If You Want to Be Successful, Don’t Spend Too Much Time Planning: A Case Study
This Forbes article explains why it’s futile to spend too much time with research and preparations. For me, it underlines the beauty of the iterative process and helps fight perfectionism/procrastination/imposter syndrome by advocating the -act-learn-build-repeat mindset. We act, learn from our actions, rebuild based on those lessons, and repeat by acting once more. The advice makes a lot of sense because the constant change in the world often renders preparation useless.
Why You Should Blog About Learning Coding
Mikke Goes encourages beginners, especially beginning coders, to blog despite their lack of knowledge at the outset. For him, writing about his process was the most efficent method for improvement. He also acknowledges naysayers by admitting that it was not always easy and his views were wrong on occasion, but that the advantage of blogging: even negative or critical feedback could nudge him on the right course.
The benefits to blogging even as a beginner are as follows:
- Gathering thoughts and clearing the mind. Instead of having all these vague ideas, which often compete for attention and prevent reaching deeper insight, putting the ideas down helps draw patterns and make room for the new.
- Processing and awareness are a natural benefits that follows this gathering and cleaning. By rewording the information and filling in the inevitable gaps through critical thinking, referring back to the material, or further research helps cement the information. In fact, sometimes just the attempt of explaining a problem helps discover the solution (one of my favorite lessons from a debugging class I took in sophomore year).
- Structure is also created through the blog and helps getting back on track after short or long breaks.
- Pride– not to confused with hubris– is also an offshoot of blogging as a beginner. By seeing what we struggled with months ago, we get a sense of pride of having conquered that.
- Community. It’s easy to feel alone and stupid when we begin. But by speaking up, we show others that they are not alone. Sometimes it’s even easier to learn from someone who knows just a bit more. As stated often, we only need to be one step ahead, not be a master, to offer guidance to others. We become the friend we would have wanted. Through this we can find peers and even mentors, ready to help raise each other up. As mentioned in the last episode of the UX Intern, one of the best ways to grow is join a group of fellow designers that challenge each other to do their best.