Many people get trapped at a very small scale. They care deeply about writing each line of code well, and then lose the top-down view in all those tiny fragments. The benefit of caring about small things is that finishing a small task gives you satisfaction quickly. But without noticing it, you can forget that many more tasks are still waiting to be done. I am not saying it is wrong to feel satisfied by small progress. What I mean is that people should not become self-satisfied, and they should not announce every tiny achievement to everyone, because from the outside it can look strange and out of proportion.

As people keep working and learning, their energy can expand from single lines of code to whole projects, from separate projects to a platform, and from platforms to a full system. That kind of growth cannot be assembled from an obsession with small wins alone. A person should not be satisfied just because they wrote one function or fixed one issue. People should use their ability to organize and create to assemble scattered pieces of code into a larger system, and to handle tasks they may not even have imagined before in an orderly way. Being too satisfied with writing code can stop you from thinking further. It can stop you from building the product you actually have in mind. More important than being pleased with writing code is thinking about how to use that code, and even code that has not been written yet, to create a better product. Do not become self-satisfied. Do not act as if a small task is a great public event. Keep doing more, and keep doing it better.