I’ve Made A Huge Mistake

Being Overzealous

I think I bit off more than I can chew this week.
I don’t mean that I can’t do the stuff I wanted to, but I grossly overestimated how comfortable I am with JavaScript - even the basic stuff like creating a to-do list.

Last night I sat down and instead of doing what I had planned to do, which was finishing the design of doMore, I decided to mess with the JS. This is how it went:

I panicked.

I’m not sure why I did, but I did. I’ve been so excited to finally work with JS on my own, away from Treehouse courses, and I froze. So I went back to my original plan of finalizing the design and even that took longer than anticipated. I kind of felt like a failure.

Now I know that is absurd and I’ve only been doing this for a few months and I just dove into JS, however, I still felt like a failure. Then I reminded myself that it’s okay to fail. It’s okay to feel uncomfortable - and boy, did I feel uncomfortable working on JS.

Feeling Uncomfortable

It sucks - there’s no denying that. It felt even worse because I pride myself on being pretty good with CSS and even that felt like it took longer than it should have last night.

Perhaps it was an off night, or the fact that I couldn’t really focus, or maybe I just don’t know this stuff like I thought I did. But it’s okay. Everyone has bad days. Everyone has times where everything feels more difficult than it should. Haven’t you had a day where just getting out of bed feels like a huge challenge?

“Move out of your comfort zone. You can only grow if you are willing to feel awkward and uncomfortable when you try something new.” - Brian Tracy

I’m going to live by these words moving forward as I want to grow into the best developer I can. I have the motivation and (I think) the work ethic to do so. I may have to adjust my goals for next week to allow myself more time for the ones I set out for this week, and that’s okay - I’m adjusting my deadline.

What do you usually do when you feel like you’ve failed? What are your recommendations to overcome it?

I know this blog is a bit different than my previous ones, but everyone goes through these moments. I'm no different.