Notes: Show Up

Author: chriskrycho

Diff for: site/notes/2025/03/Show Up.md

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+---
+title: Show Up!
+subtitle: A lesson I have been more thoroughly internalizing recently.
+
+date: 2025-03-15T16:41:00-0600
+
+qualifiers:
+  audience: |
+    Pretty general! Talks about running and job interviewing, but if you've never done either I think you will still get the point just fine.
+
+summary: >
+  Two experiences this week reminded me of the value of “just giving it a shot”—including, sometimes, when it feels unreasonable even to try.
+
+tags:
+  - running
+  - career development
+
+---
+
+Two recent experiences, with a common thread:
+
+## 1.
+
+On Thursday, I woke up feeling tired and somewhat under the weather. I had a couple of interviews that morning, and although they were not especially draining, I certainly was not feeling any *better* by the time I wrapped up the second one mid-day. When I left for my run a few minutes later, I felt draggy—at best. Given I had a relatively challenging workout planned,[^workout] it would have been easy to skip it in light of not feeling well. I decided to go out for the run anyway, trusting that I would either do well, or discover that I could not do the workout as planned. In the latter case, I woulds imply stop and run slowly and easily home instead.
+
+Either of those outcomes would have been fine: I had to stop a run and have my wife come pick me up just a couple weeks ago. It happens! But *showing up* gave me the opportunity to figure out which one of those it would be.
+
+It wasn’t clear before starting the planned hill repetitions which it would be; it wasn’t even clear after the first one! But by the second of the ten planned repetitions, my whole body was starting to feel noticeably better. In the end, I was able to complete the whole workout as programmed, and in fact turned in the best version of that workout I have ever done.
+
+## 2.
+
+One of those interview rounds on Thursday was for a company that I think is extremely interesting, but which is meaningfully outside my areas of deep expertise.[^expertise] After seeing their interview prep materials, I debated even taking the interviews, because I genuinely thought I might just fail outright. But someone rightly pointed out to me that it wouldn’t hurt, would be good experience and practice, and that I could take them in a very relaxed state. After all: nothing to lose and nothing to prove!
+
+I went ahead and took the interview rounds anyway, and I am glad I did. It turns out: this company interviews very well. They give me a chance to shine. They drew on my existing knowledge and my ability to reason from first principles, and I ended up not only doing well but also really enjoying the interviews. One of them was actually the most *fun* I have ever had in an interview, despite being notionally “way out of my depth”, because it was *entirely* about my ability to reason from first principles about domains I am conceptually, but *only* conceptually, familiar with.
+
+I passed those rounds and have more this coming week. It might work out, and it might not, but again, *showing up* gave me a chance to learn things and, in the end, to succeed at things I did not know I could succeed at.
+
+
+
+[^workout]: For the running workout nerds like me: a 20-minute warm-up, then hill repeats consisting of 10×1:00 hard uphill with 2:00 easy jog back downhill—and a goal of running them as “stretch” intervals, where each repetition is slightly faster than the previous.
+
+[^expertise]: I have specialized pretty strongly in programming language teaching and adoption with Rust and TypeScript, and in web client application fundamentals, from frameworks to build tooling and so on. This company does a ton of distributed systems work. While rich web clients definitely do make up components of distributed systems, that has not been the area I have focused in at all!