# Professional narcissism

Date: 2021-05-20 20:17:36 +08:00Date modified: 2022-07-08 14:35:30 +08:00

Per Pinker, coined from his book "The sense of style":

> The confusion of the activities of your guild, profession, or field with the subject matter designed to deal with.

To quickly understand what this means, here's some examples:

- In film, instead of focusing what movie is about, they boast about the sales or views.

- In media, "cover the coverage", a situation where multiple sources just focuses on other sources instead of the situation itself, a problem leading to echo chambers.

- In learning, instead of focusing what and why of a note-taking method, they focus on the possible effects of your productivity as much as possible.

This could also happen on yourself already.

- In Note-taking, you may focus on the number of notes, neglecting certain aspects such as the purpose and the quality of the notes.

- In Programming, you may boast how the program is fast that is less readable instead of making sure the program is maintainable where maintaining that program for long-term use is more important.

## Backlinks

- Don't get caught in the hype
- Collecting information only feels like progress
- Unnecessary optimizations cripple progress
- Journals: Learning how to draw