Challenges and obstacles are a universal constant in any process of learning.
There will always be things beyond our current scope (especially during the early stages of learning), and there will always be incidents beyond our control.
How you react when faced with challenges and obstacles is almost always an indicator of how well you’ll fare in the long run. If you’re able to roll up your sleeves and face them head on every time, then you’re on the right track.
If you aren’t able to do this or you give up on a task way too easily, then you should read on.
I’ll share a recent experience where I had to overcome a challenge. Let’s start with the challenge.
The Challenge
I’m currently trying to get into Andela and in the process, we are to learn a bunch of new things in a short period of time.
One of those things was how to deploy a NodeJS app to Heroku. For more experienced web developers, this could be considered a trivial issue. In my case, however, it was a bit of a headache.
We were given a week to create a simple NodeJS app to serve an API. Among the myriad of requirements given was the necessity to use the newer ES6 syntax and then compile back to ES5 when building.
Now, I was able to get all these working before the week was up and it was time to deploy to Heroku. Enter challenge 😬.
Keep in mind that this was my first time deploying a NodeJS application anywhere, I had already burnt through 6 days out of my deadline (which is a week), and I wasn’t working with my master branch yet.
If you’ve spent any time with Heroku, you know that to push to your Heroku master branch from a Git branch other than master, you use git push heroku <your_branch>:master .
I didn’t know this and I spent the whole day trying to push from my branch to Heroku’s master branch.
I didn’t even know why I was getting the error I was getting so I couldn’t just pop into Google and do a search.
Needless to say, I was getting so frustrated that I almost gave up on it. I wanted so bad to skip just this one requirement and go to bed instead. At this point, I felt I was a no-good programmer who couldn’t figure out something without help 😫.
I am happy to report though, that I rolled up my sleeves, did some serious searching and finally found the source of my problems. The immense feeling of satisfaction you get when you overcome a challenge is completely worth the effort 😄.
Add that to the fact that you actually improve with every challenge you power through makes it worthwhile to adopt this growth mindset and never doubt yourself.
