The Path To Achieving Expertise

Mastering or learning anything takes dedication and time. Sometimes we confuse dedication and good ideas with what it takes to be successful. For many years I knew I would accomplish my goals. I knew I wanted it bad enough and if I thought about it enough I could count on everything I dreamed of coming true. This was not true and before I knew it I was pushing thirty. I had nothing to show for all the work I had put in. I learned a valuable lesson when I turned thirty. Persistence is above all the most important feat to achieving mastery of anything.

It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.
Albert Einstein...

I am a self taught software engineer. I started my journey when I became fascinated with learning the way a webpage worked. I spent a few days building my first navigation bar which took a long time… Thinking back I spent about 2 afternoons putting my first navigation bar together. Today I can type one up in a few minutes. This ability I have that I can perform with mastery came at the cost of failures, time, headaches and lots of reading. Considering I was never the type of guy who spent a lot of time on any one thing, creating the first navigation bar was a huge accomplishment for me. That curiosity drove me to spend the next five years of my life completely married to learning how to program. Nothing came between me and my goals of being a master programmer. If I was not learning I was not growing and I never forgot that. My persistence has carried me through many long nights which have resulted in thousands of lines of code written by my hands. Persistence has helped me create a completely new life for myself. I have a career, a nice salary, confidence, achieved goals and best of all because of the things I have learned I have the ability to create things that affect people’s lives everyday.

I understand how it is to feel completely lost. Like there is no hope and you just down right lack the ability to learn something that is more challenging than anything you have ever been faced with. I promise from my own personal experiences if you are persistent you will achieve mastery. One day you will be an expert in your field.

Hello World

Every new language I have learned comes with configuration and a test program. Typically it is customary to do a Hello World project to make sure everything is running correctly on your machine. For the sake of remembering where my journey started here is a Hello World in a few languages I have learned along the way.