GROWTH MINDSET

Is Failure Your Teacher or Your Judge?

Happiness does not come from doing easy work but from the afterglow of satisfaction that comes after the achievement of a difficult task that demanded our best

This are the words that have been running through my mind the past six months. Let me tell you a short story, I never knew about programming, I never knew what “software developers “ really do, until I needed a professional website for my Dj brand, It was at this point I was being charged Ksh 50,000 for a developer to make a site for me, I could not afford this amount of money, but this did not stop me to want to put my brand out there and well that was too surprising to me! I decided to try and make my own site.

The journey began from googling, you-tube video tutorials to free online coding schools (code academy), I was learning something new and Interesting, it even reached a point I started looking for coding schools in Kenya so that I can learn and build the best online portfolio for myself and that is how I found about Andela, I thought I was the guru at coding because I had learned basic HTML and Bootstrap and managed to design a pretty decent online Dj portfolio for myself. “The guru that I was” I decided to apply to join Andela.

I was given the Andela curriculum and It was expected of me to learn a new language from scratch while at home, I told myself this was easy as I had done this before with HTML and at this time I was really enjoying code! but this, this was different, I had to learn the new language, new concepts like object-oriented programming, nothing made sense in the curriculum “classes???”, “Inheritance??”, “modules??”, “methods??”, just to name a few.

I was having sleepless nights trying to figure out stuff on my own, I decided to have a growth mindset and told myself to keep pushing and studying because this would eventually help me reach my goal, which is to build amazing software that will help the people around me and my community at large, two months down the line reading the curriculum over and over things started to be clear and I could write python code, the past few months have been an unforgettable learning experience, It has been confusing, tiresome, Information overload and funny thing super interesting, self-learning has been amazing and it keeps life fun, especially if the new stuff is fairly challenging. With all this said, I have managed to pass all the Andela assessment tests and I have been invited to the two-week boot-camp which is currently ongoing. Let me just finish this story with how I started it,

happiness does not come from doing easy work but from the afterglow of satisfaction that comes after the achievement of a difficult task that demanded our best

At first, I saw this as the most difficult challenge, but I dedicated to personal development and here I am. You don’t have to think you’re already great at something to want to do it, just believe in yourself and get your foot in. To become a world-class software developer is a daunting task, to achieve greatness It requires full dedication and perseverance. It is a long walk, a journey with rough paths.

I can not picture myself not trying to always give my best at anything after an experience like this