For any of those who are self-starters or self-teachers in disciplines that require a great deal of time and energy to gain proficiency, this following line will hold a special place in your heart:
Screw this! gonna either try some likely useless “Master [enter skill here] In Just 2 Months!!” course that will cost me $1,000+,
or try something else…
What am I doing with my life??!!“
Inevitably, there ARE going to periods in which you will feel that you are not making progress. There WILL be periods in which your motivation and even passion for learning and mastering your desired skill will wane. You may even do work or tasks that delude you into thinking your learning the skill.
But you think to yourself, “things were not always like this.” You know that candle that burned strongly in you; it was a representation of your desire to improve and reach your goals? Well… it now feels like that same candle is fizzling out. It’s only a matter of time before it dies. Now, feelings of defeat, frustration and sadness start to seep in. This self-learning adventure no longer feels like an adventure, but rather a racing path that has five thousand more hurdles to jump over and your legs are giving out.
These aforementioned feelings/states of mind/thoughts have mirrored my sentiments for the past month and a half.
But with all of that being said, I had to remind myself: I’m just on the low point of this invisible sine wave graph (I think if they knew about Euclidean planes, Pythagoras’s cult could get behind that idea!)
Here’s what I mean:
As we know (and I just barely), line graphs are representations of a variety of sets of data. Some common ones are birth rates, college completion rates, and even our very close pal Mr. Covid-19 (we like to just call him Rona). Line graphs are used to represent his “influence” around the world.
Well, if we were to take that representation and apply it to the current state of our self-taught journeys, we might be somewhere around here:
The problem with this view is that IT IS TOO NARROW.
How’s about we expand the graph a bit?
As you can see, there’s more to our story. In the beginning, things were awesome! You got the books, the tools and you were ready to kick ass!… until the hurdles came. Even so, there’s more than just painful hurdles! If we keep at it, there is real progress! Our learning adventure isn’t a race, it’s a jog that we will complete on our terms.
Much like life in general, you’re going to have your ups and downs. But when you compare where you are with when you started, you would realize that you have made strides. Moreover, you are still in the process of improving!
Even though it may not feel like it right now, it seems reasonable that if you keep it up, your dot on that graph is going to be in an even better spot than ever before!
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