Code what you love until you love coding
“Read what you love until you love to read” by Naval is one of the quotes I remember the most.
I remember hating having to read books that were taught in class, but loved reading books on my own. My favourite book at the time was “Les Chevaliers D’Émeraude”, which was a 13-book fantasy series and I devoured every book when it came out.
For the longest time, I was allergic to books, because I always associated them with school work, but my love for books manifested once again when I started reading Hunger Games for fun while riding the bus to University. And man, I remember looking forward to going on the bus again just so that I can read the book because I was so into it. And that’s when my love for reading really developed.
I think the same thing happened to coding. I always associated coding with working or working on weird problems that didn’t really do anything for me and because it was hard, I started sweating every time I thought about code.
And, as a consequence, I told myself that I would never want to code again.
But now, ~12 years later, my thirst for coding is coming back. And I already feel pressured of “doing something great” with coding.
This is when I was reminded that maybe that’s the wrong approach. Instead, I should just code for fun. Do things that will not necessarily make money or that are useless for 99% of the people, but are fun to me.
And I think this philosophy can be applied to pretty much any new skill that you’re trying to learn. Do the skill for fun, and eventually you’ll love doing this skill.