This is so strange, and it's happened to me three times this week. First, when I was working on making interfaces work in Zig, then while I was trying to test a complex piece of Go code for a client, and then today when I was trying to make the ESP work with my Raspberry Pi Pico. All these three experiences this week had the same underlying feeling of dread and limitlessness—that is, I never thought I would ever figure this out. All three times, like clockwork, I figured it out the day after I was thinking I'm never going to figure this out. Now, I never fully believed that I would never get it, but there was this sense of doubt that crept in, which I would assume is quite normal when you are stuck on a problem for a long enough period of time. Also, the other strange thing is that it feels like one moment you are stuck and the next, everything works.
Is this what building resilience looks like?
Even though the doubts kept coming back, problem after problem, at no point did I think to myself, I should just quit. The one thing I can do better is to reduce the time between the feeling of despair and showing up to try again. If anything, it's helping me build confidence over these bouts of troughs. I would go as far as to say it has been quite eye-opening. It's not just the words, but my actions are starting to reflect what I believe to be true. On all three occasions, the last thing I wanted to do was face the problem, and yet a few hours in, I felt a sense of exhilaration that is indescribable. Somehow, one of the hardest weeks this month has led to the most joy too. I want more of this!
Bigger and harder problems
I'm quite lucky, I would say, because I don't really like doing something I know how to do—I get bored easily. This is especially true if it's a side project. You'll never find me building websites in my free time unless it's something specific, like trying out WASM. I'm quite addicted to this feeling of getting good at something I had no clue about; the harder the problem, the more I seem to want to do it. Hard is subjective, so by hard I mean hard for the current me, with what I know and the amount of time I have been programming.
Luckily for me, I've got a few things lined up and know what else I want to explore for a few months at least. The north star is always the same: mastery.