They didn’t want me to be great… (Don’t let they stop you)

Some people have the ability to do something because they’re told to do so. They don’t always need to know why, they don’t need to see an immediate benefit, the end goal can be out of sight for days, weeks, or even years. I’m not one of those people.

From the very beginning, I was a “poor” student. I was distracted in class. I wouldn’t turn in homework.

The Common Thought Process:
Stay up until 3:00 am writing this five-page essay that’s due tomorrow morning ➡ get a good grade ➡ get into a good college ➡ study a subject that is considered valuable like engineering or medicine ➡ get a good job ➡ live a good life.

My Thought Process:
Stay up until 3:00 am writing this five-page essay that’s due tomorrow morning ➡ not interested, read a book or play video games instead.

The consequences of not doing something I was supposed to never outweighed the inertia caused by my lack of interest.

This problem colored most of my academic career. The feedback from my teachers was always the same.

“He has plenty of potential, but he chooses not to apply himself.” To me, it never seemed like a choice.

There were some flashes in the pan, though. An amazing 8th-grade literature teacher planted a seed that would become a deep passion for reading. My senior year of high school I got an A in my AP Computer Science class. The teacher was one of the toughest in the school, but I enjoyed every minute of my experience in her classroom.

At the time, I didn’t put any thought into why the outcomes in these classes were drastically different from the rest. My interest in AP computer science class prompted me to declare CS as my major in college. Within weeks, though, I found myself skipping classes like intro to networking. They just seemed so irrelevant. College is supposed to be this transformative experience, a treasure trove of discovery and opportunity. But I still didn’t have the map to find that treasure.

In 2013, after my freshman year of college, by equal parts chance, and frustration to do something I enjoyed, I found a “Coding Bootcamp” in Chicago called The Starter League. Most coding schools focused on placing you in a job after the course. The Starter League wanted to help you make a dent in the universe by teaching you to solve problems you care about.

I saw the problems the students from the previous class had solved. Solutions they had built themselves. I signed up.

I met another student in the class, Jack Mallers. Jack had ended up at The Starter League through a similar set of events. Together we started working on a project that would allow basketball fans to react to and rate the accuracy of calls made by referees in the NBA. It was called Fan’s Challenge.

I loved working on that problem. There I was, a kid, who for years couldn’t be bothered to do his homework, waking up at 5 in the morning and commuting for two hours every day to make it to class early. The app itself fizzled out after a while, but the knowledge I gained working on that problem seemed more relevant than anything I had learned in school.

Jack and I ended up taking The Starter League’s full-time program, Starter School, which lasted for an entire school year. During that time, we built an app that made it through several rounds of the Tech Stars selection process. We didn’t make it into the program but we ended up getting paid by someone else for what we had built because we had solved a real problem.

The experience was addictive. With the right mix of intrinsic motivation and passion, there was nothing I couldn’t learn to do if it meant reaching a goal I had set for myself.

During those nine months, I found myself craving to learn things that I previously had no interest in. Discovering how servers work and the intricacy of data storage was suddenly immensely satisfying when it helped me make our application better. That pursuit of knowledge had a purpose.

This state of mind was the map I needed to discover the treasure troves of knowledge that were all around me.

Over time, this outlook has grown into a belief that I can learn and do anything I am passionate about. If only I had known to think this way when I was younger! How many opportunities could I have benefited from?

Helping others unlock this potential is the driving force behind my passion for CodeNow. Every kid deserves the opportunity to discover what they are capable of. They just have to be willing to show up.