doing it.
> Instead of creating a new thread you post directly to the author who responded to an unrelated message. Since the author is obviously responding to criticisms, why did you feel the need to expand a thread with a non-related article quotation you took issue with rather than start your own? It seems to me you wanted to ensure that the author read what you wrote because you felt it was particularly important for him to see it. I don't agree.
I have no idea what you are talking about. My comment is on the same topic as the head of the thread, and provides more details on that original critique.
I stand by my original assessment. I am not seeing a connection between 'the use of 'you' vs 'I' personalization and the effectiveness of the difference in using them' and 'a request to investigate a logical fallacy and the relevance of such fallacy to the article'.
Glad you still liked it, despite the strong complaints!
I hear your feedback, but I don't fully agree with all of it. I do understand the sunk cost fallacy quite well, but thinking about the time committed can be a useful framing to help push past the fear of releasing or drudgery of the last 10%.
> If you tell yourself that every time you don't release a project, the fix is not to release the project, but to stop telling yourself these lies.
I mean, if you never ship you're literally the kind of person who doesn't ship though. You can tell yourself whatever you want, but eventually you'll stop believing yourself because you know it's not true!
> I mean, if you never ship you're literally the kind of person who doesn't ship though
This is a bit of an "argument from extremes" fallacy. If you don't ship 90% of what you work on, but do ship the remaining 10%, then that may well not only be fine, but optimal.
My point is that saying to yourself "Every time you don't release a project, you're telling yourself that you’re the kind of person who doesn't ship." is a faulty belief. There's a whole spectrum between releasing everything and releasing nothing. Some people like myself start a lot of things (big and small), and there is no practical way to finish all of them - life is simply not long enough. For such people, not finishing 80-90% of those projects and focusing on a few that seem to have higher value is the way to go. Such a person should not (and hopefully does not) tell themselves that "they're the kind of person that doesn't ship." If they do tell themselves that, the solution isn't to start shipping everything they start, but to change their internal monologue.
I strongly recommend you get to know intricately the lives of successful creators. The majority have more projects unfinished than finished.
I recognize the author’s argument from the Atomic Habits books — inner motivation heavily stems from the picture of self.
The example used in the book (there used for stopping negative habits) was that of smoking. A smoker that is looking to quit goes out with a colleague for a smoke break, and the colleague offers him one. If he refuses by saying “I don’t smoke now/I’m trying to quit”, he will much more likely not be able to quit his addiction. But if he answers with “I’m not a smoker”, he is on a good path.
It was a really eye opening part of that book for me - people’s view of themselves recursively depends on past experiences/facts and inner motivations. If we do (or don’t do in case of smoking) something a lot of time we can accept it as our new selves, and vice versa.
> What you do at your day job doesn't matter, (unless you work for yourself), if you ship while at work, your work is a place that ships. Not you.
Naw, this is just a toxic take.
A project is a project, whether it's a solo one or collaborative. Whether it's "personal" or professional. 99.9999% of software that actually gets widely used (because it's useful to many people) has more than 1 coder, and arbitrarily deciding that the only "real" coding you can claim to is unpaid solo coding is a weird gate to keep.
Does the Sistine Chapel not make Michelangelo "someone who completes paintings" because he was doing paid work for the Vatican? Please.
I think an easy to grasp version of sunk cost is 'buying is the same as holding' (modulo fees and taxes) from investing. In other words: you can spend today working on the existing project that's going nowhere, or on the newer idea that has potential. You allocate the day either way - it's not somehow less because it was left on the default option of what you were already working on.
Understanding the sunk cost fallacy and having an opinion like the authors are not mutually exclusive. It doesn’t always apply and shouldn’t be used as an excuse to abandon whatever one feels like without guilt.
> It doesn’t always apply and shouldn’t be used as an excuse to abandon whatever one feels like without guilt.
Unless you made commitments to others, one should never feel guilt for not finishing a project.
Something I learned in my 20's: Guilt is one of worst long term motivators, and almost never yields anything positive. It's why those who guilt trip others are best avoided.
