Habits and Rituals
Code School Book — Morgan Lopes and Tim Whitacre (4/30)
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Expertise in technology is not linear.
M y (Morgan) first major in college was Business Administration. It was my first, but definitely not my last. Soon after, I changed my major to Exercise Science before switching again to Early Childhood Education. I went through college with zero emphasis on computers or software, dabbling in some of the furthest careers from technology. Who was I to think a transition into technology would be possible?
In 2011, around the time I left college, I started writing code. I felt behind immediately. The Dotcom Bubble had come and gone. Tech giants like Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon were already established leaders in the market. The founders, engineers, and product teams in those companies, and countless like them, had decades of experience. I had none. The more curious I became about tech, the more daunting and unclear a career seemed. People were producing incredible, sophisticated work while I was barely making sense of the fundamentals. They were masters — I wouldn’t even have considered myself an amateur.
If technology was a gold rush, everyone else was settled out West with mountains of gold while I was blindly wandering east. It felt like there were thousands of untamed miles of countryside between me and a meaningful career in technology. The phrase “I am so far behind,” occupied my thoughts and fueled many fears with no sign of letting up.
It was then that I began considering exactly how far behind I might be. I started approximating. In Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers, he mentions 10,000 hours are needed to develop expertise. Plenty of writings have since challenged this belief, but I latched onto the simplicity of the idea: 10,000 hours of focus and deliberate practice lead to expertise. Without much thought, I sketched out some math. It would take three hours a day for almost ten years to reach 10,000 hours. Using a similar calculation, I could cut the time in half with six hours per day. With twelve hours daily, I’d knock it out in a few years. While daunting, the path to mastery started to seem more attainable.
My formula lacked nuance, for sure, but it also provided a helpful baseline from which to start. Even without a full-time job in technology, there was a path to expertise. Some paths were faster than others, but it was possible. If I could somehow align paid work hours toward the goal, success was inevitable.
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