I recently embarked on a journey to learn some Java with a plan to start digging into Kotlin after. I felt like learning Java might provide a nice “where it started” perspective and help solidify some aspects of Kotlin later, maybe its a waste of time.
To hold myself accountable, and to try something new, I started live streaming myself while learning. You can see how I set this up in my first post here. I also upload every stream to YouTube. This absolutely gave me the motivation I needed to show up every day which in my opinion is by far the most important part. These videos are raw. I don’t edit them. I stream and record simultaneously. As soon as I finish I upload it to YouTube.
Theres a few things here to mention that have changed over time:
I think I now have a time horizon long enough (almost 50 days) that things have changed and given me an opportunity to reflect a bit.
Now that I’m older I can recognize when I am tired or stressed out, but learning every day means learning every day, not just days you feel good. If you pick a random day to watch, you might see me cursing and losing my mind because I cannot get the answer to a question correct. I’ll sit there and blame the course which is ridiculous and start questioning why I am even learning this stuff. I think looking back at these days its comical or maybe a bit embarrassing. In the end, I really don’t want that kind of emotional reaction to learning and struggle. I tried to give it some thought.
When I think further back into the past with school, I don’t think anyone truly told me that I wasn’t supposed to “just know” things. Like its ok to be a beginner in something or to not understand something after it was explained a single time. I realize now that the feeling of struggling was/is physically uncomfortable and it caused me to try and get out of it as quickly as possible.
In school, I remember vividly having this breaking point on tests where if it was taking too long, I just started guessing so I didn’t have to continue reading the question and all the multiple choice options. Somehow I only ever got a single grade below C and it was an “emotions” class in 6th grade because I thought it was dumb, which is of course ironic as I am writing this. I had such a short tolerance for struggle that even on the SAT, probably the most consequential test you take in your teens, that I remember just filling in bubbles if I didn’t know the answer immediately.
Luckily, somewhere along the way I developed a sort of tenacity to make it through things despite getting uncomfortable and super frustrated. I raised the expectations I had for myself in college and turned things around academically at the very end of that journey. Even with this persistence I have developed, I don’t want anger to be my first reaction to struggle, especially if I am doing it every day.
The point I am trying to make in a rambling way is that I never dealt with why exactly not knowing something caused me this discomfort to the point that I was trying to escape as quickly as possible even when their were high stakes attached.
Im not sure what the answer is yet besides a shift in mentality and some initial googling leads me to think that might really be the best answer. There are a few resources on learning techniques, but I am unsure how applicable they would be to programming languages or even how helpful they would be dealing with the actual struggle of learning.
At least, on this rare occasion, I am quite pleased I started this blog, the YouTube channel, and learning every day. With this process, I can try again tomorrow.