Fear and Curiosity

I created this blog to talk a little bit about my career progression, keep a record of the technologies I'm learning, and reinforce everything by writing summaries on each learned subject. It so happened that the more time I spent thinking about what I was going to learn and write about, the more pointless this endeavor seemed.

Early in my career, my decisions about which technologies I should learn were driven by fear. During my career transition, I needed to pay my bills and put food on the table, and I was afraid of not being able to fulfill my mission. I didn't have a margin of error to try different technologies to know whether I liked them or not. I only had one chance and I had to make it work.

I think my pragmatic view of things had its origins in my previous profession, where the supply of good job openings was small and decreasing every year. So I needed to study more than my peers, perform better and learn faster, which put me on 24/7 alert. For many years I had no free time to have hobbies and no possibility of having one soon.

But let's get back to the blog. I was finding interesting the idea of documenting my learning, to be able to visualize my career progression more clearly. Seeing the path I followed and planning the path I want to pursue seemed good because leaving a career to chance is a problem. But then my daughter was born and I started to think about my motivations for learning design patterns, frameworks, and so on.

Thank God, today I don't have to worry about whether I'll be able to pay the bills or if I'll have food at home. I have the time and incentive to test new technologies at work and I don't have to compete with anyone because we make more money when we work together. I even have time to walk on the beach every day if I want to. But despite all that, I still worry and I still don't want to go for a walk on the beach.

I recently read an article talking about the positive effects of making decisions regarding work and learning, based on curiosity and pleasure rather than external pressures and fear. I was amazed that it was so obvious and so difficult for me at the same time. However, I think I just need to think and understand that contexts change, life changes, and that new problems are sometimes not solved using old methods. I haven't found the solution yet, but I think at least I found the right question that needed to be asked.