Learning to learn.

Reading and knowing just enough to pass exams and move on to the next level has been my habits throughout every level of my learning phase and so, when I tried transitioning to web development with the same habits I used in school, I was met with utter failure and rude awakening.

Web development isn't where you just read to pass exam, here, you learn, understand the concepts and go ahead to use what you've learnt to build real life projects. I had to pick myself up after the epic failure with several pep talks and quietly enrolled in the school of learning how to learn. It was the first time I was faced with learning and then utilizing the said learned lessons in actual projects and not just exams and quizzes. I was never used to this, I'd always been used to reading to pass exams and tests.

I had made up my mind to remain committed and consistent, so times I face a new topic or concept and fail to understand, I get frustrated with myself because I feel I may never make it past that stage, so there's the fear of failure and then there's the failure to understand whatever I was trying to learn.

I continued to read and practice, moving on to next topics and then coming back weeks later to start afresh. I started afresh so many times, gave up so many times and yet, I'm here writing about them.

It took me countless giving ups and fresh starts to understand part of my problems. I've been learning the wrong way and I didn't blame myself much because I didn't know any better.

First thing I learnt was I won't get most new concepts at the first attempt, I need to go through them over and over again. So, I watch tutorial videos today, read articles and book chapters on said topics tomorrow but I'll end up grasping the concepts next week. I had to learn patience, so I learnt Patience. It became a bit easier this way. I begin learning new concepts with less pressure to understand them within three days, I gave myself enough room to fully understand whatever new knowledge was coming in and it started working out a bit.

It's one thing to enjoy learning and it's another thing to be able to make use of the gained knowledge and build with it. I struggled with this too, at a point I had to accept I most certainly will struggle with every step in my new career path. I faced this issue while learning CSS and Javascript. How can I position elements relatively and absolutely, how do I bring functions and loops to work with a practical example? I asked myself this questions everytime and then like you'd guess, I head back to the tutorials. I had to learn practicing, so I learned practice. I'll copy the codes from the tutorials, then delete some parts of them so I can understand what role they play and their functions, I continued practicing this way and at some point I moved to being able to tell what the lines of code do and soon enough I was able to understand fully and transferring the lessons from my head to building projects became a bit easier.

When I say things became a bit easier, you'd think oh yea, she figured it out finally, well, did I? Absolutely not.

Getting stuck with projects became common phase in my life. I was facing issues from top to bottom, IDE, Code, Github etc. It felt like I make a step forward and then take three more steps backward. I had to learn perseverance, so I did learn to persevere. I'm allowed to close my laptop when it gets frustrating but I must come back to finish what I've started at any cost. If it involved deleting the whole lines of code or completely starting out on a new folder but giving up was never an option.

You can do somethings on your own but learning to code isn't one of them I'm afraid and this I learnt late. You need to strip shame away and ask people who have been there questions as it will save you time and frustrations.

Learning to code taught me how to read and understand, how to be patient, how to give up momentarily and pick up again, how to communicate and put shame aside and finally how to solve problems and build with lines of code.