And applying sunk cost fallacy indiscriminately can itself be fallacious as the rewards may be so unpredictable or intangible as to elude simple calculus
IMO, your post is spot on. Grinding out the last 10% of the boring details while fear starts creeping in and new ideas surface to distract you is exactly what I’ve felt.
You’ve codified this in a way that I feel like I can begin to manage it better. Really great post. I’ll incorporate this one into my life going forward.
In video games which I personally know, “make games that are fun to make not to play.”
The polish and marketing of a thing is always done better by bigger budgets which you don’t have. The math the article is missing is that shipping something polished and boring is only possible because you valued your time at zero. So even if you find success, an honest accounting could wind up making your ROI negative.
Indeed I’ve gotten out of so many worse situations by quitting early and getting my life back compared to the colleagues I left behind. It was never worth the chance to ship something that would have never found an audience anyway. This is especially true of people doing startups, they are doing psychological warfare against themselves and shrouding the reality that they have already failed and will have learned little by spending 4 years on something compared to 1.
One thing we should do while we’re configuring oauth consent screens, verifying domains, and other 10% drudgery is tell ourselves we’re building reusable infrastructure or at least obtaining the knowhow to do so.
Are young people these days mentally so weak and fragile, and everyone has to be politically correct all the time so that we don’t break their fragile hearts? If you intent to finish and released the product and you fail to do so, is there a need to sugar coat it so that you feel better . You shouldn’t feel better by lying to yourself. This is how you learn and improve as a person . Accept pain .
But for the rest, I think we are not on the same page w/regard to most of what I was trying to say.
I guess you took my text to mean we should all tiptoe around everyone else's feelings all the time, to the point of absurdity — everyone gets a participation trophy, and nobody is allowed to acknowledge harsh reality, etc.
I actually come from the other direction: failure is real, pain is common, so why add more to that pile for others? Why give people more reasons to feel bad about themselves through some choice of words?
I suppose there's some aspect of "I waded through shit to get where I am, so you should too — it'll be good for you", and that seems ... off, to me. We are all wading through shit all the time already. Different kinds for different people. So maybe throw a rope from time to time, if you've got one.
---
Aside: I don't think this is about young people these days, or political-correctness. This is about having empathy and broader perspective.
I think you misunderstand. Unconditional self-love isn't about pain avoidance. It's about accepting the pain as a function of ego and learning from it without turning it into self-flagellation or internalizing it as a function of identity.
> On an emotional level, I think it's better to start from a place of (unconditional!) self-love, and go from there, rather than beating yourself up because you're not meeting some blogger's expectations of how you should act.
This will only cater for people who don't automatically apply that filter. I'd say for most people the article won't stream directly into their consciousness as fact, and they will be applying caveats already.
Agreed that most people have some thickness to their skin already, so to speak. And communication styles vary, of course.
But I do think there's something to be said for the sort of culture we want to foster. If one blogger writes something a bit one-sided or pushy, then no big deal. But if lots of them do, or most of them, then it starts to affect what we consider normal. Personally, I'd rather we don't normalize the self-flagellation approach to progress, or at least be pretty careful about it (see another comment about "healthy masochism").
If everybody is in on the game, then it can work (eg: I enjoy talking shit with friends, because we all know we're friends), but in a public forum that's harder to be sure of. I almost feel like being a giant asshole (Linus Torvalds?) is better in this space, since it's so over-the-top obvious and people can easily reject it if they don't like it. But when it's more subtle, the risk is that some small cumulative effect nudges people to actually feel bad about themselves, even if just a little bit, spread so thin it's hard to measure.
But anyway, it's a small point; I only wish the 1-ton weight were moved 1cm to the left, or so. Sometimes I write too much text about too small a topic, and it comes across overblown (:
I would just say that this is a link, and not from inside the HN community, so it's not a cultural issue as such. I think it's possible to try and enforce a monoculture internally, but enforcing it on what links get posted might be difficult.
