Easy or not, time will pass either way

A year from today, I'm going to regret not starting to learn coding. Just start. Today.

Stop worrying about how long it will take and get started. Time will pass either way. — James Clear, author of the book Atomic Habits

That’s a mic drop of a quote there. To everything that I hesitated doing because it was too difficult, took too much time, got me weird stares.

Because a year from today, I’m going to regret not starting in anything that I wanted to do. And it really hit home for me, because there’s no challenge like coding that I wrangled with more and not made the progress I wanted. Why? All because it feels tooo hard. Or takes too long to learn. Or because I had wrong expectations of it. I started learning to code in August 2019. I wanted to build a SaaS. It was a determined effort to learn. I learned some basics, then Rails. And then I stopped. One year after that, there's still no SaaS in sight.

Comparatively, I read stories like @Dannypostmaa’s journey from not knowing how to code eight months ago, to launching his third and most successful SaaS project Headlime recently. His second SaaS called Landingfolio, was a drag and drop website builder. Something I too wanted to make, but nothing to show for. Whereas Danny here did it not just once but thrice at two thirds the time I took. Reading stories like that is a cognitively dissonant experience. On one hand, it’s so inspiring to witness how others had done it. If they can, so can you. But on the other hand, it’s also demoralising, to see everyone seems to be progressing but you’re stuck.

Now the words of James Clear is stuck in my head. Easy or not, time will pass either way. If I had just started anyway, I would have had much more progress now than whining about how how hard it was to learn coding.

It’s not like I’d not done harder things. This too—this perceived challenge—shall pass.

Time will pass either way.

Better to get caught on the right side of time passing, realising how time flew by when you were coding, than my current predicament of having nothing to show for, to myself.

Follow my daily writings on Lifelog, where I write about learning to code, goals, productivity, indie hacking and tech for good.