I’m so slow in comparison

Three paragraphs, and three different things in them: a comparison, a piece of evidence, and a story about a friend. They are easy to hear as one sentence. They are worth hearing apart.

If you have ever looked at what everyone else is shipping and felt your own work shrink, this is for you.

Slow, or new to it?

The middle paragraph carries its own correction, almost in passing. Two bugs, two days, and in hindsight they “weren’t as complicated as I thought.” The difficulty, by the writer’s own account, was “more my lack of knowledge in a particular technology.”

That is not a description of a slow mind. It is a description of an unfamiliar tool. “Slow” sounds like a trait, something about the person. “New to it” is a location: a part of the map someone hasn’t walked yet. Lack of knowledge in one particular technology is about the most changeable thing there is, and it changes in exactly the way the post describes: by staying with a problem until getting to the bottom of it.

Slow and new to it share a feeling. They are not the same fact.

Compared to whom?

“All the open source projects that people are producing” is not one person. It is thousands of people, each visible at their best: finished work, in their own strongest technology, with their own slow days off camera. Next to that, anyone is slow. The comparison isn’t a measurement of one developer. It is the arithmetic of standing beside a crowd.

His story, not a forecast

The old friend’s retirement is told with real tenderness, and “I know how he feels” is an honest sentence. Feeling outmatched is real, and it deserves to be taken seriously rather than argued away.

But “he knew his time was up” was his reading of his own life. Carried over to someone else’s, it becomes a prediction, not a verdict. A feeling of being outpaced can be completely true as a feeling and still leave the question of anyone’s time wide open. The same post, two paragraphs earlier, shows a person still fixing what was broken.

From the book

Comparing yourself to other people’s level of intelligence is a quick way to harm your self-perception of your unique intellect. Defining yourself intellectually or in any other way by how you stack up against others is usually a recipe for failure because no other person like you has ever existed in human history.

In context: the passage sits in a section titled “Progress Not Perfection,” just after the book says that each of us is on a journey unique to our God-given design. The weight is in the last clause. Comparison assumes a shared scale, and the book’s point is that there isn’t one: no other person like you has ever existed. A developer measured against a crowd is being measured on a scale built for nobody in particular.

Going deeper

Levi put a nearby thought in one line on Nostr on September 12, 2026:

Confusion is often the first experience of someone becoming more intelligent.

Two days of not understanding how a technology worked, and then understanding it. From the inside, that first stretch feels like slowness. From a little further away, it looks like what learning looks like while it is still happening.

The bugs got fixed. The person who fixed them is still here, still learning, and there has never been another one like them.