Aren’t you kinda telling someone how they should write a post? Even though you start writing most sentences with I, it comes off as what they should rather do.
Which, you know, is fine. I would maybe have {insert similar advice here} :)
Actually I do have a contribution, inspired I think by _why. Rather than telling them how to write, just write. I don’t do that enough myself.
On writing, I think strong points often get through better. Challenge people. They’re adults, they can consider if it applies to them or not.
On completion, for those who have difficulty achieving self love, achieving small completed projects is nearer “fake it till you make it”. It’s easier, actions and thoughts and beliefs impact each other. You can start with any of them, but some might find it easier to start with actions.
> Aren’t you kinda telling someone how they should write a post?
Well, it is not my intent, but I take your meaning (:
I suppose I do draw some fuzzy line between presenting someone with information or perspective, which they may or may not choose to internalize, and telling someone what to do. It's a struggle: I want to share and try to be helpful, but I don't want to be evangelical about it. Likewise, there's challenging people, and there's used-car-salesman-ing them (or so).
Certainly, there are lots of different personalities banging around in the world, and anyone trying to learn has to develop some resilience to the various ways people communicate. But I guess for my part, I do gently advocate for a more gentle approach. I respect if you find "strong" (forceful?) points to be better, though. In my mind, not everyone I talk to is fully an adult (hell, myself included).
I'm reminded a little bit of some East/West cultural differences that come up, sometimes. In the West, we say "the squeaky wheel gets the oil" (i.e. being loud/pushy is rewarded) and in the East it's "the tallest blade of grass gets cut down first." In the West, argumentation follows a "I'm right, you're wrong; here's why..." adversarial approach, while in the East, it's "You're right, but I am right in an even broader sense..." Obviously I'm grossly generalizing, but you get the idea.
But anyway, thank you for your counterpoints. It's a topic that interests me.
(Aside: I don't mean to imply that you or the OP are being used-car-salesman-y; just staking out some points of reference in this many-dimensional space we're discussing :)
With you on finding balance and considered points. That’s my instinct in general. However (and feel free to see if this lands with you) I think I’ve found that the ones that work are super direct. For example, Joel Spolsky had absolutely confident articles that might or might not be perfectly correct for all situations (eg “Things you should never do, part 1”), but the confidence means there is one message in one article. I consider that article a principle to balance against other principles. But it’s not written as if it should be balanced and that probably made it more successful.
Yes, I'm more than a little allergic to that sort of tone as well. But I take it more as he's saying out loud what he says to himself for motivation.
These are things that are important to him. His advice and tone may be of use to others who share his values. Those that don't should feel perfectly fine with ignoring him or (better) reinterpreting what he's saying so it better aligns with their own set of values.
> I think it's better to start from a place of (unconditional!) self-love, and go from there, rather than beating yourself up because you're not meeting some blogger's expectations of how you should act.
It took me a while to realize this, but it's the only way I want to live my life. Terrorizing myself through my ego was a retardedly pointless mental preset, and I'm very grateful I changed it.
In the end value of person is in what they do. If you can't constantly ship anything, you have a problem you need to solve. Painful, but you shouldn't sugarcoat it.
I worry for someone who reads "You also have a duty to your future self to release the project" and "...you tell yourself that you are the kind of person who ships" and takes that to mean "if you don't release it, you're failing yourself" and "you're the wrong kind of person if you don't ship."
On an emotional level, I think it's better to start from a place of (unconditional!) self-love, and go from there, rather than beating yourself up because you're not meeting some blogger's expectations of how you should act.
And just to be clear: I don't think the author means it that way, but that's one way it can come across, to some people, in some states-of-mind.
I've generally found it more useful to phrase things like this in terms of "I" rather than "you". As in: "I had X experience when I did Y" rather than "you should do Y, so that you will feel X." It's a common mis-step in giving well-meaning advice, I find.
EDIT: Also, I'm sure there are plenty of people who really do benefit from advice being given in this more pointed way, and I realize it's a bit onerous to always write and phrase things for a "safest common denominator," but I think it's worth keeping in mind, at least.