They’re in the habit of defining small but meaningful projects for themselves, breaking those projects down into steps, and practicing the steps until the whole project attains a smooth and satisfying flow.
They’re looking not just for goal-oriented success but for little, intuitive, hard-to-explain ways of finding a thrill in the practice itself. They make little games for themselves that would seem utterly neurotic and silly to other people. And those self-imposed, idiosyncratic games are actually an important part of the lived experience of practicing for these people.
They look for opportunities to teach and show off their skills.
I feel like these are all kind of true, but also slightly askew of my reality.
Sometimes it feels like it was overdetermined that I would become a programmer. I started when I was 8, kept coming back to it, and had this persistent drive to make computers do things and to build things out of computers. Looking back it didn’t make a lot of sense; I had some unjustified belief that COMPUTERS!!! were the answer to all my problems.
And then there was the reality of becoming a programmer. The long trail of abandoned projects, the procrastination, the vast difficulty of getting the computer to do what I wanted it to do, the constant failure. It was like getting punched in the face over and over, and yet I kept coming back for more until I finally learned one day after decades of effort how to punch back. If you had looked at me from the inside you would have not seen what looked like a healthy way to become an expert at something.
So I don’t know, I feel like there are a lot of pieces to the puzzle, and sometimes things work out in spite of conditions that seem like they should lead to failure, or that combine in weird ways to work despite lots of forces working against mastery.
I feel like these are all kind of true, but also slightly askew of my reality.
Sometimes it feels like it was overdetermined that I would become a programmer. I started when I was 8, kept coming back to it, and had this persistent drive to make computers do things and to build things out of computers. Looking back it didn’t make a lot of sense; I had some unjustified belief that COMPUTERS!!! were the answer to all my problems.
And then there was the reality of becoming a programmer. The long trail of abandoned projects, the procrastination, the vast difficulty of getting the computer to do what I wanted it to do, the constant failure. It was like getting punched in the face over and over, and yet I kept coming back for more until I finally learned one day after decades of effort how to punch back. If you had looked at me from the inside you would have not seen what looked like a healthy way to become an expert at something.
So I don’t know, I feel like there are a lot of pieces to the puzzle, and sometimes things work out in spite of conditions that seem like they should lead to failure, or that combine in weird ways to work despite lots of forces working against mastery.