If I had to guess I'd say my greatest strength is a equal two-way tie between two different personality traits. The first is a persistent optimism, even when faced with potentially disheartening circumstances. I believe my ability to see the silver lining in most situations keeps both myself and potentially my team motivated to continue the fight against problems for the sake of progression rather than giving up and remaining stationary. The second would be my method of simplifying a potentially confusing issue through the use of analogies or an easier to understand example that relates to either myself or the person I'm attempting to explain to.
I work best with a clear defined goal or destination in mind with ample communication from those around me concerning their progress. A secondary non-distracting stimuli, such as music, can help to break up the monotony of staring at a screen for an extended period of time as well. When faced with a problem that seems impossible to work around, I often will leave my workstation to take what I refer to as "thinking laps", giving myself a change of scenery to inspire thought and hopefully allow me to consider an idea or route that I hadn't yet tried.
This question can be interpreted a couple different ways. If it is geared towards the idea of a self-deficiency somewhere that I feel could use improving, I believe I have a knack for overthinking or overcomplicating things that can be detrimental to achieving a goal. In most cases, a simple fix would be to simply calm down and re-engage the problem from a different mindset, but sometimes coming to that logical conclusion could take longer than I'd prefer. The second interpretation of this question addresses if it is referring to a past accomplishment that I feel was my "greatest area of improvement moment. If that is the case then I feel like my choice to vastly improve my quality of life by taking, what I viewed as, one of the biggest risks by abandoning the monotonous way of life I'd grown accustomed to and joining the Armed Forces.
Software development provides an interesting difference in my usual application of my strengths, as I will be able to tangibly see the "fruits of my labor" be built in real time. This differs from loading aircraft munitions in the military on a fighter jet that simply takes off with them and then lands without them. The same could be said for my administrative functions in the corporate world where I'm told that sales are doing well, and spreadsheets reflect that, but my workday never changes as a result. It is exciting to know that both myself and my team will be able to build a product from the ground up and see it take shape over the course of time until it matches or excels beyond its concept, and I look forward to utilizing all of the aforementioned strengths to make this a possibility.
In knowing where you excel at during a project, you can place people in their most productive positions on a project in the interests of progress. Additionally, it may prove beneficial to pair likeminded individuals together rather than pairing together people whose strengths or working preferences put them at odds and make it difficult to increase or create productivity. Alternatively, in knowing the strengths of those around you, it would give you the insight to know what personality traits to appeal to in order to get the job done. Forcing someone that is an introvert to participate in a highly social style of working would be likely to place that person in a level of discomfort that does not allow for them to operate at their highest capacity.
What efforts do you make to manage your learning process? Are these efforts successful? What challenges have inhibited your ability to manage your learning process effectively?
When it comes to my learning process, I have operated under the mindset that practice makes perfect. However, as Kathy Sierra's keynote addressed, that is not always the best method of learning and can actually be detrimental to learning advancement. In the past, my practice consisted of constant repetition, believing that I could 'force' the information into my head by moving things from the "Can't Do, but Need To" (Group A in the keynote) stage to the "Mastered" stage (Group C in the keynote) through converting what was once a difficult task into Muscle Memory. It can be effective, however there are times when "Step 1" is such a seemingly monumental task that it demoralizes me from trying and learning the remainder of the process.
From Ta-Nehisi's article, I relate to the process of practical application in a near constant environment, forcing me to learn through necessity. In doing so, a process that may have been very difficult for me from the start becomes less difficult over time because the application of it is so often that it becomes second nature rather than requiring the cognitive resources mentioned in Kathy Sierra's keynote. From the keynote itself, I relate to the idea of taking larger difficult tasks that I struggle with and breaking them down into smaller more manageable processes that I can master at a much quicker rate until the initially large task becomes just a collection of smaller things I already know how to do.
What role does your emotional state of mind play in your learning? How do your successes and failures at learning affect your emotional state?
There are times in which during a learning process, moreso with group learning, my emotional state can play a large role in tricking my brain into being less productive. Often I can see a difficult process and think to myself "Could I be the only one struggling with this? Am I the dumbest person in the room?" This can be both detrimental and inspirational at the same time. It oftentimes begins as a failure, putting my brain in a 'slump' where I spend more time worrying than actually doing anything constructive. When the slump period is over however, it breeds a spark of inspiration to get better at the process quickly and effectively in order to catch up to where my imagination has placed everyone else in terms of skill. In the end, I almost always find that I was freaking out over nothing and that, sometimes, everyone didn't instantly master the task and struggled just as much as I did.
The steps I've taken thus far, even prior to my official enrollment at Turing, was to learn as much as I could on my own in an effort to make learning a new skill/trade less of a daunting task. While I may not learn everything I absolutely need to know (or in some cases, may learn more than I need to), I feel as though overpreparation can be far more helpful than underpreparation. That way, once at Turing, in addition to learning things I may not have already heard about/tried to implement on my own, but I may find that there is an easier way of doing something I attempted to learn the difficult method for. At that point, it would just be a matter of dropping the self-taught method, and replacing it with the more effective method more skilled individuals than myself already implement in real-world applications.