If you want to grow, you need to be able to learn, experiment, and stay consistent. That's only possible if you're able to keep yourself motivated, which is impossible if you're not being kind to yourself.

Many people think that being kind means not doing what needs to be done because it's hard. That giving themselves breaks from trying is what they need.

They think it comes easily to those succeeding at what they set out to do and if they themselves struggle, it's obviously not for them. They're special in how hard it is for them. Hence, they deserve time off from trying.

That's one of the biggest misconceptions, and I believe the inherent problem is with how people talk to themselves.

Growth is the result of enough repetitions, many of them ending in some sort of failure. Your drawing doesn't look like anything you expected, your run felt terrible, your code doesn't compile.

If your inner voice gets destructive every time you mess up, you're less likely to try again. Ironically, you are getting in yet another successful repetition of talking badly about yourself.

If you learn to not succumb to negative self-talk, it gets a lot easier to get back to what you set out to do and start another repetition. You'll still fail, you'll still find it hard, but you won't be in a constant fight with yourself anymore.

I strongly believe that everybody can achieve whatever they set out to do, as long as they keep at it. It might take forever, it might require a whole lot of deliberate practice and deep work, but as long as the repetitions don't stop, progress is inevitable.

The key difference between you and those who make it seem easy is probably that they're kinder to themselves.

The hardest thing about learning to code is when my ingrained software-design-perfectionism clashes with what I’m able to do. Stoins is going great. I’d say it’s an above average app for somebody who just started coding. Yet I can’t wrap my head around the solutions to some of the problems I’m facing and I struggle with accepting flaws that are solely there because I’m not good enough yet.

Everything works, don’t get me wrong. It’s just not as good as I know it could be. I think a better understanding of concurrency could solve one of the problems. Perhaps a second problem would go away with more knowledge about threads. Oh and something, something state machines? I just don’t understand any of it enough to solve my app’s bugs.

Here’s the thing though: Motivation doesn’t come and go by some magical whim of fate. Motivation is something you create. I know that my motivation is heavily influenced by progress. I tried fixing these issues for so long without getting anywhere that I’m at a point where I need to accept that those are flaws I need to live with. It’s my second self-coded app ever, of course it has problems.

I’m sure my next project will teach me some of the things I need to learn to come back to Stoins and fix it. A cycle of learning through manufactured motivation and not giving in to perfectionism.