“This is The Hardest Thing I’ve Ever Done”
I’ll start with a quick story.
I work with students at One Month, and we do a lot of one-on-one sessions where I can troubleshoot common problems that people have when building apps.
One day, a student reached out who was having trouble with images not working correctly in their Rails app. I had seen a few errors that could happen at this point in the project, so I was confident that I could get this fixed. I followed up and we scheduled a screen sharing session.
As the session progressed, I started to panic. This was a new problem, one I had never seen before, and none of my usual fixes were working. Over the next 30 minutes I tried several different things, walking through some more obscure troubleshooting techniques. As a last measure, I decided it would be best to have the student continue through the lesson with the code not working and we’d reconvene at a later date.
I felt defeated.
That’s when I saw the problem: we were missing the image rendering code. Once we added this bit of code, the project worked and the student was back on track. Hooray!
As I walked to the train that night, I replayed the session in my head, trying to figure out what happened. In that moment, I realized something about the learning process:
You are either doing something easy because you’ve done it before, or it’s the hardest thing that you’ve ever done, because it’s new.
When faced with a new problem, something you have never seen before, it will always be the hardest problem you’ve ever faced.
During that screenshare, I faced, at that point in my life, the hardest problem that I ever had to face, and it was new. It wasn’t what I had expected and nothing was working.
I had no clue what I needed to do and no idea where to go.
I think that as learners, we often forget this idea. We forget that we are forging new pathways in our personal atlas. It is in these moments that we have to accept that the problem is hard. It’s hard because we don’t have answers, and we don’t know how to figure it out yet. Not only do we not know the solution, we don’t know how to go about figuring it out. This feels really frustrating. But that’s the whole point: to challenge ourselves to find those answers.
The point is learning.
In 2015, Omies decided that we would make personal resolutions. We even went so far as to write them down and share them publicly so you all could hold us accountable. My resolution was to make more music. I share new work and music links every week on my public Trello board. Every week I sit down with the goal of “drawing a musical sketch.”
It has been really hard. It’s hard because it’s so far from where I want to be, and being bad at something for a while isn’t always the most fun place to be. When you’re learning, there’s a lot of frustration. Most people give up when it gets hard, but there’s something that happens when you figure it out. When I get frustrated with my weekly musical sketch or want to quit I think back to my screenshare:
