Immersion and Hurricanes

Josh Strzeszkowski
Sep 5, 2018 · 2 min read

I’ve been told that to become an expert in any skill, it takes 10,000 hours of practice. Having spent nearly 3 years, living in Spain, learning to speak fluent Spanish, I can safely say that that is a relative assumption. I don’t know exactly when it finally clicked for me, but when it did, all I ever wanted to do was speak Spanish. I dreamt (and still do) in Spanish. It was a long, tough road getting there though.

That was almost 3 years ago. Today, I’m immersing myself in a different type of language: the language of the Internet, Javascript. I’ve spent the last 3 months living in a coding world. However, it has only been over the last roughly 8 weeks, that I’ve truly been immersed. I would say I’ve put in somewhere between 450 and 500 hours of coding work in that time. It’s been a long, tiring, and tough journey just getting here.

I made the decision to study coding to better my career path. I wanted a career that would allow me to better provide for my family. One that would allow me to, one day, work remotely or start my own business. As I sit at my computer typing this out, wondering if that hurricane will end up hitting or not, wondering if I’m going to lose power, wondering when I’ll ever sleep again, I am almost half-way through my immersion program. 7 weeks from now, I could potentially be looking for and starting a new job and a new career. It’s both a humbling thought and an exciting one. I just imagine that one day I’ll be closing my computer, having just finished a day’s work, while on a beach in Bali, or in an RV touring the continent. While the last few weeks have been difficult to say the least, I just keep my eyes on the prize and I know that, in my heart, it will all be worth it. That and I need a refill on my coffee.

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