Climbing the Learning Curve

Learning a new skill is a lot like riding a roller coaster. It starts with excitement boarding the coaster. Then they lock you into your seat and you begin to question whether or not this was a good idea. You look around and wonder, “are these the people I am going to die with when this coaster goes flying off the tracks?” Then the ride operator smiles at you and waves as he pushes the button to send you on your way.

You leave the station and almost immediately start to ascend what looks like the largest hill ever made. Each passing moment the ground looks smaller and smaller and your impending doom seems larger and larger. Just as you reach the pinnacle of the hill you look forward into nothingness. You can’t see the tracks as they vanish below the first car in the coaster and you begin to question your sanity of letting your friends or even you talk yourself into riding this thing.

You then plummet down the tracks pushed against the back of the seat. You are trying to catch your breath but just as you do you are thrown left and right around corners that seem way too sharp to be going safely around at this speed.

At this point you think you have endured about all you possibly can when you come to another large hill and you are momentarily slowed down only to crest the hill and you go rocketing down that one. You thought the first one was bad but soon realize that the speed you just gained was required because you are about to do a loop followed by several corkscrews then another hill and another speed increase.

Your head is shaken like a James Bond martini and you are disoriented to the point that you could have sworn you just say two talking mice skipping along the path adjacent to the coaster. This was not what you signed up for. You start thinking about all the things you have not yet done in your life and lamenting that you are too young to die. Somewhere while you are creating a mental note of bucket list items you may not live to do you realize that just maybe you aren’t going to die.

You start to get comfortable with the car and even anticipating the turns and hills. The adrenaline rush has taken over and you find yourself letting go of the death grip on the lap bar and raising your arms as you crest another hill.

Just when you start to actually enjoy the ride you start slowing down as you re-enter the loading gate where the lap bars release, and you exit to the left of the car. As you get out all you can think about is getting back in line and riding it again. This time you know what to expect and may actually enjoy the whole ride.

Over the course of the first four weeks of the 100 Days of Swift challenge how many of us have gone through nearly the same thing. You started learning the fundamentals of the Swift language and got a few successful quizzes under your belt. Soon you were feeling like you had a pretty good handle on things and wondered why you were anxious about this at all.

At that point you got a project or a concept that suddenly had you questioning whether you were even capable of learning a new language or skill. But then a subject came along and although you didn’t have much confidence things were working. It was almost like magic and you wondered how you were doing what you were doing and why was it working.

That led to a hill where you were brimming with confidence and proclaimed to yourself or your friends, “yeah I got this, I’m a Swift developer”. Of course, at that moment you started getting into perhaps more complex areas that you didn’t even know existed. Now you are questioning if you really have learned anything. That is about when you reach a point where you start to think that you don’t know anything at all and wonder if you ever did know anything.

Through perseverance or just the will to not quit you still with it. All of a sudden you get to a spot where you read or try something and have that epiphany, “what a minute, that made sense!” As you travel further down the path you step back and ask, “did I just do that?” And finally, you come to the realization, “Hey, I did it!”

You my friend have just climbed the learning curve. The funny thing is that once you reach that final pinnacle you find out that what you thought was the summit was just a lower peak and that the real summit is still in the distance. But rejoice, you made it to the top of this peak which is more than those who gave up ever accomplished.