Discomfort and the Growth Mindset
For 10 months or so, I’ve been eagerly awaiting my start date at Turing School of Software and Design. I interviewed last spring, knowing that I wouldn’t be able to attend until this year. A lot has changed in my life since then and it feels like an eternity ago that I applied, and yet, March 12 is sneaking up on me.
So here we go, my cohort (1803) begins in a little more than a month and I move from Houston to Denver in just 21 days. Even though I completed my pre-work a bit early, I’ve read the student handbook at least 7 times, I’ve submitted my bike parking permit, and I’ve listened to every Turing-related interview and podcast I can find… I still don’t feel prepared for this experience. I’m nervous about everything! I’m nervous about retaining the information, I’m nervous about socializing, I’m nervous about moving into my apartment.
But, really — what would it take for me to feel prepared? I’m starting to think “feeling prepared” is not a thing in the life of a programmer. In fact, the more accustomed I get to being uncomfortable, the less nervous I feel. It’s very counter-intuitive, but I anticipate that adjusting my expectations of myself can lead to a better learning process as I move through the program.
To paraphrase a point from Turing’s Executive Director, Jeff Casimir, “It’s okay to not know everything, it’s not okay for your process to suck.” This turned from theory to observable reality for me when I was working on a pre work project that I found particularly challenging (as in, “You mean I have to build this without an example to reference when I forget the syntax?!” challenging). I ended up having to reach out to an instructor for help with the project, which I found to be a super, super uncomfortable experience. And it’s not because the instructors at Turing are difficult to contact or work with, they’re wonderful. It was uncomfortable because I’m so used to operating from a “fixed” mindset. In a fixed mindset, failure is perceived as evidence of inadequacy.
For those who are not familiar with the concept of fixed and growth mindsets, I highly recommend this Ted Talk by Carol S. Dweck for a brief overview. Simply put, a fixed mindset is the unfortunately common view that one’s abilities/talents/etc. are fixed traits that one inherently has — not something to be developed with effort or practice. A growth mindset is life changing. This is the view that one’s abilities/talents/etc. can and must be developed through committed practice. Since subscribing to this view, I have concluded that my discomfort isn’t always such a bad thing, since my discomfort in learning usually stems from a fear of failure. And in the growth mindset, any given failure provides helpful data about the problem, as well as how another approach to solving it might work better.
Preparing for my journey at Turing has reminded me of two things:
— The first one is personal. I have social anxiety, so I will probably always be uncomfortable in any positive situation to some extent, which is okay!
— More importantly, failure is an opportunity to gather information.
So in the coming weeks instead of trying to convince myself that I “feel ready” (whatever the hell that means), I’m going to push myself a little beyond my own comfort zone each day. There’s a reason so many people recommend this; I feel that it has to do with developing a growth mindset and an effective process. When I find myself in seemingly agonizing discomfort, whether it’s in learning code or in anything else, I’m going to attempt a little bit of alchemy in my brain. This discomfort is not a sign of inadequacy as I have so long believed. It’s a sign of growth.
