Get Frustrated — But Don’t Quit
Sometimes, you try and try and it still doesn’t work. Don’t quit, yet.
Disclaimer: not really sure what this post is — part rant, part inspirational message?
I saw a really cool device scroll effect on a fellow designer’s portfolio recently and resolved within myself that I would figure out how he did it! It looks so cool.
So, I checked his source code and tried to copy the CSS.
Didn’t work.
I Googled a bunch, probably not using the right terms to find what I needed, and read a couple StackOverflow posts.
Nope.
I even got a free trial to the website builder he used just to see if that held the secret sauce.
Still didn’t work.
I spent hours trying to get this thing to work and at the time of this writing — it still doesn’t work :( See the sad gif below for proof. I want my image to scroll in the device but not show the overflow on either end…help me. I was actually hoping to figure this out in time to write up a tutorial this week for other visual designers so they could add the cool effect to their own portfolios without stressing too hard over the code. #WritingThisFailPostInstead
There are about a trillion things on my to-do lists these days (graduation is exactly one month away, praise hands!) so focusing on this one little thing ended up being a waste of time and extremely frustrating. I just kept failing and failing and failing.
However…here’s the (hopefully) inspirational part.
I’m not going to quit.
Yes, I kept failing. Yes, I kept figuring out more ways how not to use overflow and positioning in CSS. Yes, it was really annoying and took up too much time on a day I needed to take care of some other business. But, that doesn’t mean I’ll quit.
There are going to be so many things we attempt to do that aren’t immediately easy or obvious how we should accomplish them. The work will probably be really frustrating and time-consuming but if it’s something we’re committed to learning, we shouldn’t quit.
Keeping a flexible, growth-oriented mindset allows us to take a step away from the work but eventually come back to the complex problem. As someone who is constantly working on her programming skills, problem solving and the frustration that comes along with that is constant. I don’t just quit coding because I can’t figure something out. I continue to believe that I’ll eventually figure it out.
Again, not really sure what this is but just wanted to share a recent frustration and hopefully inspire you to not quit the next time you get really frustrated with a problem. It’s okay to fail but I would argue, unless it’s harmful, it’s not okay to quit.
Keep going!
**UPDATE: got it to work after taking a couple days break from it. Now, just need to get rid of that outer scroll bar…
