For many years now, it has been my belief that creative people that found their craft, would not need discipline to practice it, that motivation would come easily. This belief forced me into thinking that if I am not having fun practicing a creative activity, it must not be something that I was meant to do.
This was until recently when I starting working on a personal programming project, that I felt that I was having fun doing it, and that it was easy to find motivation to get started, a feeling that I rarely have normally. So I understood that it may actually be my passion, or one of them at least. But the most important realization came just after, when I remembered how it started.
Many years ago, I went to college to learn computer programming, without much more thought other than knowing that I liked computers in general. I had no prior programming experience before entering the computer science program. And I wasn’t that good at it, thanks to a good friend I managed to get through some difficult courses but it was hard and painful, I did not understand what I was doing and I wasn’t having much fun either. But I persevered through it and managed to get my degree. I worked full-time in the field for a few years. I stopped working in that field after that for many reasons, although none of them are related to my love for computer programming, so I will not elaborate on it here.
So the point of this is that I found a discipline that I love doing (computer programming), but to my surprise, it didn’t happen like in a fairy tail, where I would have known right from the beginning that it was something that I would love doing for many years to come. Learning it didn’t feel natural and it wasn’t easy at all. Many times I wondered if I made the right choice or if I should quit and try something else.
But I’m glad that I stuck with it until the end, because now that it has become a part of me, it is as easy as riding a bike (not that programming is always easy though). We could say that it was a happy coincidence that I found something that I loved even if it took years to develop, or we could say that I already knew it subconsciously. Even though I knew nothing about programming, I had interest in computers long before studying about them. So it wasn’t a random choice, it was based on the things that I already liked. But something that I realized many years later is that I had indeed done some programming before going to college. I learned some HTML and Visual Basic in high school, and I even made a few modifications to a Nintendo 64 game with a GameShark (a device that allows to hack into a game’s code). Although I didn’t link all those experiences together when I chose to study computer science, it surely influenced my choice in some way or another.
What it means for you, the reader (and me for my other interests), is that we already know what we like and what catches our attention/interest. So we know where to look to find the activities that we care about, but we may be fooled by the idea that our passion(s) will flow naturally and easily even at the beginner stage, which is unlikely. The learning process takes time and will probably not be as fun as we want it to be, but surely somewhere down the line, we will come to a point where it will actually flow relatively easily and finally be fun.