Build Your Passion

For the longest time, I thought that people discovered their passion by happenstance or by trying new things. I’ve since discovered that developing a passion for something is a long road that takes consistent effort — at least this was the story for me with programming.

I was terrible at coding when I first started learning, but for some reason I stuck with it; I strangely enjoyed the challenge of it. Ironically, I enjoyed it because it was hard for me. It bothered me that I could sink so much time into trying to understand concepts and topics related to computer science, but still couldn’t grok them.

I repeatedly told myself that these things should be simple to learn since, after all, it’s all just to give instructions to computers. If I had given up when I initially began struggling with computer science during my fall semester of my freshman year of college, I would have never discovered the love I have for software engineering and computers today.

I have this passion today precisely because I struggled. Without experiencing this difficulty in learning and continuing despite the fact that I wasn’t good at coding, I’m not sure where I’d be today. In a lot of ways, I can chalk up my entire career path to being stubborn and not giving up when things became difficult.

Now, coding is a labor of love. I thoroughly enjoy the challenge of crafting simple and elegant solutions to complex problems. I no longer see roadblocks as frustrations, but as exciting learning opportunities.

Passion is developed through hard work, time, persistence, and most importantly difficulty. It took me years to develop my passion, but I couldn’t be happier that I did. It’s given me a career, financial stability, lifelong friends, and much more. The thousands of hours of painstakingly working to develop and discover my passion for software engineering and computers has been well worth it.

I believe that passion is built, not randomly stumbled upon. Work hard at things you find interesting and difficult for long enough, and you’ll build your own passions, too.

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