I was always someone who liked to explore the unknown. This meant I always liked to learn something new, something unrelated. There is nothing wrong with that, it may even be good, as curiosity is a way for someone to become knowledgeable. But this is not the way to success. Looking at history, most people we remember achieved mastery in their field. Charles Darwin is a good example. He spent most of his lifetime focused on one thing: evolution. This made him one of the most respected scientists.
These people achieve mastery through a personal passion. A drive that leads them to their field of interest. You cannot spend 10,000 hours on one thing without passion. But passion is an ambiguous concept. What is your task?
You can take a lifetime to find this out. Robert Greene argues, in his book, that finding one purpose is often rooted in our childhood. Some natural interest we had in a field.
For me, math was always a field I had an inherent interest in, even before first grade. And I was good at it, the process of solving an issue was what I enjoyed. This is what my inherent interest is in problem-solving. I love building software as a means to solve a problem. This was how my first company was born. A future customer came to me and described his problem. I said yes, before knowing how to solve his issue and without knowing how to code*. Maybe this was, what intrigued me. Afterward, I started watching YouTube videos for mobile app development and Googling (lots of Googling). I chose Flutter to solve the issue at hand, a framework that was still in beta at this time. Throughout my Easter holidays, I learned how to code. I spent all day long figuring out how to use Flutter and Dart, doing small projects with little elements of what the future app needed. For example, doing a little CRUD application with PHP and MySQL (I have never used PHP or SQL before).
After having the feeling of knowing a bit, I started working my ass off for building a solution for my maybe customer. Keep in mind: I didn’t even have a contract. One month later (while having school at the side) I presented the solution to my future customer… He was impressed and became my customer. I was 13 at the time and received my first paycheck of 1000€.
What I am realizing now, is that I loved the process of solving the problem, not the coding part or the customer-conversation part (which was crucial to finding a building solution).
* I did some “Processing” (Google that if you don’t know it) and Python before, but only YouTube projects (copying the code from the video)
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