The Journey Is Everything

The title of this post is special to me because it was the title of my favourite musician’s (Russ) latest tour, but it speaks to something greater. The journey is everything. The journey is the destination. The journey is the reward. The journey is the process. The journey is the experience. The journey is the story. The journey is the lesson. The journey is the growth. The journey is the journey.

I have been thinking about this a lot lately. I have been thinking about how I can make the most of my journey. One of the ways I think I can do this is by starting to write. That is exactly why I built this site. I want to document my journey. I want to share my experiences. I want to learn. I want to grow. And I want others to learn and grow too.

One of the very specific reasons I have for writing is that I don’t know what I know and I don’t know what I don’t know. I mentioned this when speaking to my friend Guide about writing, and he said that writing is definitely something that should help sort through this. His writing has helped him a lot, and I hope mine will help me too. I’ve linked his site above, and I highly recommend you check it out. He has some great posts on there. (“Shameless plug”, as he would say 😂👀)

Let’s look at the first part of that statement.

i don’t know what I know

I have been programming for a while now, and I have learnt a lot. I have learnt a lot of things that I don’t even know I know. For example, I have learnt how to program, and I’d like to think I’m quite competent. But, every so often, if you ask me about specific things I don’t know off-hand even when I use them every day. This goes down to terminology or even writing something as simple as a for-loop in a language I work with frequently. I know how to do it, but I don’t know how to do it. I don’t know what I know. Part of this comes down to practice I guess, which is another reason for this site. I want to practice by writing about these things (and building things) which will hopefully help me solidify my knowledge. I can also refer back to it on those days when I feel like I don’t know what I know.

Now, onto the latter part of my statement from earlier.

i don’t know what I don’t know

This is the part that scares me the most. I don’t know what I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m missing out on. I don’t know what I’m not learning. I don’t know what I’m not doing. I don’t know what I’m not experiencing. I’m the kind of person that hates being bored. I hate not doing anything. I hate not learning and not growing. I feel stagnant. I see so many people around me doing amazing things, and I want to do amazing things too. I want to learn and grow. I want to experience new things. Apart from the selfish reasons, I want to teach and help others learn and grow too. Not just in programming, but in life. As a developer, have you ever been asked to explain what you do to someone who doesn’t know anything about programming? It’s not the easiest thing to do. I want to be able to explain things to people in a way that they can understand.

I want to be able to teach people. I want to be able to help people. I want to be able to help people help themselves.

I want to share my experiences and my knowledge. I want to share my lessons. I want to share my growth. I want to share my journey.

Anyway that’s the end of this very selfish post. I hope you enjoyed it, and I hope you’ll stick around for more. I’m going to try to post frequently, but life does get in the way, unfortunately. I’ll try to keep my posts short and sweet (not like this one), but we’ll see how that goes.

Seeing as part of starting this journey was inspired by one of Russ’s songs, I’m going to leave you with a quote from one of his songs (Pull The Trigger):

Pull the trigger, ain’t nobody gonna do it for you.