Have you ever given a thought to how you can do some of the things you do in auto-pilot mode? Let me be more clear and explain further.
We all can agree that all human beings living on earth today were once babies (except we have alien-human living among us. Who knows?😉).
As babies, we had to be catered for by other people. We couldn't do so many basic things ourselves. We didn't even know how useful our hands were and the wonders they can accomplish when put to work.
That means that there was a point in our lives when we knew next to nothing.
But no one remains a baby forever. As we grew, we started learning how to talk, eat, crawl, stand, run, etc. Thinking back, you can't tell how you were able to achieve these feats, considering how difficult and risky it was to learn how to do them. But you did learn them anyways.
Now that you are an adult, you do these things without even thinking about it. You can talk easily and faster too, run for 100m in 9.58 seconds (If you are Usain bolt😁), and jump so high that you may nearly touch the sky. What happened? how were you able to learn these things and master them? Well, the rest of the article will help you answer that.
Learning something new can be daunting at first, especially when you have no prior knowledge or background that you can build on. These have made people grow cold feet and give up on their journey to become a master in whatever they previously set out to learn.
But these kinds of scenarios are not new. To achieve any great feat in whatever you are doing, you have to face challenges to learn. These challenges are what you will later refer to as experiences when you finally conquer them.
Just like the baby example above, there were so many occasions when we fell on the ground while learning how to walk, bruised our knees while learning how to run, and even spoke so many gibberish things before we could say "Mummy" but we kept on trying regardless. In the end, we were able to conquer these little setbacks and grew into experienced adults.
In the same light, being a beginner in the tech space or any other space can have its setbacks. Understanding these setbacks and the way to conquer them is the only way you can move forward.
At the end of this article, you should be able to
- Understand the problem
- How to conquer the problem and move forward.
Understanding the problem.
- Unrealistic Expectations.
- Unhealthy Comparison.
- Impostor Syndrome.
Unrealistic Expectations.
When I first started learning JavaScript, I was told by a friend that in six months, I will have learned enough to land me a good job. While these can be true for others, it is not generic to everyone. We all learn differently at a different pace too.
Most beginners start their journey with a roadmap given to them by others. I am not saying that roadmaps are bad, but some of these roadmaps have average completion time expectations attached to them. These expectations sometimes affect the self-confidence of the learner when they are not able to learn what is needed to be learned in that duration.
Unhealthy Comparison
Most people usually compare their success rate with that of other people. While this is not a bad thing if it helps you work hard, it sometimes affects your progress and improvement.
As a beginner to programming, imagine comparing your progress with a full-stack developer who has been coding for five years. This can immediately shut your eyes from seeing the little progress you have made and might even throw you into a depressing state of mind, that you even begin to question your learning abilities.
Impostor Syndrome
This is one of the popular challenges every beginner or learner faces in their journey to mastery. I faced it and sometimes still do but what is it exactly?
According to Wikipedia, " Impostor syndrome is a psychological pattern in which an individual doubt their skills, talents, or accomplishments and has a persistent internalized fear of being exposed as a "fraud". Despite external evidence of their competence, those experiencing this phenomenon remain convinced that they are frauds and do not deserve all they have achieved".
This feeling can come when you are trying to accomplish a task you feel that you are supposed to already know and yet you can't figure it out yourself. Immediately, you start feeling incompetent. What this does is that it introduces self-doubt and therefore affects your progress in your learning journey.
How to conquer the problem and move forward.
We have already spent so much time listing out some of the main problems faced by beginners, now let us see a few points on how these problems can be conquered.
- Set your expectations.
- Be your competition.
- Be consistent.
- Believe in your abilities
Set your expectations.
As a beginner, instead of trying to live up to other people's expectations, it is healthy to have mapped out plans of the milestones you plan to achieve. This will serve as a personal guild for you in your journey. It will also help you check if you are progressing or not and if you need to improve your pace or otherwise.
So for me, when I started out learning JavaScript (Programming language), I had a list of what I wanted to achieve in a month. It wasn't much, but I tried as much as can to make it as flexible as I can. It helped me to focus on my learning. In the end, I was able to achieve my expectations. That boosted my confidence and helped me progress.
Be your competition.
Instead of comparing yourself with other people why not compare yourself to yourself. Ask yourself a daily question like, "What can I do today to be a better version of who I was yesterday in line with my goals"? If you can answer this question and do something to enact the change, you will learn and improve every day.
Be consistent.
If you have ever heard the phrase "Slow and steady wins the race", then you have already met consistency. This phrase simply translates to Consistent, effective effort leads to success.
Cultivating the habit of consistency will go a very long way to help you improve the skills you are learning. Consistency helps you measure success and progress easier.
while learning, instead of going ten hours in a day and then coming back after fours days for another round, why not break those hours in chunks daily. This will help your brain retain more as well as helps you make it a habit and stay consistent. Learning this way will make you more productive too.
Believe in your abilities
We oftentimes doubt ourselves more than other people doubt us. In your journey to mastery, it is normal for you to feel this way especially when you meet a challenge that seems unsolvable or very hard. But instead of having to entertain this feeling for so long and allowing it to affect your progress, I will advise that you always see such problems as an opportunity to learn more. This way, your interest will be spiked to solve that problem. This will also change how you view and tackle the problem.
Every problem you solve gives you an experience that will be needed in the future when you meet a similar problem. So instead of running away or allowing a problem to demotivate you, believe in your abilities and use that as a stepping stone to progress in your learning.
Conclusion
Gaining mastery in anything can be hard at first but always remember that no one became a master without practice, perseverance, and consistency. These three things are the keys to going forward as a beginner. So give yourself some pat on the back for every progress you make. Remember that as a baby you couldn't do a lot but now you can do so many things with ease. These things you learned took time and practice and so will everything we try to learn. So when you start feeling demotivated or having that impostor syndrome, don't forget that Everything is Learnable.