It’s a quote that has been attributed to several athletes recently and seems to originate from a high school basketball coach named Tim Notke in the early 1980s. Considering I first heard it while volunteering as a high school basketball coach, I’m going to go with Tim as the source.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this quote and several other motivational tidbits over the past year as I transition my careers and my programming skill set continues to expand. When I began to learn the basics of web development I knew nothing. Everything was foreign and hard to me. It wasn’t something that I had done as a hobby as a high schooler, a hobby that many developers seemed to share. I had no talent but I did have the desire to work hard.

1. Bet on yourself (shoutout to Shea Serrano)
2. Get incrementally better every day

Nobody likes to lose or struggle and early on I struggled a lot. Maybe it was a point in a tutorial where I would get stuck and not be able to match what the instructor was doing or it could have been a lesson where everything seemed as foreign as Mandarin and I found myself repeatedly just clicking “show answer”, but I consistently found areas that would bog me down. The easy solution was to stop and walk away. I didn’t have the educational background or the knowledge gained from developing as a hobby and I sure as hell wasn’t going to produce that knowledge out of thin air overnight. Again, I didn’t have the talent and I felt so far away from those who did.

All of this caused a great deal of self doubt. How was I going to catch up and prove myself in order to make this thing a reality? That quote just kept coming back in my mind. As a sports enthusiast I thought of all the instances where an individual had reached the limits of their natural talents and had to learn to work hard in order to push their limits to new heights and achieve their goals. That was going to be my approach. When it came to web development and programming at large, I wasn’t the tallest, fastest or pre naturally talented but I could be the hardest working “gym rat” in an effort to level the playing field a bit. That has been my approach, combined with two other mantras:

I had no talent but I did have the desire to work hard.

With a year of development now upon me, I have taken a moment to look back and I like what I see. Problems that caused me to walk away in frustration are now solved within minutes. The answers that I do not know are much easier to find as my related knowledge allows me to conduct more accurate searches. I’m not going to be pulling any 360 tomahawk dunks out of my bag but I also don’t worry about the coach benching me or getting cut from the team. These proven results and improvements add to the motivation to continue learning. They make me wonder how far I can go and what else I can learn or achieve. I no longer worry about if I can do it, instead I get excited at the chance to apply my knowledge and inevitably learn something new along the way.