ما يُستفـاد

The full essay, here . Blunt Knives "If you're given a sharp knife , it seems to me better to use it than to blunt its edge to avoid cutting yourself. "The bad news is that if it's not exercised , your fierceness will turn to bitterness , and you will become an intellectual playground bully: the grumpy sysadmin, the forum troll, the hater, the shooter down of new ideas. How do you avoid this fate? Work on ambitious projects. If you succeed, it will bring you a kind of satisfaction that neutralizes bitterness. But you don't need to have succeeded to feel this; merely working on hard projects gives most fierce nerds some feeling of satisfaction . And those it doesn't, it at least keeps busy. "Especially early on, nerds spend so much of their time in ordinary social situations and so little doing real work that they get a lot more evidence of their awkwardness than their power .  "It might seem like it would be a disadvantage to be mistaken about one