I never really write online about personal things (except a few times, generally about my wife, who is awesome). Not that I don’t want to, I’m not particularly privacy-minded, but more that I never feel like it’s that interesting to share a ton about my pretty mundane day-to-day.

There’s one thing that I do off-handedly publicly mention, maybe more than I realise: health. Generally in the context of “sorry about RAGatouille, I’ve had less time to spend on it than I thought because of health”, or some other similar phrasing. It’s a bit of a running gag at this point (I’m currently, actually, for real this time, reworking ragatouille, and I’m hoping to ship it somewhat soon, but I’m not making any pormises).

I never really share more, again not because I’m ashamed of it, or anything of the likes, but mostly because I’m a bit self-conscious about it, and generally don’t want to wallow – lots of people have go it worse, after all!

However, I’ve been meaning to write a blog about this for a good while now. For a few reasons: one, that I didn’t quite expect, is that this is something I get quite a few DMs about. People I’ve met at conferences too cagily enquire about my health, and then kind of ask leading questions about how it impacts my work. Quite a lot of the time, it’s in a very positive “woah you shipped this while sick the whole time? congrats!!”, which I appreciate a lot.

Sometimes, it’s people with illnesses (that I’d consider as much worse than mine) who are a bit lost about how to handle the suckiness of chronic illnesses in a very fast-paced field. I didn’t really expect to get the latter kind of messages, and generally, I feel pretty bad, because I have no idea what to say – I don’t feel like I handle it particularly well.

The other reason is much more bleak. A few people I know, with similar health issues, physical or mental, have recently gone into an extremely negative mental health spiral, with one person in particular having made the decision to end their life (in case anyone’s wondering/worried, this is absolutely not something I’ve personally ever had thoughts about, but the event was a bit of a shock). It’s a bit of a self-perpetuating issue: you don’t feel well, so you’re not doing great at work. Things are competitive, and not making progress stresses you out. You end up feeling even worse, mentally this time. Rinse and repeat.

There’s not really any coherent thought put into this blog’s structure. I’m mostly finally writing it because this week wasn’t super fun, and I’ve heard from people struggling – so I thought it was worth sharing!

Frustration

For full disclosure, anyone who knows me knows that I’m rarely feeling amazing. Should anyone care, I’ve got type 1 diabetes, recently suspected/semi-diagnosed Crohn’s disease, a bunch of post-COVID side effects (brain fog, shortness of breath, etc…), and chronically low white blood cells. None of those are too bad individually, but the combination often results in pretty unpleasant days. I’m not sure I should be listing those out, but I figure – I’ve now got a very tiny voice in a sea of online ML content, so I might as well do it if it helps someone else feel less ashamed.

As a result, I frequently get frustrated about not managing to get things down. My mind’s pacing about all the cool stuff that I could be doing, and I see all the cool projects that my coworkers are working on, and it gives me an intense fear of missing out.

I get super anxious about it too. Something I hate is having to reschedule something because of not feeling well. This feels OK to do once in a while, but sometimes, I’ve already rescheduled once, and something is flaring up, but I feel a bit too bad to cancel last minute, so I end up attending something with a high fever. It generally goes okay, but it’s always upsetting to feel like you could’ve done a better job: maybe I could’ve explained X clearer, or been more responsive when person Y was trying to solve Z, or [insert endless continuation and self-beating here].

Negative Feedback Loop

Getting into your own head, I think, is a very common trait. Sometimes, I hear Jeremy Howard, of being himself fame (and fast.ai, and ULMFiT, and being my boss at Answer.AI, and…), mention that he gets into his own head before giving a lesson, and I realise that there’s definitely no escaping it.

So it’s definitely not just about having health issues, but it definitely compounds it.

A funny example I have is my talk at Hamel’s Mastering LLM course, on the basic components of retrieval.

This talk is a very good example of what I talked about in the paragraph before: I had to reschedule it, as I got a throat infection at the original date. I felt super bad about it but Hamel was (characteristically) extremely nice and immediately rescheduled. On the rescheduled day, I had an awful night – I woke up with a 38C/100.4F fever, whatever bug I had was messing with my blood sugar a bit, etc…

Rescheduling felt like it’d be causing Hamel more trouble than I felt was okay, so I decided to just do my best, power through it for a while, load up on caffeine, then never talk about it again when it inevitably ends up being mediocre. To my great surprise, it actually got a great reception! It blew up on twitter for a bit, and people seem to have mostly enjoyed it! Hamel still raves about it sometimes, which feels good, even if a slight part of me thinks he’s just being nice.

We all do stuff, and we all feel like it’s not good enough.

I think part of working well when you’re unwell is accepting that, yeah, you’re not gonna be 100% productive all the time.

The thing is, I don’t think anyone is truly 100% productive for dozens and dozens of hours, every week, without fail. I also think that people are pretty quick to dismiss other forms of productivity.

One example is simply learning stuff: when I don’t feel amazing, I spend a ton of time reading documentations, papers, watching videos, looking at stuff my colleagues have done, playing in notebooks that are so broken that the idea of the world ever seeing them gives me deep anxiety, etc… All of this is technically work. I’m getting more knowledge. But I’m not producing anything. So many people are doing cool stuff, and all I’ve got to show for this week is that I know a bit more about a given topic than last week? And ragatouille still hasn’t been overhauled!?

