Among the (many) reasons I haven’t been blogging lately, is the conference I attended at the weekend – CCWESTT, which stands for Canadian Coalition of Women in Engineering, Science, Trades and Technology.
It was great – amazing speakers, enlightening talks, and the chance to spend time with some of the other execs from WISE.
I left, exhausted – it had been a long week even prior to the conference – but feeling inspired by and immensely grateful to all the women that paved the way so that I have such an easy time of it by comparison, today.
It is not always that easy, being one of few women, but I cannot imagine how much harder it must have been to be the only woman. People have doubted my abilities, but no-one has ever come out and said to me that I couldn’t code because I was a girl.
Our generation is so fortunate, and we should recognize that.
Starting my internship, the launch of the Awesome Foundation and 6am bootcamp have reduced my blogging, but normal service will resume soon I hope. Apologies!
If you know me at all (or have just been reading my blog for a while) you’ll know I’m really interested in how to be more productive, more effective, and generally achieving more. And of course I read Zen Habits and all these other blogs that talk about flow.
Flow is about being completely absorbed in what you’re doing. It does wonders for your productivity, and definitely, being in a state of flow is awesome – I achieve it from time to time, but nowhere near as much as I would like to.
But I also love Study Hacks, where he writes a lot about achieving greatness, specifically (at the moment) through deliberate practice. The key to this is working on something that is hard and uncomfortable. And Seth Godin writes a lot about how you need to fail to achieve awesome.
And I wonder, are these two things in conflict? Because thinking about skiing, I can be in a state of flow, carving down a pisted black (or blue, or green run). I can be completely absorbed in what I’m doing, and energized – it feels like I’m flying – but I’m well within my comfort zone. Does this make me a better skier? Maybe not. To be better, I have to leave my comfort zone. So I go and ski moguls because they make me uncomfortable and I’m not as good at them. The biggest break through I had as a skier, was when I decided I had to get a grip with moguls and I went and skied them again, and again, and again, until eventually I could make it down without falling over.
Was I experiencing flow? No. I was uncomfortable, and my legs hurt, and I wasn’t having a good time. But time like that is necessary for progress. It’s a teaching technique that I use and that was used in my PDP last week – work on X on a run within your comfort zone. Then, work on it again on a run that makes you uncomfortable. Come back to the first one, see improvement in your skiing. Rinse, and repeat.
My first release of my graphs was hacked together in an afternoon. After a morning of fighting with the software, and fighting with myself to focus.
Right now, I should be working on a testing assignment – to do with databases. I’m not a fan of databases, so every distraction is inviting. I’m uncomfortable and bored. But, this is how I become a better programmer – by sitting down and making myself work at it until it is done.
If we chase flow too much, we miss the moments that make us uncomfortable. But we should learn to seek out those moments, because they are what make us better, at whatever we seek to master.
How do you define progress? As a grad student, the weeks I spend reading papers and thinking don’t feel like progress – it’s the week, or day, or hour, when things start to come together that does.
In going back to training, it’s not the gradual improvements in fitness and energy. It’s when I can train for two hours straight and still get up the following morning and go to the gym. It’s fitting into jeans a size smaller.
In programming – lines of code, is progress. A feature, it progress. Passing test cases, is progress. A new idea is not, so much. Ideas are many – implementation is key.
Maybe that’s why I wish I got to code more.
In training, “progress” makes the things that make progress happen seem easier. Seeing results makes me more motivated to stop work and go kickboxing. Having more energy makes it physically easier to get up and go, too.
In grad school, having made “progress”, the act of going back and enabling more feels like stopping. But weeks of reading, and thinking, and failing, make progress happen. Time to better recognize that, I think.
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