Growth Mindset
“Stay hungry, stay foolish” by the visionary Steve Jobs is the best way I can describe a growth mindset and tell it from a fixed one. It’s a message that pushes one to step out of their comfort zone into this whole world of new learning experiences and challenges. By staying hungry and foolish, one is always eager to learn and never feel satisfied by the current amount of knowledge and skill they posses. I try to live by these rule (though not perfectly) and push myself to achieve things deemed “crazy” but I feel are essential to my growth.
Late 2017 I decided to pushed myself into the world of web development, it however wasn’t my first programming experience. In my university learning, i had encountered C/C++ languages, developed databases using MySQL and also built a few systems that incorporated the two. However, I had always wanted to explore the world of Web development. In my earlier years I had found this a bit challenging as I always told myself that it wasn’t possible to like juggle the two and that maybe I would end up being a master of none. However my experiences that year got me to get out of what was my “comfort zone” to this place where i was ready to just take any challenge.
A hackathon during the Nairobi Tech Week is what i greatly thank for this new mindset. At first, I didn’t expect to participate in the event and i went there to just see what people were actually doing. The theme was building Facebook bots that revolved around the following topics: Entertainment, Social good and productivity in 24 hrs. I knew what a bot was but didn’t have a clue how to implement one. I attended the hackathon brief and after I thought to myself, “…wait maybe I could actually do this!”.But wait, I did not know either JavaScript or Python neither did my other 3 group members yet we were supposed to create a bot in 24 hrs.
The next 24 hrs were spent on tutorials and trying to understand the new languages. We came to a conclusion to use Nodejs as it looked a bit familiar to most of us. It was all dark and nothing seemed to be working then we got a successful “Hello World”. The belief was reborn! We could do actually pull this off! So we got working and created a complete Health bot with much difficulty and presented it during the pitch. I had learnt a lot of new things in just under 24 hrs and this was an achievement . To cap what had being a great day we were ranked as the Runners up in the overall AngelHack competition.
This experience got me to actually learn JavaScript from scratch. I started looking for resources all over the net and challenged myself to doing challenges online. In that timeline I also applied for Andela and i am currently at the boot-camp stage.I also got to learn Python basics and used it during the Homestudy. I also got to learn new concepts like TDD (Test-Driven Development) and how to use project management tools like Pivotal Tracker.
It’s been challenging but, once your mindset changes, everything else will!Be limitless!
