Infinite Energy

I have infinite energy to write, and I plan to draw on it every day until I die.

Photo credit: iStock

By Niklas Göke

During my first semester of college, we had to code and submit a Java programming exercise every week. For me, it was torture — and thus more work than my other seven classes combined. “Where is the bug? Why won’t this thing compile? Argh!”

A good friend of mine fared much better. He had what our professor used to call “the third eye.” My friend had some talent for using the various code elements, and he also had a knack for spotting bugs. As such, he was also willing to spend more time on the exercises, which, ironically, meant he was often done faster than me. In the end, I quickly concluded that coding was not for me and proceeded to copy his and other people’s solutions to make the workload manageable.

A year later, I was hell-bent on completing an animated music video project I had started ages before, and over the Christmas holidays, I finally finished the thing. I must have spent well over 100 hours in total on it, and one of the reasons I kept quitting was that the editing software I used kept crashing. It had all kinds of limitations, and that made the whole project feel like treading water. This time, I persisted, but I also never tackled an editing project of this magnitude ever…