Me against myself
I believe I’ve finally accepted and come to terms with the fact that this blog can remain alive while not being updated very often. The first time I started writing in a blog was to express myself and it just so happened that at that time, I wasn’t writing more often because I wanted to write more often but because I needed to express myself more often. It came from within. It still happens that I feel like expressing myself this way but it’s just less frequent, hence the time difference between posts.
In any case, whenever I find the motivation, I’ll also have to spend some time into looking why WordPress is acting so slow. I don’t pay much for this server but it definitely has enough specs for the traffic expected here. In any case, moving on to the crux of the topic of this blog post.
I’ve mentioned it before here in other words but I find I can sometimes be my worst enemy. I’m sure I’m not the only person saying this about themselves, I assume it is actually fairly common.
What I mean by this is that since ages, I have this bad pattern where I *want* to learn a new skill (be it a new music instrument or something IT-related) and I’ll start putting myself out there, following course(s) to learn that skill and where I will somewhere along the road just stop. At first, I’ll just think that it’s just temporary and that I’m stopping because I have other things to do, which can sometimes be true. However, the real reason behind it is that what will have happened is that I’ll have encountered something that’s not so easy to learn and to assimilate. Something that will actually require effort and time and self-discipline. And this is where things get complicated.
I first learnt how to write Hello World in C++ probably 15 years ago or so. I first started learning programming with QBasic when I was in my early teenage years. Then, because I wanted to get away from console-based applications, I turned over to Visual Basic 6. There was a lot of energy and a lot of passion back then when it came to learning the language and experimenting with it. I still remember writing simple applications related to Pythagoras’ theorem because that’s what I was learning about in school at the time. I can’t really say I ever became a good programmer, but I played enough with the language that I would understand what I consider to be the basics of programming: variables, loops, arrays, etc. Visual Basic was more than what I ever did with it, which makes me believe that this problem I have today is not new. I believe it’s actually pretty old, which in a way, is maybe reassuring.
I don’t think I’ve ever been able to overcome this kind of issue before when I was trying to learn a new skill on my own. The best I could ever do was to pick it up again after some amount of time. Problem is that just because you resume learning a skill after some time that you won’t stop for the same reason you stopped before. This leads to what folks call a vicious circle: I start learning a new skill, get stuck (not necessarily because of difficulty), stop learning, wait a few months/years, start learning again, etc, ad-vitae.
There’s no magic solution to this. I think that there are two main ways out:
- Force yourself to work on the skill even though it’s hard and not pleasant.
- Get yourself a mentor/teacher who accompanies you through the learning.
I know that the second option can work for me because I’ve tried it for about 6 months when trying to learn the piano a few years ago. I definitely made more progress with a private teacher than I ever did on my own whenever I tried to learn the instrument on my own. Obviously, on top of the time needed to learn the skill, teachers aren’t free and don’t typically come to your place to teach you. Those are additional things to consider when walking this path.
I’m also sure that the first option is not impossible, though much harder. There’s after all a reason why I’ve been stuck in this loop for such a long time.
I also feel there is a lot of value to find a way to make it work with that first option. There’s so many free resources online to learn a new skill on your own that learning to overcome this issue could prove very useful since you won’t have to find a teacher for every new skill you intend to learn.
I haven’t managed to find the courage/self-discipline to go past my issues when learning but I know one thing: knowing you have a problem and knowing the problem is the first step towards overcoming it.