On the last day of January this year I set out to learn to code. This is not the first time I’ve been down this path. But… the stars aligned and I got a very helpful email from a friend who set me on my way.

The email? It mentioned 2 important things:

• nothing beats hard work
• try out leetcode

Hard work. Really? Wait. I always thought of coding and software as producing “smart solutions”. Whereas, I chalked up myself and my approaches as hardway, slow, inferior. I don’t know why (lack of brain cells), but I never sat down and gave learning to code an honest days hard work. It’s funny how a quick mention can have a huge impact.

And leetcode. Really? I thought that’s where elite engineers went to show off how they could implement the Fibonacci in 1 line of code or less. I gave it a try. The fist problem caught my attention. With low expectations I dove in and in just 15 minutes I had a solution… in words. 2 hours of coding later and I could see clearly that it was a long road ahead.

Still, I was bolstered by the experience of taking on a tough problem and working through it. It was fun. It reminded me of philosophy calsses in college. One of my English professors used to say, “Reading literature is like doing pushups. Your strengthening your muscles for other jobs, not just to do more pushups.”