How Programming is Developing My Mindset

Programming is a jackhammer crushing my egotistic side, built from the myths that I believed were true growing up. The most popular myths I heard as a child were “You are so smart, look at your grades!” or “You were born to be an artist.” -all based on the outcomes rather than on the efforts it took to achieve them. Programming, for me, cuts away years of this stagnant way of thinking (thank goodness!).

That’s because programming consists of thinking critically and creatively, and problem solving. It also requires an enormous amount of patience and effort, with a major stroke of curiosity. These skills mentioned, necessary for being able to to sit down through the boredom AND difficulty, can build resiliency and help discover what you may be passionate about. Without these, I don’t think I would have been able to achieve what I set my mind to.

One thing I learned quickly is that, unlike human beings, computers will chew on your code-writing skills and spit out errors without sugarcoating it. What’s even worse is that computers won’t tell you how you can solve the issues, where to look, or who to ask.

Being “smart” isn’t so important anymore when the thing processing your input doesn’t have an emotional bias towards you.

It doesn’t matter if I am a beginner or advanced engineer,  running into errors is something that will continue to happen. It is with gritty effort and active patience that coding is orienting my mindset into believing more in my work, structuring my determination and thus, strengthening my commitment towards difficult work, rather than being led astray by the results.

It’s not to mean that coding is dreadful. It’s not. On the contrary, because of how difficult it can be at times, and how constant we face these errors, I tend to ignite sparks of curiosity into a blaze of solution-oriented rabbit-holes.

I asked questions like:

-“Why doesn’t it run like this?”
-“What does ‘SyntaxError’ mean?”
-“How can I make this function work?”,

Questions like these help me venture out on my own behalf and look for the answers I want/need. I use online resources, books, and connect with people to better understand the problems involved and that are bound to show up again.

For decades, we have been told that our work is reflection of who we are, but it’s evidently inaccurate for me, as I believe it is how we go through the process of our work that comes closer to the reflection of who we really are.

Instead of letting the constant errors determine whether or not “I am really good at coding”, I use the errors as feedback, indicators of what is getting in my way, and self-taught lessons to learn from. This daily training is strengthening my mindset to be more resilient and resourceful. It pierces through the fixed perceptions of intelligence and digs out the core of a growth mindset.

The tactic is in normalizing errors and interpreting mistakes, not as a direct reflection of myself, but as a learning opportunity to hone new skill sets, and thus use this truth as motivation towards what I want to accomplish and as an incentive to not give up right away.

One would think that coding only trains cognitive areas of our brains, but our brains are wired to use all areas, even if one area is predominantly active. The skills, that are developing, are not just useful for creating websites; they are also useful in our daily lives when making decisions, and we inevitably have to make decisions before we run into problems, during and after.

Don’t believe me?

Say we drop a 20 dollar bill on a windy day, as we rush out of Target, you and I both know we will take action to run after it and/or ask for assistance to make sure we retrieve it. Say we need to get a can of tomato paste from the cabinet, but cannot reach it; so we look around for something to firmly elevate us and/or something that can be used as an extension of our reach and/or ask for assistance.

Or say we lose the 20 dollar bill on that windy day, or drop the can of tomato paste to waste; we will want to think of ways to prevent it from happening again. We will even think of ways to make it easier and/or optimal for us accessing them. (Thank goodness for debit cards and lower-level pantries, right?)

The point is, resilience and resourcefulness can literally help us back on our feet and accomplish what we would like to achieve in any area of our lives.

Programming has nurtured and is definitely nurturing my mindset into developing these crucial life skills.

Thanks for reading!

🔴 Be Empowered, my friends.