“Our whole theory of education is based on the absurd notion that we must learn to swim on land before tackling the water.” — Henry Miller
You are the only one who can make yourself realize that you have to get in.
Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years
Wonderful short essay on pursuing coding, but relevant to any endeavor.
It takes 10 years to develop an expertise, based on some science done researching that. I find myself winding up so incredibly quickly sometimes, that I forget these things. That the real timeline for my progress is way different than the one in my head. Nice reminder to slow down.
http://rubyfortheweb.tumblr.com/
Blog following the endeavors of an HTML/CSS front end dev diving into learning Ruby on Rails, and setting a goal for writing his first application in 16 weeks. Brilliant!
This same idea has been knocking around in my noggin for just a minute…
Late night
I’ve had many conversations with my peers on the nature of ambition, self-realization, and the idea that you’re only growing when you find yourself uncomfortable. The only way you can get better at anything is to defy your default discomforts. I’ve had an incredible experience thus far in a wide variety of fields. It’s only now though that I feel the rush of going for it myself completely.
My days have been quite long. Running a few miles before work, work at 8, off at 5, leave the office at 6:30 after some resource/computer work to use later at home, dinner, work, studying until 12. Hard bedtime cutoff. It’s easy to get lost in it all and catch the clock at 1, 1:30, 2am. You’d be surprised at how much you can learn from the internet. Online tutorials, academies, MIT OpenCourseware, magazine articles, best practices, Twitter updates, Khan Academy, you can literally learn anything you want about anything you want any time you want. I find this incredibly exhilarating in it’s lack of precedence. In the last 3 weeks, I’ve completely caught up on what ever it was I once knew in web design/implementation, and then some. Standards and languages, and semantics, and I’m working at thinking in the languages- to problem solve in them. To click with ideas when I’m not even thinking about them. Getting there. Just need more fluency. Found myself too fatigued to really get into picking up on work. Luckily there are minor things to always clean up on. Domain management, closing up shop at the previous blog, brainstorming, and always a moment for blogging.
Studying. A lot. I want to know everything.
Motivation beats everything until you have the talent to have anything, or so I like to think.
I’m off ladies and gents. Tomorrow has a pre-work morning run on the schedule and I read that sleeping after studying aids information retention, or so I like to think.
