Shoshin

Shoshin (Japanese: 初心) is a concept from Zen Buddhism meaning beginner’s mind. It refers to having an attitude of openness, eagerness, and lack of preconceptions when studying, even at an advanced level, just as a beginner would. The term is especially used in the study of Zen Buddhism and Japanese martial arts, and was popularized outside of Japan by Shunryū Suzuki’s 1970 book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind.

The practice of shoshin acts as a counter to the hubris and closed-mindedness often associated with thinking of oneself as an expert.[2] This includes the Einstellung effect, where a person becomes so accustomed to a certain way of doing things that they do not consider or acknowledge new ideas or approaches. The word shoshin is a combination of sho (Japanese: 初), meaning “beginner” or “initial”, and shin (Japanese: 心), meaning “mind”.

Wikipedia

This is a concept that my Team Lead mentioned in one of our “one on one” meetings, which I completely forgot and he kindly reminded me of after I shared with him a realization of mine.

Work in the IT has often been a source of great frustration for me. One of my biggest strengths and weaknesses is that I’m passionate. I do love my work, and I do love to succeed. Quite often though, I do not succeed and failures often get me quite frustrated and I run in a raging mode. My struggles with k8s is just one of many such long and tiresome battles which in the long run are grinding and exhausting. And by frustration I mean rants, yelling, cursing, cussing, which is not only tiring for me, it’s stressing my poor partner.

Few days ago one of the real reasons for this clicked. I consider myself a half decent IT, with some knowledge in the field, some experience in both development and system administration. And quite often – when tackling a new technology – I start doing so with some expectations about how this should work (usually based on experience with similar technologies). And when the thing I’m trying to make work doesn’t work the way I expect it to – I get angry.
The source of this rage are my expectations. And the reason I have them is because I consider myself somewhat educated in the field. I don’t question my knowledge, I don’t question myself. And this often leads to a circle of frustration, anger and exhaustion.

So this is probably where I need to change my approach. Instead of wasting my energy on anger – I might do better if I try to approach the problem as someone that isn’t half decent, but a complete noob. I will hopefully update this in the future.