I’ve been trying to learn this new stuff since a few months ago. And looks like I saw a first good sign this week. But first, some context…

‍

November 2020. We challenged ourselves to bring the best website experience to our clients. We wanted the client to have both: the best of design and the best of sales functionality. When it comes to designing a bespoke user experience, Webflow is the way to go. Unfortunately, Webflow still falls short on the eCommerce front. If you need enterprise-grade sales capabilities in the backend, you need to go with Shopify. But Shopify’s forte is not in design. There are thousands of online stores with the exact same templates. My team’s goal was to fuse the best of the two platforms into one coherent piece. My job was to take what our award-winning designer came up with and develop it into an interactive web design ready to be hooked up with the backend. The only problem was that I had very little clue as to what I was doing.

‍

I asked lots of questions to the engineer who was in charge of the backend integration part of the project. My frontend development part needed to be prepared in a specific way for him to do his job properly. I asked him how I can do that and he did explain but I had no idea what he meant when he said something about “tagging elements.” He was kind enough to send me some online manuals to read but again, it made almost no sense to me. To understand what’s mentioned on page 74, I had to start from its cover page. We were technically communicating in a totally different language from each other. I had no vocabulary of programming language or concept he was using. In the end, I had to lower myself to an order taker. I had to let him login to my account so he could figure it out.

‍

Fortunately, the project ended in success. Within budget and we made it before the Black Friday cutoff time. The project manager was happy and my boss was happy. He told me that I did great. I did more than what was included in our scope of work too.

‍

I wasn’t satisfied though.

‍

I need to learn this stuff. Fast. I can’t keep asking dumb questions. What should I do?

‍

Should I join a community of smart people? My engineer friend told me to join online forums and attend meetups. There are a bunch of friendly, smart, and helpful folks everywhere around the world. He said that fact that I speak Japanese is very helpful to learn a new programming language because Japanese engineers in Tokyo are so nice and respectful. Yes, but… They are being nice and respectful to him because he is a pretty well-known and respected engineer in his field. Smart people hang out only with smart people by definition. If you are hanging out with dumb people, you can’t be smart. They are nice to each other because they know they can build something together. I’m sure there are lots of generous engineers out there but in a long run, they have no incentive to help me learn their craft because I’d slow them down.

‍

That was the depressing thought I had as I moved forward with trying to learn a new programming language. Wait a minute, I thought learning something new is something fun. Yeah, that was another misconception I had to snub out. To my engineer friend, learning a new programming language is something fun. He’s been doing this since he was 5 or something. He won awards. He traveled to conferences around the world. He gets to work with smart, like-minded engineers while getting paid handsomely. Learning is fun if your innate interest and market demand match up. Oh, he even made a template a couple years ago using the language I’m trying to learn and that hobby project was sold for thousands. Yeah, you should definitely learn this. It’s so fun!

‍

No, it’s not.

‍

So how should I go about learning something new and dreadful? Surely, this is not the last new thing I need to learn. I need to learn how to learn because the way smart people learn doesn’t work for me.

‍

Ask lots of questions because there are no stupid questions.
Join the community of smart people.
Learning should be fun.

‍

Lies! Lies! Lies!

‍

Learning is about managing pain.

‍

It hurts to feel dumb and helpless in the new field. It hurts to know that you can’t even ask the right questions because you are clueless about the language spoken around you. It hurts to know that you are way behind and incompetent compared to your peers. No wonder we tell ourselves lies.

‍

But it’s time for me to go bottoms up with the pain pill.

‍

It hurts because I’m alone.

‍

It hurts because I feel lost.

‍

It hurts because I’m scared.

‍

Back in school, I was brainwashed to become just like everybody else.

‍

Out in the wild, I am left to my own devices.  

‍

Either way, it hurts.  

‍

It hurts but it hurts me good.

‍

Because this is the pain of being myself.