It isn’t always what it seems

Remember how I said tech was my passion and it had to be tech and nothing else in my first blog (check it out here), I honestly thought it was going to be an easy ride. You know those sayings like

Forget about the fast lane. If you really want to fly, harness your power to your passion. Honor your calling. Everybody has one. Trust your heart, and success will come to you. – Oprah Winfrey

OR

Just don’t give up trying to do what you really want to do. Where there is love and inspiration, I don’t think you can go wrong. – Ella Fitzgerald

OR

If you feel like there’s something out there that you’re supposed to be doing, if you have a passion for it, then stop wishing and just do it. – Wanda Sykes

OR

Passion is energy. Feel the power that comes from focusing on what excites you. – Oprah Winfrey

that makes you feel like once you hop on this, it’s going to be a smooth ride. Well, sorry to burst your bubble it isn’t going to be a smooth ride. As much as these quotes get you highly motivated and encouraged to hop on that train called your passion, you are still going to have to put in a lot of work and there are going to be a lot of obstacles on the way, so be prepared. I will share with you a few of my troubles.

Being Consistent

I first had to deal with being consistent. This was a big issue for me, one minute I’m coding, getting fascinated by the programs I could create and all the problems I could solve with just my hands and my laptop and then another minute I’m carried away by either school work, chores at home or any random thing that eats up a person’s time. It’s like how you plan out your body goals for the month with all the exercise routines set and ready to be run, but before the end of the week it all becomes history.

This became a habit; I would forget all my tech dreams for even up to a month and one day, when I am randomly scrolling through the internet and I come across an article with a new tech revolution or I happen to open LinkedIn to see people’s success stories, it all comes back to me and I start asking myself “what have I achieved so far?”. I am sure a lot of people can relate to this.

So here is the fun not so fun part. I decided I couldn’t continue with that vicious cycle so I created mini remedies for myself;

• First one was to write my goals on every place and platform possible: my reading notebooks, my sticky notes on my laptop, my phone and every device I had, to ensure that everywhere I turned I would be haunted by them if it hadn’t been completed👻👻. Although this didn’t turn out to be as efficient as I thought it would be because of how the human mind/eyes can decide to see what they want and don’t want to see at any point in time, even if it is right in front of them- if you know what I mean, it still helped me to keep my goals in check.

• Another thing I did was to plan myself and to be real with the planning: by being real, I mean not telling myself “hey, I am going to finish this Udemy course in two weeks and in a month’s time I am going to be pushing machine learning models into GitHub” but saying “hey, I will probably have projects and assignments to do and a lot of errands to run so I will dedicate my 3 pm to 7 pm every day (or more hours depending on the day) to upgrading my tech skills”. This helped me a lot because I was able to share my time efficiently with other different things I had to do during the day, and anytime it was 3 pm and I wasn’t on my desk with my laptop I wasn’t at rest so I had to get up eventually and do the needful.

This or that

Another trouble I had was knowing what to read and when to read them. I spent a lot of time researching on the best way to go about studying machine learning, the best materials to read, the best videos to watch and in what sequence I would watch them. This led to me jumping from one machine learning course to another or one YouTube video to another trying to find the best fit. I always wished someone would send me a list with all I needed to watch and read to give my ML career a boost, but I guess it is part of the learning process to find the diamond in the rough (PS: to whomever, you could still give me this list as a late Christmas present in the comment section below 😋).

What about you

I am sure everyone has had their own share of troubles and challenges while trying to pursue their passion in tech and I would like to know about them and how you overcame them, or if we faced similar issues, I would like to know in the comment section how you solved the problems.

Thank you for reading!!!