Consistency

Someone told me I'd be learning for the rest of my life in IT as a developer. And I felt relieved because I believe the mind has to be stimulated, otherwise I'll feel useless. There's a lot of stories about self-taught developers in YouTube mentioning their successes and it looks easy to learn. Since Terceira Tech Island I told myself I'd make my own path learning, because their rhythm is brutal ??

What no one told me was, how hard it is to be consistent. How many times I'd have to skip hanging out after work, skip the girlfriend, skip the mother, the father, brother, computer games, series, things I love to do. Really. All this because I kept the mottos in mind "If I do nothing today, tomorrow I'll be the same. " and "Nothing comes from nothing." as a good friend once told me. By respectively turning off my phone and throwing it into a different room, deleting game shortcuts on my PC then logging off Facebook, disconnecting WhatsApp, I steered away from distractions, and even dealt with complaints of how I was "always unavailable!" during my time blocks. These are little sacrifices for bigger results.

There were even days I felt completely unmotivated, lazy, stressed out, in short I felt like doing something else. It's easy to quit. I wanted to quit, escape by playing games, watching series, going out and talking to people. Procrastinating.

To be consistent, every time there were emotions in the way, I read my sticky notes: "Is what I'm doing now helping me achieve my goal to be a better dev?" and "Nothing comes from nothing.", a reminder that worse is to come if nothing is done. Just like a computer has scripts to achieve a result, the mind needs a script and what we tell ourselves matters. Every day.

Don't get me wrong, I still have times for negativity. Sometimes I get it from myself with doubt, sometimes from people around me who share different beliefs. And from what I learned from all those self-development books, your big why will realign you. I made it my daily exercise to be intentional towards my goal as a better dev. I always have to keep myself in check and watch what I feed my mind, or what and whom I'm exposing my mind to.

After seeing three months of consistent work, the long green tiled repo made me want to go on. Seeing this visual uplifted my spirit and I felt ecstatic. Time blocks became a second nature and people started to respect my time, that an "I'll call back when I'm done." makes them wait for me instead of complain.

In the span of 11 months I was able to learn the basics of ASP.NET Core MVC, forms and validations, ViewModel, ViewBag, ViewData, consume API's such as Sweetalert, Summernote, set up the database connection with Entity Framework Core, use DB First approach and CRUD operations and others. I created a B2B E-commerce masonry store. I studied a 2D game development course and I was able to develop a 1986's block breaker arcade game with Unity. I was able to accomplish all of this because of my big why, because of my intention to be consistent. It also helped to keep in mind those who inspired me: The Master coders(Terceira), Pedro Silva, Arthur Britto, Paulo Lemos, Tiago Filipe, Ralf, my family and some I spoke with along the way ?

I didn't believe I could do this out of a bootcamp and now I have the confidence I can do it again and I will do it again starting this month. And I invite YOU to do the same with me! If you are someone who wants to be consistent and is having a hard time doing so, you are welcome to connect with me in this journey! Might be a good call for accountability!??

Accountability is the glue that ties commitment to the result.

- Bob Proctor -