Don’t spend your life waiting for the weekend

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Ever have the Monday blues? Or even worse, the Sunday-in-anticipation-of-Monday blues?

If not, I commend and envy you. For the rest of us, let’s admit that the workweek lifestyle sucks — “living for the weekend” may be a good subject for a country song, but it’s a bad way to live your life.

The monday blues have been on my mind a lot the past few years. Even though I’ve had fulfilling jobs, deep down I still felt excited to clock out on Friday and anxious about returning to the office on Monday. The worst part is that the more I talked to friends and colleagues about their work, the more I got the feeling that living for the weekend was normal. *Shudder*.

It was tough to admit to myself that I wasn’t where I needed to be. It was even tougher to leave in search of my passion. Figuring out your passion is way harder than anybody seems to admit — especially if you already have a good job. For most of us, getting there takes experimentation, and experimentation is risky by definition.

All I knew breaking out of my monday-blues cycle was that I wanted to do something that satisfied three criteria:

  1. Keep my mind off of Fridays and make me excited for Mondays
  2. Always have something to learn
  3. Have something I could passionately work on for the rest of my life

While I can’t say I’ve found nirvana or the purpose of life, I’m happy to say I’ve found something that makes me excited when I wake up on Mondays: programming.

As some of you know, I’ve been going through an immersive software engineering program called Hack Reactor. There was not a single morning that I dreaded going to Hack Reactor even though I knew I’d be coding for the next 12 hours. In fact, I got a burst of energy just thinking about the day ahead. There’s something magical about doing something because you want to do it rather than because you have to.

That’s what coding has become for me.

The lows of programming

Despite how much I’ve grown to love programming, it definitely has its lows. Here’s a few of the challenges I’ve worked through:

  • It’s incredibly challenging and you always feel uncomfortable. Naturally, this makes it incredibly easy to give up. After all, no one likes feeling incapable.
  • It can get pretty darn frustrating sometimes. You can sit there for hours fixing a tiny little bug or getting a tiny little feature to work. You get lost in rabbit holes and have to dig your way out. You feel guilty for not being “productive” during the time that you’re dealing with bugs or merge conflicts or the millions of side problems that always come up.
  • You spend a ton of time on things that feel annoying (e.g. git, build process, documentation, etc.) but are still necessary and important. There’s a lot more to the process of building something that just spitting out code. And you just have to accept that it’s part of the process.
  • There are ALWAYS people who are 100x better than you. Always. You have to be ready to swallow your ego.
  • It’s extremely fast-paced and there’s a constant influx of new things to learn.

Overall, it’s the fact that these lows haven’t discouraged me that has encouraged me to keep leveling up my programming skills — turning what started as a side project into a full-time education, then a full-time career. I simply love programming.

I hope that readers going through similar growing pains know that they are not alone. Few of us are born knowing what our passion is, and figuring it out is a journey. I may not be there yet, but I believe that by refusing to settle and following my curiosities I will keep getting better.

Hack Reactor update

I’d like to close today’s post with my updated diagram. Six whole weeks at Hack Reactor! Hard to believe how much I’ve learned, yet it still feels like I have an infinite amount of things I want to learn:

What’s next

Week 6 concludes the “junior” portion of the program and for the next six weeks, everything is project based. So this also concludes my weekly updates.

But don’t worry, I’m not going anywhere. I have many more topics I’d like explore in writing over the next six weeks and beyond… So stay tuned! Especially if you like technical web development posts :)

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Why am I sharing my travel stories?

Founder & CEO of TruStory. I have a passion for understanding things at a fundamental level and sharing it as clearly as possible.

Preethi Kasireddy
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