> if difficulty itself becomes a badge of honour, you've created a trap: anything that makes the system more approachable starts to feel like it's cheapening what you achieved. You become invested in preserving the barriers you overcame.

The mentality described here has always galled me. Half the reason I’m willing to scramble up these hills is to gain the perspective to look for an easier way up the next time. It’s my reward for slogging through, not for the gathering of sycophants.

I’m not sure you’ve mastered a thing until you’ve changed the recipe to make it a little bit better anyway. My favorite pumpkin pie recipe, isn’t. As written the order of operation creates clumps, which can only be cured with an electric mixer. You shouldn’t need an electric mixer to mix pumpkin pie filling. If you mix all the dry ingredients first, you get no clumps. And it’s too soupy. Needs jumbo eggs, not large. So that is my favorite recipe.

But maybe this is why I end up writing so many tools and so much documentation, instead of hoarding.