“Structuring your theory into a story makes it more compelling.”

The latter consequence of low expectations is the more serious one. It's something that some people may never recover from. The average career of a paramedic is 6-8 years because of the physical and psychological strain the job puts on a person. The career of a physiotherapist is about the same, mainly because they become someone's personal psychologist 8 times a day while treating back pain or a sore knee. The trajectory of a data or software engineer seems to be a bit different: they burn out from the mental stress of working in dishonest and fraudulent cultures that produce unsatisfying work, but the engineer stays in the profession. Only they're a shell of a human. How many developers or programmers do you know who are a little sad all the time? I wonder what caused them to be like that.

So much of building tech stuff is a figurative conversation - between you and the machine, you and the abstraction, you and the people who will use what you build, you and the people who will maintain it, you and those who came before you. To understand such a varied audience you need to anchor on your understanding of yourself. Improve the one tool you can never replace - you.