Things you can and cannot do
Recently, my new company WebinarGeek forced me to do a webinar about myself. Actually, you could choose any topic, but obviously, it'd be cool to add a personal note, so people at the company get to learn a bit about yourself. In the end, it was really fun. It got me thinking about myself and my life and whatever impactful personal learnings I had in the recent years.
The topic of my webinar ended up being: Things you can and cannot do.
A stinging fun fact about me is that for most of my life I thought...
- Programmers are super cool and coding is awesome, but I can never be a developer because I flunked math back in high school
- Making things visual is valuable and fun, but I won't ever be able to draw because I have 2 left hands
However, somewhere around my thirties...
- I became a professional software developer, coding coach, and tech event organizer/speaker
- I've drawn educational visualizations, trending on Reddit, published in other people's blogs, and even upvoted on StackOverflow 🤓🎨
My theory: To try something new for real, I needed to internalize and accept (not just know or understand) that with enough time investment I can become a good enough version of myself in any area that I want, even in those where I feel disconnection for seemingly valid reasons.
I was happy enough to have had some passions that helped me to do just this, internalize and accept. Additionally, I had some kick-ass motivation to tackle a vastly foreign wonderland as computer science or take a wild chance on getting my hands moving over paper with pens and pencils.
You can try on your own, and get incredibly good enough at something that you already consider your passion, so you can be assured to have the permission to do something incredibly new. Or, you can skip waiting for 15 years and jump on a vastly attractive but extraneous task that you still consider unmanageable for some reason.
In any case, whether you think you can or cannot do it, you are...
P.S.: Here's the webinar replay for the whole story 💙