Your progress is slow, isn't it? It's taking more time than you hoped for. Everybody else is doing it, they are winning competitions, getting clients, winning big bounties, but you are still here, with little to no progress...

You are not alone, my friend. I sometimes feel this too. The sad truth is that not everyone is meant to make it, there is not enough room for everyone to be successful.

"All those who work hard don't succeed, but all those who have succeeded have worked hard." - Kamogawa Genji, Hajime no Ippo

I consider the above just an excuse not to give your best, to not make the greatest sacrifice. These beliefs are like ghosts, the more you believe in them, the more real they will seem. They are excuses to quit early, but remember, every failure bring you closer to the win. You have no choice but to do your best, failing time, after time, after time, without seeing an end.

Everyone falls the first time they try to walk…

The above was the first thing you needed to learn, and below is the rest, enjoy.

Progress is exponential

Progress, whether in sports or a career, is never a straight line. It's exponential. The more you practice, the better and faster your improvements will be.

Indeed, this scientific graph (which I definitely didn't draw myself) shows a good representation of how progress is measured.

It's the same with success, money and even women (or so I've heard D: ). The more you achieve (have), the faster you can acquire more. This is why they say:

When it rains it pours

This is great and all, however it's upside is also it's a downside. You see, this doesn't apply only to you, it applies to everyone. Everyone is on this curve and if someone is ahead a month or two he can be much better and much more successful than you. Even worse, the more in front they are the faster they will expand the gap between you and them.

But worry not kind reader, there are things you can do (or not do) that will help you scale better in any aspect you want. If you've read my previous article (selfish promotion )

you will know that in order to master a certain skill you will need to practice this specific skill and not skills that mimic it. If you are confused, here is an example from the above article:

Driving your car every day to work won't make you a F1 racer.

For you to master something as fast as possible, you will need to cut off all distractions

And the most dangerous of all distractions are the ones that make you thing you are going the right way, that you are working and grinding, task that take your energy, time and attention, but yield no return.

These my fellow reader, are the ones that you pay the highest price (time, energy and suffering) and get the lowest returns - nothing…

Do you remember it?

While we are on the topic of acquiring as much knowledge as possible, I need to ask you

Do you remember it all?

You may remember the stuff you've read for a few days, even a a week or two, however if this knowledge is not used it's ultimately forgotten.

Does that mean you should stop listening to advice or new ways of thinking? No it's just the opposite. You should aspire to find the best way to be proficient at what you do, and that is by learning and implementing new methods and mindsets.

So what should you remove?

Well, why are you reading an article about how Compound works, when you don't plan to audit Compound based projects? Why are you reading the famous 1 DAI article when 50% of the stuff in it you already know and the other 50% you won't need? I've personally read it and if you ask me I've forgotten everything in there, as I didn't really need it.

Note: No hate, it's a really good article for general knowledge, however I don't recommend wasting 1 hour of your life if you have basic knowledge of EVM.

Have you read Mastering Ethereum ? Why ? It’s extremely dense nature makes it packed with info that you won’t remember, or won’t need. That book i as old as time (probably dinosaurs wrote it), most of the stuff inside is outdated. It’s a giant waste of time.

Note: Again, nothing personal, this book might have been a great read a couple of years ago. However if you want to be a developer/auditor this book is too outdated.

I am telling you this from experience, when I started I spend 1-2 hours a day reading random articles on different DEFI projects. How Compound works, deep dive into OpenSea, Curve, Maker, Lido... Yet, this information is now completely forgotten.

Reading things like this might seem productive, and it's better than playing video games, however at the end you only end up with the feeling of productiveness. Better spend the Saturday night with family or friends, or writing articles if you are like me (empty inside :D).

Do you need it?

As per Bytes (a random guy I saw on twitter :D ) one of the biggest mistakes new auditors make is:

Studying stuff that you don't need right now

This leads me to the most important question that you must ask yourself before starting any new endeavor:

Do I really need it?

Does It Make The Boat Go Faster? is a quote from a world class rower. There are so many exercises that you can train to improve team coordination rowing technique and a thousand other little things. But does it make the boat faster? The fastest boat wins the race, not the one that trains the little things.

So I am asking you, are you training to make the boat faster or are you training the small little things? Some thing might feel like work and look like work, however they are the furthest things away from work. They are not making you progress faster, they are just occupying your mind, making you think you are productive, while letting your competition surpass you.

Very few of the articles I’ve read were useful. Again that doesn’t mean to skip everything, but it means that some articles, some videos, even some tweets are useless.

You see, everything you need is already on the internet, you don't need to remember all of the stuff as long as you know it exist and how to find it. Simply if you are working on a project that integrates with Lido, go and look up how lido works. This way your learning will help you build better code and the information that you are gonna acquire is gonna be remembered for longer as you will use it in your code.

Trust your gut (or boredom)

Most people will tell you that you need to rely and discipline and do the tasks even if you don’t want to do them. I have nothing against it, however in most cases your gut instinct tells you pretty well if you actually need to know something or you are just procrastinating, and if the latter it would make you not want to learn it. Here discipline will actually be bad for you, as you would force yourself to learn something you don’t need or want.

Perfect example is reading the docs while on an audit. Everyone has had that experience needing to understand the code better and heading to the docs, in order to spend the next 1 or 2 hours mindlessly reading stuff. If you actually gain insight, then that’s amazing! However I can tell from experience that most of the time you would read it with the hope of getting more context, but end up in the same place 2 hours later, with 2 hours less and a ton on energy wasted on useless tasks.

Same can be said for tutorial hell. Most people after watching enough videos and reading enough boring articles will start to notice that every new piece of content is 95% already known and 5% new stuff. These 5% of “new stuff“ might be useful, but most likely not.

When you reach that point you would need to shift your priorities. There is nothing bad in learning more, or reinforcing what you already know, however do that in your spare time, don’t count it as “work done” because it’s not. It’s entertainment, especially if it doesn’t change your behavior.

With time and experience you will get a feeling of what is actually useful and what isn’t.

If you do it, do it good

Finally you’ve got my point (if not, hit me up on twitter, I would appreciate some feedback) and you have eliminated all of the crap and started reviewing the real stuff. Now it comes the time to ask you how well you are doing it ?

Generally I would suggest when you read an article or watch a video to do only that. Don’t check your phone, or send a few messages on telegram, or read all new emails. Just watch the video and fully concentrate on it. When you finish, do a short 30 second summary in your head.

If you have chosen to watch it, it means it’s important (even if at the end it proves not to be). Most interviews or podcasts have a tone of hidden implies that are only a sentence or two long and may sound like small talk, but in fact they actually give extreme detail on the methods or way that this guy operates. Multitasking in these cases would mean that you have wasted 1 or 2 hours watching the podcast, but have gotten 20% of it’s insights and thus made near 0 improvements.

With that I would put an end to my rant. I hope you’ve got the point I was trying to make. If while reading it, or just in general you have some ideas or topics that I have missed, hit me up on twitter and I would add them here.

And of course if you really liked it, want to share the knowledge or just want to get more followers on X, then feel free to tweet about it!