My tunes for the night. This soundtrack is so amazing. The game is great, too. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and I look forward to playing the second game the same studio produced and released recently, called Transistor.
I promise I didn't come here to babble about video games, much as I'd like to. Instead, I want to babble about the furthering of ones' knowledge and skill.
This has been a recent discovery for me. I described it when I first felt it as "a desire so strong to achieve a goal that the relatively unenjoyable steps that need to be taken along the way are no longer unenjoyable". When I questioned my fiancé on what a feeling like that could possibly be, he merely named it "motivation". That's when I realized that I had not been truly motivated to do something for a very long time. Long enough to forget what it felt like.
That was in 2011. At the time, the feeling applied to my artwork, which I was using as an outlet for brainstorming a story that Andrei and I were working on together. I became enamored with the concept of MUDs after being introduced to one, and in 2012, I spent all of my time learning as much as I could about them. The desire I had to learn about them made me voracious for any information I could find, though it was quite thin by the time I started looking (most MUD information was out-of-date by 2007, with the massive popularity of emerging MMOs at the time). As I learned more about MUDs, I only became more fascinated by them. The majority of the old codebases were written in C, so I took the natural next-step and picked up C to try to fully understand them. The knowledge certainly helped when I started trying to script short programs into the MUD I build for!
Progress on that front has been halting, thanks to several projects I have on my plate that have been vying for priority. Now that I've made the overall decision to focus on HTML/CSS, I feel the same motivation driving me forward when I get stuck. I've grown to call it "possibility", personally. If I give up on whatever I'm working on, the possibility of anything coming of it will die. And, really... Anything is possible.
But, enough broad anecdote. What does that kind of motivation look like? Outside of the forward-driving force that is ones' own motivation, it looks something like this:
- Scouring shelves at bookstores for used and new books that could hold useful information
- Hunting for online resources; magazines, white papers, newsletters, blogs... anything.
- Stepping away from the games or TV shows a little earlier at night to fit a little bit of reading in before bed
- Keeping a digital copy open on the phone/tablet/computer on the off-chance that a 15-minute span of time pops up to allow for some quick reading
- Writing a lot of code
- Making lots of mistakes
- Reading or talking about those mistakes and finding industry advice on how to avoid them
- Making more mistakes, and hopefully, some visible progress
At least, that's what it looks like for me. I was lucky enough to stumble upon a used book published in 2004 for $6 that focuses on web standards for HTML and CSS. Inside, the author made heavy reference to his blog, so I went to see what he had to say. The blog hadn't been updated in a year or so, but even so... Thankfully, HTML and CSS haven't changed too much in the past 10 years, and the changes that have been made are very helpfully documented on the W3Schools Website. With that being the case, this blog is a fount of information. Additionally, the author often references a great deal of other resources. While reading through his blog, I found myself bookmarking every other page I visited for the quality of content I read. Some things were a little confusing, being marketed to web designers who have been in the industry for years. But, that unenjoyable feeling of being confused? It didn't last long when I reached a point in those articles when things began making sense. If I had given up and decided to come back when I had more experience, I'd have robbed myself of the opportunity to understand. It took more effort to continue reading something I legitimately didn't get, but the payoff was far greater.
This has been an incredibly rambly way of explaining why it's a bad idea to give up. If something seems out of reach, there are times that you give yourself an excuse to not work as hard. It is tough to keep the motivation going. But to throw the towel in because something is too hard or you don't get it is the wrong approach -- instead, figure out why it's too hard or why you don't understand, and go from there. And if that is way too much work, then start asking yourself if you've chosen the right thing to take up your time.
Some of the HTML/CSS references I found are listed below, for anyone interested. I wish all a wonderful night or day, whichever the case may be.
- SimpleBits.com Archive (aforementioned Blog)
- A List Apart
- ImpressiveWebs
- Smashing Magazine
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