Introduction
Starting a journey in the world of tech is beautiful, no doubt about that, but even it does not come without its share of problems. Trying to learn a technical skill in Nigeria is hard enough, with the combined problems of electricity and internet connectivity, but other side problems come with starting a tech journey in general.
Before I started learning web development, I had been inspired by stories of people who had managed to learn it in six months or eight months and had gotten jobs immediately after. This put me on a deceitful self-learning path, with the naive thought that it couldn't be much more different for me.
I couldn't have been more wrong.
The lack of guidance
Self-learning itself was bad enough, but I had to learn with the added pressure of trying to cover a whole lot of topics in “six months”, with no one to properly guide me through the right path. I found myself on a seemingly endless train of tutorials, with no way to track my progress. I was surprised to find that the quest to find someone to properly mentor me was not an easy one. I registered for the Third Cohort of the She Code Africa mentorship program, selecting the JavaScript track, even though my knowledge of the language at the time had been very green. I didn't get into the program, which wasn't so surprising, but it hadn't stopped me from feeling dejected.
I reached out to a few people I knew were quite established in my field. Eventually, I found out that although some of them were willing to mentor me, they did not really understand what I truly wanted from a mentorship. Thinking back to it now, I realize that I may have asked them for too much. People have their own lives to deal with and may not be able to devote as much time to you as you would want, and that is okay.
I continued my learning without a mentor and learned to deal with it.
The comparison dilemma
The tech world is quite an interesting one, in that there is no age discrimination. 14-year olds can build amazing things and even get to work in well-established companies, which of course is a great thing, but I had once found it very intimidating and it was another problem I eventually had to learn to “deal with”.
At the time, I had done nothing but compare myself to other people, even the ones I knew had started their journey into tech years and months before I had. I was angry with myself for not being able to progress as fast as I wanted to, and the anger developed into anxieties. I was constantly haunted by my inadequacy and the fact that there were people younger than I was making big changes in the tech world didn’t make things easier for me.
I did, however, get to overcome it by learning to appreciate every little progress I made and forcing myself to realise that people are not the same, and they shouldn’t be.
Conclusion
The greatest disservice you can ever do to yourself is to make yourself believe that you’re not as good as other people, simply because you cannot do all the things that they can.
I find myself facing new challenges occasionally such as rejection emails and the lack of inspiration to learn, but I am grateful that I am constantly learning to focus on my progress and not measure my abilities against that of my peers.