Day 12
New Year, old resolutions.
Starting this 2017 I didn’t set any goals. I didn’t had to. I already have goals to make and things to do. I just needed to hit the road. And I already started that in 2016. That’s why for this year I don’t have goals, well, except for quit complaining, at all.
In 2017 I set myself to stick to my commitments of previous years and raise the bar for myself. Raising the bar, means stop looking everywhere, and focus on a few little things that matters for me and put all my energy and action to those.
As a developer in today’s world, I used to be really concerned with how the things were fast at a pace I couldn’t keep. I specially hated going to Twitter and saw so many articles, libraries and new technologies that I wanted to try. Just give it a try and tinker with it. Because I used to enjoy tinkering with frameworks, libraries, whatever, I was what you might call an early adopter. At least in Cuban’s technology landscape. But I didn’t have the same time last year that I moved to Montevideo and had a more demanding job ( grateful for that, BTW).
At some point, I stopped and tried instead to go deep instead of wide. And it felt good as well. But I still missed tinkering. I guess that’s part of what brought me to this challenge. I wanted to go the basics, enjoy again the thrill of solving little problems, designing systems and looking at things that I don’t do at my day-to-day job.
I know now that I will always need going wide and then deep and learning new things aside from my current assignment. I mean, I was born a learner.
As the holidays were passing by this weekend I remembered a funny story my family always tell from when I was a child. I can’t remember it. My grandma tells me I was like 3 years old and went missing. A neighbor found me a few meters from the nearest school. Luckily, he knew my family. He says that I said I was going to school to learn. They knew from that moment on that they will never have troubles convincing me to go to school. And they never did.
I have surrender in the quest for passion on an specific thing. I am a learner. I enjoy it, crave for it, love it. Computer programming is possibly the best medium for me to channel that energy as the wide field it is nowadays.
This challenge is my way to discipline myself and create a process of organized learning and professional growth. My challenge is to structure my learning, to focus. And that’s my whole old goal for 2017.
Personally that has a profound impact in how I approach life as well. I will say it’s a win-win for now.
P.S
This article is part of a 66 days challenge of coding practicing, reading and learning outside work.
