There’s many situations where success is preceded by pain, or at least arduous strain. Breaking loose that rusted bolt on your project car, cramming for your final exams, debugging production issues at 2am, running a marathon. Sometimes the success is worth the pain. Sometimes the pain is inevitable. Sometimes there is no success at the end of the pain. But is the pain necessary for success?

2024 was a year of pain, reflection and reassessment for me. Some of that pain was on the way away from failure and some of it was on the path to success. Some of the pain was just observed in others sharing my path. For some time I was convinced the path to value, success and joy was only through pain, because “if it were easy anyone would do it”.

Boy, was I wrong.

Visiting Belfast, after two years, and catching up with old friends and former colleagues showed me how successful I was both professionally and personally, without even realising at the time.

One example is a long-time friend who regularly introduces me as his former mentor to his friends. Which is fair, as we met at one of my clients. He just had started as an apprentice fresh out of school. I was responsible for most of the Linux infrastructure for the 1500 employees. Meanwhile he is a successful engineer in his own right, and being introduced as his mentor always tickled me, but I always was dismissive of it, because what did I ever really do for him? I was just a driven smart young engineer myself, who respected him as a human, took him serious as an engineer, provided feedback and guidance for his work and learning, and offered a glimpse of a possible future for himself.

What have the romans ever done for us?

I didn’t even realise it at the time that that was something special for him. It was “just” who I was and what I did. No pain nor strain, easy. And yet, his success will forever be one of my proudest achievements of my career.

Another example is resource_api. In its first iteration 400 lines of code, 1200 lines of unit tests, 100% coverage, example code using the new API, documentation, a workshop with customers showing improvements of developing a new integration with the API from several weeks of complicated work to several hours with a clear and streamlined result. Resouce_api was easy to write and will forever remain the single-most impactful 400 lines of code I’ve wrote. Sure, it took all of my over ten years of experience with the product a f 20 years of programming experience to create it, but again, nothing even close to pain.

The crystallisation point for accepting all of that as my successes was this entry in the 50 things I know post saying:

I know that talent doesn’t feel like you’re amazing. It feels like the difficulties that trouble others are mysteriously absent in your case. Don’t ask yourself where your true gifts lie. Ask what other people seem weirdly bad at.

This had me reeling. Most of my life I’ve been thinking I was only succeeding because I only attempted “easy” projects, and frustrated by the lack of understanding in others who needed “obvious” connections in complex systems spelled out in small words.

Boy, had I been wrong.

The projects were easy, not because they were worthless or simple, but because my talents and skills applied. When colleagues struggled with connecting the dots across complex systems based off minor technical details, I was the one who could help them. This seismic shift in my thinking was a huge relief, and I cried for the years I’ve lost beating myself up over the wrong things. I can’t wait to see what I’ll do with these new-found insights in 2025.

The path to success doesn’t have to be painful. Sometimes it is enough to be the right person, at the right place and time, and not fucking it up.