One skill that will make you succeed as a dev

Hey there,

The other day I finally picked up my gym routine again, after a 6-week hiatus.

And let me tell 'ya it wasn't a pretty sight:

My my first squat rep made me feel a little woozy.

By the third rep I'm red-faced...

And after the whole set I'm wobbling on my feet with tinnitus ringing in my ears, ready to faint then and there.

What gives??

This comment from a reader made me re-live that unfortunate gym experience:

~~~

In my life, I've probably picked up and dropped programming again a dozen times in total (yes, persistence is my weakness in that respect). 

And every time I saw marked improvements if doing a bit of it every single day and saw decline if leaving it alone for so much as a week.

~~~

Here's my take on this:

Whether you're learning how to program with Python, you just ate a slice of humble pie at the squat rack, or if you want to learn how to cook a decent meal from scratch—

These are all "use it or lose it" kind of skills:

The more you do them, the better you get. The less you do them, the worse you get.

It's a law of nature. 

And if you drop the ball—don't beat yourself up too much.

The truth is, we're all TOGETHER in this constant struggle against entropy:

I looked like a complete tool at the gym? So what. Since then 2 weeks have passed and now I'm back where I was before my break.

It's been a while since I built a web scraper in Python? Well, the next time I need to write one I'll just have to do a few hours of research first.

My point is this—

You can ALWAYS recover from a setback.

In fact, the ability to recover from setbacks is vastly more important than talent or a perfect attendance record.

Because sooner or later you WILL need it to achieve your goals.

Grit is worth cultivating.

Happy Pythoning!

— Dan Bader
 

P.S. Next Monday I'm on-boarding a new group of people to PythonistaCafe.

Want to grow your skills with likeminded Pythonistas including myself?

There's still time to put in your application at:

https://www.pythonistacafe.com