When Fixing Yourself Becomes the Blocker

Your side project is not a referendum on who you are

Many engineers want to learn new skills or work on side projects. But it’s hard.

There’s a lot going on in an engineer’s day and in regular life, and something I hear often in conversations is:

“I need to be more organized.” “I need to be more disciplined.” “Once I get that sorted out, then I’ll start.”

And it makes sense.

These kinds of goals require sustained effort over time before the value shows up. Of course you’d want to feel confident the effort will compound. You do not want to start another thing and drop it. You do not want more evidence that you are inconsistent.

But where I see people get tripped up is that somewhere along the way, the goal quietly changes.

It moves from: “I want to learn this skill or build this thing.”
And it becomes: “I need to fix myself first.”

Now the project isn’t only a project. It’s a moral issue.

Before I can work on the project, I need to become more organized. Before I can learn the skill, I need to change how I function as a person.

All the effort that could have been going into the work now goes into becoming a different person.

That’s a tremendous amount of pressure. An impossible task.

The thought “I’m broken,” “something is wrong with me,” now becomes the gatekeeper of the goal.

So the goal doesn’t get worked on. The task has become too emotionally expensive to touch. And it gets dropped.

What I see open things up in the conversations I have is when a person notices what’s actually been happening.

They see they have not only been trying to work on their goal. They have been trying to redeem themselves. Trying to prove they are disciplined enough, organized enough, serious enough.

Once that becomes visible, something starts to shift.

All the effort that was going toward shame can be redirected toward the thing itself.

Because you don’t need to fix your entire life before you can work on something.

And once you remove the pressure to become a new person before you start... starting becomes a lot easier.