I frequently look at what I’ve released/shipped/merged over the last X weeks, and think I definitely could’ve done better. In fact, this is what spurred me to finally write this stream-of-thought: this week, I had big plans. BIG plans. Then I ended up on a new medication, which messed up my blood sugar. At the same time I got another random fever caused by another chronic illness flare-up. For half of Tuesday and a good chunk of yesterday, I didn’t manage to produce much, so I just tried to learn things and do a bit of ModernBERT housekeeping.

Again, I got into my own head about it: I had plans to do some really cool things, and they’re not yet ready! Sure, they’re on their way, but nothing tangible is there. Don’t get me wrong: I like to think that I’m at least somewhat good at what I do. But it can be a bit hard to shake off the feeling that I could’ve done more, if only I’d felt better, or powered through harder.

But then, you get that grounding conversation with someone, who does point out that, hm, from the outside, it looks like you’re actually doing quite a lot.

Jeremy, in a recent podcast, said something that I feel is relevant: most people at Answer have, at some point, gone to him and discussed their feeling of not being good enough to be there. His answer is along the lines of “Well, surely, not everyone here can be an imposter”.

I do still get imposter syndrome quite a lot, especially when health gets in the way, but it’s utterly confusing to me that my colleagues are feeling the same. All of them are very, very good at what they do (and even at what they don’t do – sometimes they just do what Isaac did and decide that they’re gonna make front-end development fun for Python devs, because why not).

People are nice

Another thing to keep in mind there is that people are genuinely pretty nice. Of course, bad people exist, but they probably exist in an environment that you don’t want to find yourself in.

For the BERT24 project, that became ModernBERT, for example, it all started well. I initiated it, we got a really good group going, and I started leading it. Then my health got worse, and combined with other projects, I just struggled at fully contributing + leading + coordinating, and all that stuff you just have to go to keep a project on the rails. It stressed me quite a bit. And then, people stepped up. I’ve not discussed it with people beforehand so I’m not going to single out anyone, but I’m infinitely grateful to just about everyone on the paper’s author list, and in particular to the top authors. We probably spent dozens of hours chatting, and they did an absolutely amazing work that led to a pretty cool model.

A lot of the time, I also feel weird about mentioning that I didn’t do something, or will miss a meeting, because a health flare-up, again. There’s this fear that it’s going to sound like an excuse, or something. Yet I don’t think anyone I’ve ever spoken to has even considered that being something to hold against someone. It’s funny, because it’s definitely something I personally would find completely normal: if you’re not well, just tell me, then turn your computer off and go rest!

But it’s a rule I find quite a bunch harder to apply to myself, so I find myself spending far too many hours powering through, just to spend a few hours doing an hours’ worth of productivity. Somehow, the only time I’ve ever gotten in trouble for doing so is when I mentioned that I was doing that, and I was told that it was stupid (in nicer words), and that I should just take a break and get back to it when I feel better.

Working around your limits

I guess I do have two takeaways from this: The first one is that everyone, or at least most people, struggle, with health or other issues. People you look up to are probably pretty insecure about that talk you loved. This piece of code you’ve got framed probably had the author second guessing whether or not it would work, many times over. It’s simply that these things aren’t shared.

Do work. Put things out there. If it’s not good, you’ll learn, but eventually, you’ll put something out there that is good. Even if you think you could’ve done better if you had more time, or if you felt better. It’s important to focus on what you can achieve, not what the bizarro universe version of you that has no flaws whatsoever could get done.

The second is that powering through is something to be used sparsely. I’m guilty of powering through things, far too often. But something that is far more important, I’ve learned, is working around your issues. Sometimes, you’re going to do absolutely nothing of value for a couple days, and that’s fine. But on the flipside, sometimes, you’ll get that burst of productivity, and create something really nice. The only thing that would you, in those times, is self-imposed limits: if you’ve gotten too caught up on the idea that whatever limit you’re encountering is going to make what you produce bad, then you might second guess yourself, and end up wasting your productivity.

And so…?

There’s not really a particular conclusion to this blog, I’m just writing down some thoughts, in case they are useful to others who are in the same situation.

My main takeaway is certainly not that you shouldn’t try to do good work. You definitely should. But it’s more that everyone is struggling in some way. Every single person with major achievements definitely has periods where things go less smoothly, they’re more tired, they’re sick, things don’t work. And from my experience and private chats, they, too, get quite frustrated about it. It’s quite a normal part of doing things, really.

On social media, which we all spend far too many hours on (but we have to, because where else are we gonna stay on top of the latest, coolest tech), you tend to see the wins. The things that do work. And it gives this impression that everyone’s out there, managing to work without the sort of hindrance you experience, and that the problem, for some reason, is you. This circles back to the top of the post: I’ve had people DMing me asking me how I stay so productive despite having mentioned health issues.

I hadn’t quite realised I was contributing to the problem, but it makes sense: the reason it seems this way is because I tweet about things that work, but I rarely tweet “ah man, felt awful this week, my code broke prod and it took me so long to realise I just messed up line 36.”

Anyhow, I hope this is useful to someone. Tinkering is fun, building things is fun, but do take it easy – I feel like ML is one of those fields where everyone’s work ethic is very strong, sometimes to the detriment of actually doing good work (which sadly requires some rest, once in a while, as our body machinery is pretty bad at recovering from loss spikes).