Make it happen

To get something to happen, you need to do something to make it happen.
It sounds obvious, doesn’t it?
Regardless of the hurdles in your way, if you want something, you need to do everything you can to make that happen. For example, I get a lot of messages asking ‘how do I become a web developer?’, and as I have mentioned before, a lot of people have a lot of opinions about the ‘right’ path. My response is mostly the same: ‘just start’.

If you have committed to ‘becoming a web developer’ or ‘becoming a firefighter’ or ‘becoming an astronaut’, or whatever you want to do, then your next step needs to be with immersing yourself in that thing.

You have completed the first step of making that decision, regardless of how broad a decision it was. That is almost the most difficult bit - deciding what you want to do.

Great job!

Now is not the time to sit back and relax.
Now is the time to act. You have to act while you have that energy in your belly!

You have the motivation!

Now where do you go?

You have the option of looking around for resources and asking a few trusted people about their path. After all, you need to get a little bit of direction. You also have the option of asking as many people as you can find about how to do it and what to do and what the best thing to start with is.

What option do you think will give you a little nudge in the right direction, and what option do you think will leave you spinning in circles for weeks? What option would you choose?
Sure, the second option may make you feel like you are more safe and more cocooned by some knowledge before you go into it on your own, but you also have a strong likelihood of never actually starting, or ending up watching so many recommended tutorials and doing so many recommended courses that your brain turns to mush before you have even started…

So: do you like solving and building things, puzzles and logic challenges? Have a go at backend development!

Do you like design, working out what people (a client) wants, and visual art? Try frontend.

I haven’t put all that much thought into the above, so please don’t try and profile yourself too heavily from this! For web development, you can learn a bit of both.

You aren’t stuck to the thing you start out learning. Take me for example: I decided I wanted to learn web development, and had no prior knowledge. I started out with JavaScript as I read that it covered both backend and frontend (in truth many languages do.). I spent months learning javascript fundamentals and implementing what I had learned into little projects, with the help of tutorials and lectures. You can see what I built in my Github, but don’t expect to be amazed! It is javascript only, it has no front end.

After this, I realised that I was finding it quite tedious, all this learning without actually seeing anything visual and shiny. So I started to learn HTML and CSS in order to build things out fully.
All the while I was constantly documenting on Twitter about my learning journey.

My point is that although I started out learning JavaScript (and still am), I moved on from it as soon as I wanted to try something different. This doesn’t mean to switch around all the time - we know that consistency is important - I studied JavaScript non stop, every day for 6 months, around 10-12 hours a day. I got ill - don’t do that....