Persistence

In this episode, I describe the benefits of taking a leap of faith and continuously coming back to something that you are learning that is completely new and alien to you. This is persistence. Even if you feel totally overwhelmed and ignorant every time you sit down to study that thing, the continuous exposure is valuable, and eventually you will begin to understand and get good at that thing. I use the example in my life of making a contribution on GitHub to a C++ code that I have been using for a very long time. At the time, I didn’t know very much C++, but over the span of a few months, I developed this feature. At first I was completely overwhelmed and didn’t know anything, but I kept coming back to it and doing my due diligence, and occasionally asking other developers for very specific help, and eventually, I was able to get the feature working. Persistence like that is how one becomes more well rounded and competent and confident. To not do this continually throughout ones life is to confine oneself to a subdomain of things that you know and things similar to things that you know. This can be okay, but I thinking expanding one’s domain of competency is much more satisfying.