Getting soft? or just soft skills?

I’m sitting with a glass of red wine and a full-screen Jupyter Notebook window full of TensorFlow code open. Now, it may be the red wine, but I’m finding it just plain difficult!

After more than a PhD’s worth of wrestling with code and algorithms, I felt up to the challenge I’d set myself. But in between, there’s been a few years where the emphasis has been on management rather than code.

So now, I find myself wondering whether it was always this hard, or whether my focus on soft rather than hard skills has left me, well, soft.

After a few months of cognitive behavioral therapy, I’m able to recognize this thought as a distortion, not to be quite trusted. Yes, I’m sure I am a little rusty. But it doesn’t take much to remind myself that this stuff was always difficult. Indeed, if it wasn’t difficult, it wouldn’t be satisfying. And if wasn’t difficult, everyone would be doing it.

I think probably what I miss is the sense of flow, born of hard-won familiarity. The reality of management is that there’s just less time in the day for developing that muscle-memory readiness.

So, I persevere, inch by inch, and treasure the moments of flow when they come.