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If I may be so bold, the fallacy here is of time. Dare I say, you are already surrounded by friends, and not noticing it.

It seems like you measure "friendship" not by the time spent with them when you go to events or in school, but what happens afterwards. In other words, you are discounting to zero the moments that are actually happening in your life, for an imagined future of what a friendship might turn out to be. But life only ever happens moment to moment. That time that you spend with people at an event, that IS the thing.

There is no "friendship certificate": some people, you'll only spend ten minutes with; some, you might spend an afternoon with; others you might end up seeing once a week for a term. You might date a girl for a fortnight, or a couple of months, and then break up and never see each other again. It's ALL GOOD.

If I understand correctly, none of the above would qualify in your eyes as "real friendship", only the deep, deep kind. You might find it helpful to learn about Dunbar's number, and the size of the model's concentric social circles. Most people end up with 1-2 very close friends (possibly including their spouse). That is the outcome over a lifetime of making connections. Popular culture markets this idea that we should all be carousing with a tightly knit group of friends - no statistical social evidence bears this out.

When sinking into deep analysis about all your self-perceived inadequacies, your attention beam is directed inwards. That's unhealthy. When it's directed OUT, into the world, it takes you out of your head, and lets you see that everyone, every single one (person or otherwise), is struggling in their own way. Everyone's got a thing. Looking out builds empathy and kindness and affection towards things that make you happy, and gazing inwards makes you miserable.

You are surrounded by people in school, and are at a stage in life where you get to be interested in whatever. Any experience you have, even if it doesn't lead to lifelong friendships, is worthy in the space of time it occupies.

Throughout my undergrad I had friends come and go. I'm not in touch with anyone I met at Uni during those years. It doesn't make the actual time spent with these people any less special.

There are two books on the issue by a guy called Steven Pressfield, "The War of Art" and "Do the Work". I've read the latter and it's good. He talks about how resistance strengthens the closer you get to ending a project. I've found it useful in my work.

Don't know about "ideal" but YC have a video where Michael Siebel talks about the dev cycle they had at Twitch. Before they applied it, he says, they wrote lots of redundant code and also get stuck on stuff that didn't matter.

Eventually, what they did was set up two-week dev cycles. Before each, they'd write down suggestions for features/WIP and stick everything on the board. They would also estimate if a feature was large (one week of work or over), medium (2-3 days) or small (up to a day). Then, they'd pick the most urgent things off that list, and work only on them. Two weeks later, same thing. But you don't keep a list of the ideas, the other things don't go into a queue.

I applied this for a product I was building last year, and it definitely helped build faster.

Not sure about measuring things in LOC or commits.

A vast open source community. If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.

I'll say something that sounds really unhelpful until one day it makes sense. You don't really choose the process, the process chooses you. You can't make yourself 'enjoy the process' for something that doesn't resonate, because it will always feel a chore. So the one and only trick is to really pay attention to the thing you keep going back to, and in a way accept that this is a path.

Some people might say "But I only enjoy video games!" and if that's the case, I don't really know what to say to that. All the people I know who have found great alignment with a path of progress are ones where the effort tickles an itch they would have regardless, so might as well scratch that itch.

And there are still goals, that doesn't change.

I used to be a big fan of LinkedIn. I've posted, here and elsewhere, expressing these views. But some of the value LinkedIn used to offer is definitely eroding.

The feeds have become really terrible. This wasn't always the case. Before, a lot more weight was given to posts from people you were connected to, vs. the weight given to their overall engagement. This offered two kinds of value: One, you were more likely to keep updated on what's happening within a professional niche (assuming lots of your connections were in that niche too.) Two, your own writing would be shown mostly to people in your business niche, which helped foster trust.

I've formed a lot of useful connections this way. A lot of client relationships, past and present, started out this way. A bunch of people helped me in a bunch of ways (intros, advice) because they felt I was a real person, not a rando profile image.

That's mostly gone now. A useful post is now so rare, and the rest is "engagement" fodder. Eventually, I turned off the feed, and that's how it stays most of the time. (I installed an extension someone once posted about here.)

The chat feature, which was always really powerful, is still there. But it used to be that the flow was written insights -> chat -> in person/Zoom. Without that slower process of getting acquainted, the connecting itself has less potential to become really useful.

For anyone saying "I definitely won't get in" here's a counterpoint that has little to do with whether your application succeeds or not: Do it for yourself, not for the approval.

I found that filling in the application, without even sending it, is a useful exercise. It makes you think hard about what it is you are trying to achieve with whatever it is your building. It's very helpful when you come to talk with clients.

You know how they say launch fast, launch early? That's part of it, because launching means talking about it to other people. Those people will have questions or objections or an incomplete understanding of pre-existing solutions. A lot of the application is about this kind of stuff.

Personally, I wanted to fill the application irrespective of YC. I figured, if I'm serious about building something useful, I shouldn't just build it and que sera, sera. I should know what to focus on. And since they've learned a bunch about building companies, if they care about something enough to ask about it, that's a good pointer that I should care enough about it to be able to answer it.

For example, I filled it in when a solution was just an idea, as if it were already built. So it made me set expectations, and clarify what I want this thing to be. Then, once it was built, the first thing that happened when that solution met with clients was this: I'd give them the short description I've written in the application, and they'd ask - Oh, but does it have to do just that?

Without the application, there wouldn't have been the short description, without which there wouldn't have been the useful client feedback...So, again: do it for yourself, not for the approval.