I’m not really sure where I’m going with this post, hopefully we’ll end up somewhere coherent by the end. I was thinking about skipping this week and give myself some more time for either more GO programming or next weeks post (more geese incoming!), but then the discipline part of my brain kicked in and said “you’ve made it 15 weeks, you will keep going”.
This made me start thinking about how long it takes to make a habit and how discipline keeps you doing the things you may not want to in the short term, but will be beneficial in the long term. Discipline is important in your engineering career because it helps you keep the bigger picture in mind and do things future you will thank current you for. Its not always easy to go back into the Github action you’ve been fighting for days or wade into a bug fix on the legacy code base, but you do it anyways. It keeps you doing tests even though you know your code works just fine.
So how do you train yourself to be more disciplined? I think you have to set a goal for yourself then commit to it 100%. Personally, I commited to participating in a NanoWriMo (RIP NanoWrimo :(). I wrote 50,000 words in 28 days. Fifty. Thousand. Words. I hated it so much some days, it was such a slog. It was so hard pulling more and more ideas out of my head. But in the end, I was very proud of myself. I had very close to the final product for my first novel. I never want to do that again, but I proved to myself that I can.
I guess the point of this post is that as you develop as an engineer (or as a person), you’re going to have to learn discipline and how to do things even if you aren’t really feeling like doing them.