You may be familiar with Kanban as a team tool from your work in development, but have you considered using it as a tool in your ‘personal development’ journey?
Whether you’re a student or an experienced developer (or some combination of the two, because that’s pretty common in our industry) there is always beauty in progress over perfection.
Our current hustle culture constantly eggs us on to be so excited and pumped and ready for everything and anything we’re doing, that it’s often easy to lose sight of what you were trying to accomplish in the first place.
Now don’t get me wrong, Confucius was definitely on to something and there are definitely some people out there that live their life with this concept and I celebrate their happiness and devotion. …
The journey is ongoing. As it should be.
Like many, there’s wisdom in your thirties that makes all the difference.
What really changed things for me, in particular, was my journey with ‘acceptance’.
In contrast, my 20’s was a rampant denial of anything that did not fit in with the illusion of my ideal self. Even though it was often at the pure detriment to my psyche; I was so busy playing the rejection game on blaring red flags, that I failed to see something very simple, but very powerful:
I’m flawed and there’s plenty of room for improvement
I’m what neurotypicals like to call high-functioning. Figures.
And yes, there was a time I took pride in that label. With all my accomplishments and the constant pursuit of bigger, greater things, it didn’t seem like I would ever need to fall back on mental-health coping techniques. I was getting it done, getting it done well in fact; so why would it apply to me, I thought. …
Ah, welcome my fellow red pill devourer. We have much to do.
To quickly recap, in my last blog post I began to unpack the following:
Why are we always so quick to focus on solely developing our coding abilities FIRST rather than our ability to thrive in its environment? Why are WE, the creators of code; secondary, at all?
2020 has thrown us a massive curve-ball, and like most — we’ve all been juggling with some feelings of discomfort for an extended period of time. …
I’ve always been a very visual learner.
And when you’ve always done things a certain way, you tend to take it for granted. During my university years, surrounded by hundreds of computer science peers, I was often surprised when I had to defend my elaborate doodles, drawings and lists.
I noticed back then, (and I’m talking 10+ years ago mind you) that there seemed to be some kind of rejection against “writing things down”. That having to write something down somehow reflected your inability to grasp a concept? Again, just to be clear, I’m talking about a computer science program where being smart and doing nerdy things are common if not expected qualities. …
