On Building A Tech Career: Ten Foundational Problems To Solve
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I have mentored 100s of people over the past 6 years.
And there is one thing that I have noticed.
The biggest issue people face is not with the skill or learning process.
It revolves around the state of their mind.
So before you blame laziness and procrastination.
Read these ten foundational problems and ensure you aren’t held down by them.
The Theory Of Action
One of the biggest webs people learning a tech skill get stuck in is tutorial hell.
Tutorial hell is that point where you are stuck in an endless loop of watching tutorials.
This is where what I call the theory of action comes into play.
You don’t learn something until you do something
If you check the names given to someone who is good at a particular skill.
You would find out that they are action words,
Writer, designer, etc.
In the same vein, it is important that you fully understand what this entails.
A writer is someone who writes
A designer is someone who designs
Waiting until you know enough will keep you feeling less than enough.
It is impossible to learn everything in one day, month, or year.
It is by taking action that you begin to connect the dots faster.
Consistency Creates Competence
When I started writing online in late 2016.
It took me a lot of research to write my articles.
I remember researching for two to three hours and only writing articles with an average of 400 words.
But the more I wrote online, the better I became at writing.
And because I was constantly reading and writing my output improved.
Last year, I did a challenge on WhatsApp.
Where people gave me a topic and I wrote an article on it immediately.
Each of those articles took me less than an hour to write and there was none that was less than 1000 words.
I also didn’t do any research before writing them.
Many people struggle with competence.
And they think that they will magically get better with time.
No
You need to consistently put something out.
Zoom Out
You might have been at that point before
Where you wanted to quit something because things seemed to be moving slowly.
A failure to zoom out was most likely your problem.
We are very good at overestimating what we can achieve in a day.
While underestimating what we can get done in a year.
Imagine a farmer planting maize and then coming every morning to dig it up to check if it is growing.
The seeds won’t grow that way.
You need to be more patient and give what you are building time to manifest.
Don’t be among the group of people who jump from thing to thing until the year ends and they have nothing to show for it.
You have what it takes to be different.
Guard Your Eye and Ears.
In the former chapter, I shared how the environment I was in affected me.
I didn’t get the drive needed to pursue something that I had loved for years.
And while I later found my way back. I still wasted some time.
Your environment plays a 60% role in determining whether you achieve your goals.
And in this day of massive social media presence.
You need to understand how powerful your online following is.
Do a review of all those WhatsApp groups that you are in.
How many of them are actually useful and help you grow?
Who are the kind of people that you follow on Instagram, Twitter, etc?
Who are the kind of people that view their WhatsApp statuses?
Personally, I actively filter the kind of people whose content I consume daily.
This might not sound like a big deal
But if you know how powerful the things you expose your eyes and ears to are.
You won’t spend another second of your life following the wrong people.
The state of your online environment is very important.
It shapes your beliefs about what’s possible.
Don’t Internalize Defeat
Failing at something does not mean that you are a failure.
You just haven’t discovered the right path to getting it done.
It is important that you understand this so that you don’t default to the popular postion.
Murmuring and complaining.
Find ways to drive change instead of murmuring and blaming others.
There are times when I lost access to opportunities.
I didn’t sit and point fingers.
I started working hard to find my way around the obstacle.
The Obstacle Is The Way – Ryan Holiday
Failure Is Feedback
Still on the topic of failure.
You need to treat it as feedback so that you can leverage it the right way.
Most of my courses are valuable mainly because I teach people how to avoid the mistakes that I made.
In doing so, I found a way to monetize my failures.
Having this mentality would help you take action faster.
And this is because you have liberated yourself from the need to be right all the time.
Action beats Meditation.
Courage is Not the Absence Of Fear.
Sometimes I get messages from people who are about the publish their first article online.
They always want me to review the article and give them a verdict before they publish.
And this is because, deep down, they fear that their work is not good enough.
If you ever get to the stage where you are afraid to talk about what you do or put your work out.
Understand that we are all learning too.
No one is perfect.
The only way you get better is by consistently putting your work out.
Waiting for the fear to go away before you share your work won’t help.
Even after writing online for 7 years, there are still times I wonder if people will like what I put out.
So courage is not the absence of fear.
It is taking action despite the presence of fear.
That’s how you win.
Aim High
One of my business mentors Is Naval.
And one day he said something that resonated with me.
“It takes the same amount of energy to build both a big and a small business”
Those who are building big businesses aren’t doing so because they are more equipped than those who have small businesses.
The difference is that those who have a big business made up their mind from day one that their business will be big.
So they started with a big vision and committed to it and as time went on, things began to fall into place.
Aiming low is a tragic way to think.
Your Reputation Matters
Invest in it.
There are places where your attitude matters more than your skill.
It is better to lose money than Integrity.
Let your yes be yes and your no be no.
I have seen several times where the wrong attitude and a bad reputation rob skilled people of things.
Don’t be one of those people.
Yesterday Does Not Exist.
Any day that goes by is frozen in time.
You can’t touch it.
Yesterday does not exist.
Do it now.
One of the biggest challenges that you would face is procrastination.
And while it is easy to push things to the next day.
Putting your head down and getting it done immediately is the best choice to take.
In chapter five of this book, I will teach you an effective way to beat procrastination.
I found this very helpful.
Especially the aspect of you are what you do. I am a motion designer because I put things into motion.
I also have a question.
What if you organized a class and it didn't go as planned.
You disappointed those who registered and didn't know what to do.
How can I approach them after being absent for a long while?