stuff tagged with "the struggle"
One of the many, many, many mantras I had to adopt to make it to the end was, "this is a challenge, not a race."
The worst happened, and then it passed. You lost the person you thought you couldn’t live without and then you kept living. You lost your job then found another one. You began to realize that safety isn’t in certainty, but in faith that you can simply keep going.
Comfortable with the struggle
🔗 a linked post to
rachsmith.com »
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originally shared here on
I’ve known developers who’ve put up with the struggle with the expectation that one day it will go away: one day they’ll be an expert and never have to struggle again. This day never arrives, and so they bail out of the field.
Unfortunately, I don’t think the struggle ever goes away. I’ve been doing this professionally for 14 years now and I still have to deal with the struggle almost every work day.
If you can be comfortable with the struggle and build up your tolerance for it. If you’re able to sit in that moment and be okay without drama or a total crisis of confidence, I’m fairly sure you’re going to do just great.
The Struggle comes in multiple shapes and sizes too. Here is a short list of my experiences with The Struggle from this week alone:
- Impostor syndrome
- Anxiety about breaking a physical connector
- Frustration with unclear objectives
- Being overwhelmed by unfamiliar technologies
- Debugging something and being unable to find an answer
After 12 years of professionally dealing with The Struggle, I’m still able to handle many aspects of it, but my tolerance is quickly diminishing.
Dealing with The Struggle is much easier when you feel like there’s a reward for you at the end of it. Right now, I’m trying to restore my old iPod fifth gen with an SD card, and no matter what I do, I cannot get it to work right.
I’ve been all over forums, digging into the sixth and seventh pages of search results, desperately looking for clues as to why I’m not getting it to restore.
But I can picture myself playing that brick breaking game soon, and that first game is gonna be so much fun after all of this work.
I'm never not working on material. Every second of my existence, I'm thinking, could I do something with that? [That may sound torturous.] Your blessing in life is when you find the torture you're comfortable with.
Whenever you’re chasing a big dream, you’re supposed to feel good a third of the time, okay a third of the time, and crappy or not great a third of the time, and if you feel roughly in those ratios, it means you are in fact chasing a dream.
Each day, the heaviest thing I lift in the gym is the door handle to come in and get started. I doubt it will ever not be a struggle, but the more that I do it, the lighter it becomes.
Stop trying to borrow wisdom and think for yourself. Face your difficulties and think and think and think and solve your problems yourself. Suffering and difficulties provide opportunities to become better. Success is never giving up.
