I find one of the hardest parts about learning something is getting past what you think you already know about what you’re trying to learn. For example, I’ve been haphazardly programming computers for about 20 years (longer if you count Logo on an Atari 400). It started in junior college with an introductory course in Pascal and then I moved into C programming. Since I couldn’t write a functional line in either one of those with a gun to my head you can tell how well it went. Years later I picked up Java in the web’s early days. I hated that too and was forced through it again once I went back to school years later with the intention of becoming some kind of internet superhero. Now I focus my coding efforts mostly on Javascript, Python and PHP. Programming has become easier to learn and implement since my early days in C programming, and that’s also made it more fun.

This example has spread across many different facets of my life and I’m only recently noticing it. In becoming a parent, I’ve had to deconstruct the simplest of ideas in order for someone without any life experience to easily understand them. Explaining a concept like time to a three-year-old makes you force a look at your own understanding of it and how it relates to your day or why it’s important and in giving relevant examples to someone that doesn’t share your priorities can make you realize how well you do actually understand, well, pretty much anything.

I’m lucky that I do have a need to learn as I’m pretty sure that relaxing on what I’ve learned to this point might get me through the next few years but it wouldn’t make me grow and professionally I’m not being challenged in any way. It’s sad at times but this is where it’s up to me to put on my big boy pants and continue the growth. And yes, just right before this I wrote some Javascript that makes things blink, so there.