You Aren’t Getting Any Better
5th March 2013
You can’t just show up and expect to get better. You can’t even just show up, work hard and expect to get better. You have to show up, work hard and deliberately focus on the specific things that will make you get better. Sometimes they will be the same as the cool things that you instinctively want to work on, but there’s no guarantee of this. Working through problems you’ve already solved won’t help much. Working on easy problems won’t help much. Working without feedback won’t help much. Working with only a superficial understanding of the technologies and frameworks you are using won’t help much. You’ll be OK for a while, but before long you might just be spinning your wheels in the mud, and if you’re unlucky you might not even notice.
To which my native indolence replies, I knew it all along – so let’s have a nap instead.