My greatest strength is adaptability. I’ve spent several years working in stressful environments, and usually I’m solely responsible for technical support and troubleshooting issues. I’ve found that being able to execute a “plan b” at a moment’s notice is essential, both in keeping clients happy and when sticking to a tight schedule (in my industry, “the show must go on” is a very real goal.) If I credit my success to one thing it’s adaptability; I haven’t had problems with a client in years, because when problems do arise I’m able to keep a level head and them without getting stuck or letting it affect the rest of the team.
I work best in support roles or in team environments. Even when working on my own I prefer to have input or to be working on projects for a use other than my own. I find the most trouble when I’m allotted the time and have a level of personal investment which encourages extreme attention to detail. In these moments I quickly lose sight of the bigger picture, take too much time to execute, and ultimately the quality of the product suffers.
I hope that my attention to detail and willingness to problem solve (I generally enjoy it) will help me become an agile developer. I’d like to couple this with my tendency to guard my inner/emotional life as a way realize and answer my communities needs through my work. This tendency has done a lot for my patience, and while I’m eager to zoom onto my career, I hope that I’ll be able to focus on the learning at hand without getting to excited about what’s next.
There’s a lot of credence in the saying “you set yourself up for success” but I don’t believe that we can be totally prepared for any situation. Trying to understand one’s self with as little bias as possible is one of the most proactive postures we can assume when, undoubtedly, something will go awry. Knowing your strengths and preferences is as much about being able to recognize when you’re operating outside of them as anything else.
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?
I try to spend time comparing my work to quality examples, organize and define my processes, and to prevent my mood and eventual lack of cognitive resources from despairing over a project. I never felt the comparisons helped, but after watching Sierra's presentation I think I wasn't using enough. Organization has been the only thing to keep me sane, but I also wonder if trying to use a defined process has slowed me down. Paying attention to my state of mind is starting to become habitual, or subconcious, and I think it's extremely important. Even when I'm not happy with my work, being able to separate my critical vantage point from my mood and energy has been essential.
I recognized a lot of my self in Sierra's presentation on moving post-it's between boards, or "can't do, can with effort, mastered." One of the efforts that I do make is to be constantly re-examining things that I've "mastered," but I don't know that I'd say these efforts are entirely successful, and the extra time I spend in that headspace definitely takes a toll on my ability to effectively learn and manage my process. I know that especially on very large projects I have a hard time dividing tasks into smaller ones, and I know that I've tried to spend less time on things to preserve cognitive resources. I think using 100s of condensed high quality examples will be a new tool in my arsenal; 100s is a much higher number than I'd have expected.
Coate wrote about a mind-set about mental health that I've been struggling with and working on for the past few months especially. I do believe as an artist at an early age I learned how to separate my self-worth from my success rate when working with new ideas. I do fight the hopeless fatigue often, but I see it as more of what Sierra talked about with cognitive resources. Coate wrote about feeling like he's getting better, and that's something I picked up when I tried and failed to read Infinite Jest. They talk about it in the context of tennis, but say that we go through periods of time where we experience improvement, and then plateau for a while. I definitely recognize that as part of struggling to learn, but Sierra made me suspicious that this isn't necessary. She made me think of having to write out my "thought process" in rudimentary math problems, where I just knew the answer, but it wasn't right until I proved it.
What role does your emotional state of mind play in your learning? How do your successes and failures at learning affect your emotional state?
Again, this is something that I've been working on for a while. Some days if I'm starting from a bad state of mind I'll wait to start working until I can get myself to relax. Mostly though, I've managed to prevent successes or failures from affecting me too much. I still get emotionally exhausted, but I try not to let myself get despondent or over-excited - everything is a process, and I want to be able to continue to learn without being disappointed that I misunderstood something, and I want to like what I'm doing when it's not working out enough to figure it out.
Tom Hanks was accepting an award and giving a speech and basically said all you have to do is be prepared and show up on time. He was talking about being on set, but I want to be like Tom Hanks. I understand that it takes more than that, I'm going to use a nice planner and study and etc.; but I also want my second run at school to be a time to focus on developing good habits and opening myself not only to new information but also new ways of being.