HFLW

Thoughts On Goals and Learning

A lot of people I've talked to lately have some sort of goal in mind, but see the task to be too difficult. It's understandable, but a lot of people don't give themselves enough credit. Learning is a lot easier when there's a goal in sight; all you need to do is throw yourself at it blindly, and learn along the way.

The key, however, is that the goal needs to motivate you to to the point of learning. A lot of people lack the motivation, either because the goal seems unattainable, they don't feel confident that they can do it, or some other reason. Honestly though, if you don't start somewhere, you'll never learn. The best way to learn is to fail, so simply accept that your first attempt will be a complete failure, and keep going. Eventually you will refine whatever it is you're working on to the point where it's perfect, or close to it, and you will learn a lot in the process.

When I started Lucid, I knew pretty much nothing about software engineering. I knew syntax, but I didn't know how to write good code. The first working version of Lucid was horrific in retrospect. You can look back in our git repository yourself, and you'll see how terrible it was. But, as time progressed, I picked up on what other programmers were doing (a lot of which was from looking at Dojo's source code), and learned how to properly structure the project in an object-oriented fashion. I would never have been able to learn as much as I did if it weren't for the fact that I was persistent with my goal, and I followed through, despite how bad my first version was.

I should give a more recent example, too. When I was re-writing my site, I didn't really do any web design work. I wanted to design my own site though, because what good is a portfolio designed by someone irrelevant to the work in question? I felt that it wouldn't have been as personal. At that point, I already accumulated a good sense of what I should be doing from reading Aza Raskin's blog, along with articles from UsabilityPost. Although I knew the theory behind what I was doing, I had no idea where to start. I wound up getting really frustrated, but then after I started looking at how other sites were laid out and stylized, what I wanted to do suddenly became clear. More or less, I borrowed the features from the designs I liked, and remixed it using the knowledge I gained from the two blogs. This is within the same vein as "borrowing" the programming conventions and structure from Dojo's developers, and incorporating it in Lucid.

If that wasn't enough, I'll share one more bit that I actually found in a textbook about writing. If you take the average high school student, they will pound out an essay in one sitting, and say it's done. Hell, some college students do that as well. But what separates the good writers from the great writers is the fact that they revise their work. They read their papers over and over, continuing revision until the work is due. Some even end up rewriting the paper from scratch. Although this process involves less learning from example than my previous two examples, it still supports the fact that you should consider your first attempt to be a failure, and refine it from there. And of course, these revisions will consume a lot of your time.

Knowing that the first try would be a failure would probably make anyone a bit hesitant to start, however, one needs to be persistent, and become motivated by their goals (as well as their failures), rather than view them as an impossibility or a hurdle. If anything, they should use their motivation as a means to get over that hurdle.

I wrote this mainly to solidify the theory in my head, so the next time it comes up I can explain it clearly, but hopefully someone reading this finds it helpful. Writing is something I have a tendency to shy away from, mainly because I'll start writing, say to myself "this is a stupid idea to write about," and delete it without a second thought. In that regard, maybe I should take my own advise, and just start writing more.

Posted by Will

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