DEV Community

Cover image for Why Problems Keep Me Going in Tech
Neel-Vekariya
Neel-Vekariya

Posted on

Why Problems Keep Me Going in Tech

As a learner in tech, Every day somehow I face a new problem I didn't even know existed yesterday.

And honestly I love this.

When something crashes, when a feature breaks, when I have no idea why the code is doing what it's doing and that struggle of finding the bug, digging into it, understanding it that gives me a kinda of motivation I can't explain. It's like a dopamine hit. The feeling after solving that problem is incredible.





I realized something because of this. Without problems, writing code becomes a repetitive, boring task. Zero motivation. Zero excitement. Just the same thing again and again.

But when something breaks when I actually have to think, investigate, sit with the problem that's when my boundaries expand. That's when I actually learn something.


The Comfort Zone

But I also noticed something else about myself.

The moment I get comfortable with something I lose interest in it.

It starts in the learning phase. Everything is new, everything is a problem, everything is exciting.

I'm struggling, I'm figuring things out, I'm building. And then slowly I get comfortable. That struggle disappears.

The thing that was exciting becomes a repetitive task. Boring. Routine.

And then I move on to the next thing.

This happened with MongoDB. I started learning it, faced problems connection issues, queries not giving correct responses, things not working the way I expected.

I struggled. I used it in my backend project. And then I got comfortable. The interest just went away. MongoDB became something I already knew.

So I moved to PostgreSQL.

Same thing happened with Express. I got comfortable, lost interest.

That's actually one of the reasons I moved to Fastify I needed something new to struggle with again.




The Interesting Part


At first I thought this was a problem. Like maybe I'm not focusing enough. Maybe I should stay with one thing longer.

But then I noticed something.

Express took me two and a half months to learn. Fastify took one week.

PostgreSQL took even less time than that.

The time it takes me to learn something new keeps getting smaller. Each thing I learn becomes the foundation for the next thing. The struggles I had before make the new struggles easier to work through.

Someone once said "Tomorrow's knowledge becomes the foundation of today."

I think about this a lot, And Thats True. Every uncomfortable thing I pushed through, every bug that frustrated me, every late night trying to figure out why something wasn't working all of that is why the next hard thing feels a little less hard.




What I Actually Think This Is


I don't think I get bored of things. I think I outgrow them.
The problems that once challenged me stop being problems. And without problems, there's no growth. So naturally I move toward the next thing that will challenge me again.

That feeling the discomfort, the struggle, the not knowing that's not a sign something is wrong. That's actually the sign that learning is happening.

I want to stay in that feeling as long as I can.




If I made any mistakes in this — please mention in the comments. I'll correct it.

Top comments (0)