Today, I wanna talk about the most important skill that you need to have to become a programmer and it’s probably not what you think it is. Let’s discuss more about it in this video.
Today’s tip is all about, “What is the most important skill that you need to get to obtain to become a programmer?” Now, you might be thinking that, “Okay, I need to learn Java, I need to learn Kotlin or C++.” No, it’s not the programming language. It’s not the computer, if you need to have the latest, i7 CPU processor with 64 gigs of RAM. No, it’s nothing to do with the hardware. And it’s not to do with working for particular places, it’s not even to do with technology, it’s all about a very important concept, persistence.
Yes, believe it or not, persistence is gonna be your number one most important skill that not only you need to master but you need to show persistence to succeed as a programmer. The reality is, when you’re starting up learning programming, you’re learning any skill but particularly programming, you are gonna get frustrated and you’re going to hit the wall on many occasions. You may get confused whether you wanna go on or you can’t figure out a solution, you’re frustrated, you wanna give up, and your brain’s probably screaming “I give up, I’ve had enough, let me do something else.” You need to persist through that.
The reality is when you’re learning a new skill and again, as I mentioned, programming, it’s even more doubly so, perhaps triply so, it’s going to get hard at times and you need to be able to persevere and push through that. Now, I’ve got a blog post talking more about this and check that out if you wanna know more about that. But basically, in that blog post, I outlined an example of a video game that I played. So I’m a bit of a computer gamer but at my age, I haven’t exactly got the world’s fastest reflexes so I get sort of shot to pieces by the younger people out there.
But when I first started this particular game, I found that I sucked at it, for want of a better word. I couldn’t figure out what the controls were, what to shoot or to block attack or whatever it was, I found that I couldn’t find the key, I couldn’t remember what the key was and was dying all the time. But what happened, I persisted at the game. So I got better at it, and that’s the reality. When you persist at something, you can get better at it.
So I started to understand the keys and I understood the various buttons and what they did. I understood how to dodge attacks, so I could start playing better. I was getting further and further into the game because of persistence. The same is going to be hold true to you, definitely hold true to you as a programmer. I can absolutely almost guarantee this, that if you stick to it, things will become easier.
If you’re programming now, perhaps you’ve done a bit of programming and you’ve hit a wall, or you’ve got to the stage where you’re watching a tutorial, (it might be one of my videos or any other video out there) and you understand the concepts but you can’t apply that into writing your own programs, you have to realize that that is of natural part of programming. Persist that, keep it coming, immersing yourself into programming code and over time, you’ll get better at this and things will make more sense. You’ll understand the process more.
So I can’t stress this enough, persist at it, don’t give up. Just refuse to give up. Just go, put it out there and say, “I am not going to give up until I master this particular thing.” Whatever it is that you’re trying to master; programming language, particular technique or whatever it is. So if you do that and you’re going to that mindset and you keep at it, you will ultimately succeed and be able to become a programmer.
Alright, so I hope that helped, if you’ve got any questions, feel free to leave a comment and I’ll get back to you.