My Friend, Work-Ethic

What I’ve learned is that there are few feelings as exhilarating as having an opportunity in front of you, and being fully and completely prepared for it. That doesn’t always mean that there are no butterflies associated with the weight of the moment. But the feeling of peace and calm that you experience because you know that you have put in the hard work, effort, and the grueling labor of something, feels so amazing. Your confidence quiets your nerves. Your heart beats a bit slower. You smile a lot more, LOL.  Stress does not touch you; stress decides to mess with the unprepared. And you can see it in their eyes, their sweaty hands, and their trembling knees. I HATE having those moments. I am learning more and more to make work-ethic my friend.

In some ways, we all try to avoid him. He’s harsh and demanding (if you want your dream, he forces you to pay for it), rude (he does not care about your schedule), selfish (demands all of your time) and makes you turn your back on many of your loves (hobbies, friends, family, leisure time, etc.).

As a society, we have gone about this the wrong way. We need a perspective shift. Work-ethic is our friend. Work-ethic is there to protect us, prepare us, and provide for us, if we are willing to listen to his wisdom. Boundaries are a good thing. Sacrifice is often a good thing; and when we begin to embrace those principles as being true and good for us, we will not see hard-work and discipline as friends, but we will instead look at them as enemies. We will see them as threats to our comforts.

It is not until we view these “comforts” as the very things that are confining and imprisoning us that we will begin to see them as lesser joys and the enemy of our progress and therefore begin to change.

I feel myself beginning to change. Though it is often hard to look my friend, work-ethic, in the eye early in the morning and answer his calls to hang out during the wee hours of the night… though it does not always feel good to hug him because of how awful he makes me feel sometimes, it does not compare to when I rise the next morning and I look myself in the eyes in my mirror and feel the pain and disappointment from not having spent time with my friend.

A Major Milestone

 

So, I managed to do the impossible and pass a major test in my journey to becoming a full-stack developer. It was only by GOD’s sheer grace that I even passed it. Not by my smarts, or my work ethic, or by any such thing. I am beyond hyped (and relieved). As you can see from the gif above, this is an accurate representation of my current mood. I’m trying to go Super Saiyan on every test from here on out, but I know it won’t be easy. Every assessment makes me feel like it is the 4th quarter in game 7 of the Finals. The pressure is palpable. The stressful cloud hanging over your head each time you take one makes you feel like you might throw up Mom’s spaghetti at any moment…

I was tested on things such as refactoring classes, module mixins, inheritance, schemas, SQL queries,  nested arrays, etc. There’s such a long way to go. Yet, I am trying to re-orient my mind to think more about how far I’ve come instead of thinking how far I have to go. I see more clearly how learning to become a programmer changes you… You really do have to think differently and approach situations with more of a changed perspective than you ever have before. There’s definitely a lot I wanna say right now, but I will leave that for another time. Sometimes, you just gotta appreciate the win, and not take for granted what you have already accomplished. So that’s what I will do. Soak it all in, before it is time to get hit by more haymakers.