It has been a while since I did a blog post. A couple different reasons:
- Work demands
- Lack of updates
The reason I started this site was to give myself a playground to develop different technology and learn how all the skills I had learned fit together. It wasn't a fast journey, but I felt like I got to a final look pretty quickly. I won't go over everything on here because you could just look around (if you are a user). A couple of things are missing that I had planned to make. Comments on blog posts, reactions (likes, love, hate, etc), calculators, and a random name picker.
Time played a major part in staying stagnant. Sleep, family obligations, and work schedules all zapped me of energy. I am lamenting over the fact I didn't have time to work on this site. In fact, I love that I have such a full life with my family and a fulfilling job.
And as I turn another page in life, I am faced with another challenge. Getting promoted to data analyst is a great opportunity for me to gain great skills in data science, but I am facing the dreaded impostor syndrome. Feeling like I don't have enough skills to accomplish my tasks is something I have been doing my entire life. Even with my sales job, I can remember when I got pretty confident, I felt like I wasn't that good at it, and most of it was luck.
Where are you going with this?
Now that I am officially a data analyst (sort of ?), I've got some more skills I need to learn. It's another start of a journey, but this one is harder to see the path ahead. It is going to take a lot of reading and writing, then getting ideas into a form that I can solve. I will have to massage ideas and look for ways to test those ideas.
Studying and working while getting paid seems like a strange thing to me. I know the more I learn, the better I will be at my job, but this awkward stage of developing a schedule of daily tasks while learning a new skill and providing value is a struggle.
Today I have felt out of it, completely mental checked out. Not for the lack of motivation, but because of overwhelming fear that my skills are lacking. I have wanted to learn and get on a path to keep learning, but today felt more like a roadblock.
Do something about it.
To get out of this rut, the plan is simple; keep going and learning. I have been doing my Rubiks cube a lot recently, and I learned a new way to solve it. The new way is difficult, and I am going slower than before, but it is becoming easier and quicker the more I do it. The same can be said with my data analyst and programmer skills. It will be awkward and cumbersome to start, but eventually will become easier, just keep learning and being exposed to new ideas.
I want to use this site again for gaining the skills I need, just like when I created the site. I will try to bounce ideas around on here when they come up. It would be a good way to keep track of my thoughts.
Final thoughts.
Just remember, the awkward stage doesn't last forever, and it usually brought on because of a lack of struggle. Once things start getting real, and there are more things to learn, it will feel good and rewarding. Until that time comes, keep reading, learning, and finding your own struggles to overcome.