# Oh, to turn off your mind!

*In admiration of some of the best programmers I've worked with*

By Thorsten Ball • February 24, 2024

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Some of the best programmers I’ve ever worked with — I’m thinking of five Personal Hall of Famers here — have one thing in common that I’m desperately jealous of: they have the ability to seemingly turn off their mind.

They can decide to do something and then go and… do it. No rethinking of the How and the Whether and the *Are you sure?* No second guessing. They decided to do it, so they’ll do it.

There’s no loop of these running in their head when they work on something:

*Oh, this won’t be as quick as I thought it would be, should I really do this?*

*If I do this, will I end up only ever doing things like this?*

*What if it takes longer?*

*Is this even fixable? What if this bug is just a symptom of a much larger issue, one that I’ll never be able to fix?*

*Isn’t what I’m doing considered boring? Not cool? Huh.*

*Do others think I’m doing a good job? Will they think I did a good job? Do they think they could do it better?*

They do ask themselves these things — because some of them are valid questions, even beneficial questions for an engineer to ask — but they only ask them *at will*, meaning: when it’s time to ask them, not when they’ve already comitted to something.

I’m not talking about Being In The Zone or Flow here. What I think I’m talking about is conviction, confidence, self-assurance. Whatever it is: they have it. And boy does it change things.

A lot of things have been said and written about the importance of confidence, of *the mindset*, and I’m not going to try to repeat them here, but I’ll say this: seeing someone else with equal or less experience, skills, or knowledge just go and *do something* — something that I would’ve hesitated to start or only seen through with many pauses and restarts — is humbling. Humbling but also impressive. Impressive and beautiful.

It makes me think that the ability to control one’s mind and which questions it asks at what time is the ultimate meta-skill, if not *the skill*. And it sure would be nice if it were easier to learn. Until I’ve figured that out, I’m happy these doers exists and I get to witness what they do.