Thursday, June 18, 2015

There is no luck, only grit.

It's 1:26am here in Northern Virginia.  I am exhausted, I want to go to bed, but I promised myself that I would write a post tonight, which got me to thinking.

All of the most successful people I know have all overcome challenges, and have worked really hard for what they have.  It also got me to thinking about one of my QA coaching students Georgi, she is studying like crazy!  4+ hours a day, I can't believe the learning progress and speed she is making, I was no where near as fast as she is.

Which made me think even further about success whether it has been in coding or my own personal life.  When I was learning how to shoe horses, all of the older farriers would always refer to me as: "Hey BOY!... get over here!"  They would play tricks on me so that I would accidentally pick up a hot horseshoe, ( because they put a hot horseshoe in with the cold horseshoes ).  I eventually had to leave the one farrier I was apprenticing with because he literally would only have me work on the most dangerous horses.  But I never gave up on my goal of learning how to shoe horses, and I eventually did and had my own business for 7.5 years, 1 year netting over $115K after taxes.

That never would have happened if I had given up.  My success had very little to do with luck and a whole lot to do with never quitting, even when I thought I would pass out from heat stroke.  Coding is no different, fighting the urge to simply watch T.V. and instead open your computer and try to write some code.

That's why I love working with Georgi, I love her work ethic.  I woke up yesterday and saw an email from her that had been sent at 1:30am in Spain time.  Don't ever give up peeps, you guys can do this, if you have to go at a slower pace, okay, just don't ever stop.  It's a lot harder to get going again from a stand still.  Everyday, open your computer and write something in your text editor, anything :-)

Good night, I talk to you tomorrow :-)