How to start your dreams

Welcome!!

My name is Nathaniel, and this is my blog where I hope to share my experiences and learnings from solving problems with code. This is quite a bold title for my first blog post and dreams start with inspiration; therefore, I want to tell you a story about being inspired.

As I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, I have always been interested in creating things on a computer. I studied computer science at Purdue, and one of the classes I took was about computer architecture. While I do not write assembly code at work, I think understanding computer architecture is a foundational topic to computer science. Throughout the lectures over the course of the semester, my professor shared various comparisons of current computing designs versus historical ones which included many photos from things he saw at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA.

Even though I live close by, I had not been to the museum until a couple times in the past year. In my visits to the museum, I got to see a working IBM 1401 which ran a program to read your punch card and print your name, a working PDP-1 running the Spacewar! game, and countless other cool artifacts. I found it inspiring to see all the innovations in the history of computing that are the building blocks for many things we continue to use today. And after seeing so many successful ideas, it is easy to feel encouraged to chase a dream of your own.

There was also a big wall in the museum where you could post a sticky note with a one-word answer to encourage aspiring entrepreneurs. I wrote the word “start”, and it is funny to think how much this applies to me. I have many ideas for things I like to create, but I often do not act on them. And none of those ideas are worth much if I do not do anything. It is often easy to deprioritize our ideas or make excuses to discourage ourselves from trying.

A common reason that we may make excuses rather than starting something new is because of the fear of failure. I know I deal with this feeling a lot. What if what I create does not work out? What if nobody cares about it? These questions are only hypothetical. There is only so much you can theorize about without taking action. At some point, you must set aside your doubts and try. If you try and it does not work out, at least you can say that you gave it your best shot. That feeling is better than having to live with the feeling of regret. And I believe that it is in hard times and places of adversity where one truly can learn more about themselves. Then, from the experience of failure, you can learn what you can do better the next time and try again.

For me, creating this blog has been one of the projects I had dreamed of doing, but for a while, I felt stuck. For the rest of this blog post, I hope to share some practical tips on how I was able to overcome this challenge and get to the point where I could publish this website.

Education

You need to learn the skills necessary to work towards your goal. This can range anywhere from taking college classes to following an online tutorial. For my project, I followed a handful of tutorials to familiarize myself with the web development space in addition to reading a lot of code to understand how other people go about making something similar. This cycle of research and education can be frustrating at times as it can feel like you are not making progress as quickly as you like. I felt like I was spinning my wheels a bit in this stage as I tried out different technologies before redoing it all using another JavaScript framework.

Practice makes permanent

There is a popular saying that says “practice makes perfect”. The idea is that if you practice enough, you can become good at something. This is not true. As I was once told by my baseball coach, practice only makes permanent; thus, you want to make sure that you are practicing correctly. Of course, this applies to more than just sports; if you are not learning the correct material, it will slow your progress in working towards your goal. Therefore, I think it is important to take inspiration from others and learn about how other people are successful in accomplishing similar things to your goals.

If you are feeling stuck, do not be afraid to find help or seek out mentorship. This can be helpful for guiding you on the right path in addition to helping hold you accountable. It is easy to feel overconfident in your own ability when you are just starting out (otherwise, known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect). Remember that accomplishing your dreams requires hard work.

Organization

Another step that I found has helped me a lot is having a standardized way to organize my thoughts. It is easy to get discouraged when you forget what you were just working on or that idea you had while you were doing your chores. I find that writing a note down using an app that I can easily access on my phone like Google Keep helps me save those things before I forget. After I jot down my notes, I spend some time transferring them to a more organized place like Notion or GitHub Projects. Both of those applications allow you to add more content to expand on your initial idea, and they make it easy for you to prioritize which idea you want to work on next.

Additionally, I also found that setting up standard processes helped me lower the friction between having an idea and executing it. For a technical project like mine, this means creating a development environment that makes it easy to contribute. This includes having a code editor with syntax highlighting, adding a code linter and formatter to make it easy to follow best practices, and using version control so that I can track my changes.

Building Confidence

It is important to dream big; however, do not let the scope of your idea discourage you from starting. A good way to combat this is to break up your large tasks into smaller pieces of work. By consistently completing these smaller tasks, you can build up your confidence that you can do it; this gives your brain positive reinforcements which only continues to snowball. Before you know it, you will be amazed at how much progress you have made.

Just Do It

Thank you for taking the time to read my first blog post here! I am still trying to figure this out too, but hopefully I was able to offer some words of encouragement. Feel free to stick around on my little side quest here on my blog as I explore this passion of mine. Overall, while there are no shortcuts to success, these practical steps can help you make progress in the right direction and reduce the friction to work towards your hopes and dreams. If I can leave you with one final thought, it would be to not worry about what other people think. You need to set aside your doubts and take the first step. And as the Nike slogan goes, “Just Do It”.