Everything you do leaves a debt.

Ing. Jan Jileček
3 min readSep 21, 2020

The basic law of the Universe is that of karma. Everything you do leaves a debt, be it good or bad.

I use this philosophy for my everyday life. I know that when I will partake in hedonistic pleasures, it will incur a debt, I will have to pay for later.

So, when I have a day that is full of easy things, then I know the second day will be full of difficult things. Thus I try to do very difficult things, so I can have an easy time later.

The same goes for any kind of project. Be it your college project or a work project. When I go for the easy way out, and I make some short-sighted decision, it ALWAYS comes back, sooner or later, and kicks me in the butt.

I can’t say how many times I used a “hacky” solution in a programming project, only for it to bring bugs or other implementation difficulties later on.

Thus, I now I try to go for long-term decisions, that are often hard to make and implement but are the only right thing to do, compared to short-term solutions that will need a rework later.

This concept even has a name in programming - it’s called “technical debt”.

I realized the same thing about my college years. I used to do a lot of college projects at the last minute, and often create them so it worked so-so. I used to study for exams…

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Ing. Jan Jileček

INTP, UE5 dev, Master’s degree in comp-sci, Creator, indie game developer, director, writer, photographer. I like BJJ, Jungian psychology, mythology and memes.