Enjoy Learning
I’m learning, teaching myself something new every day.
I think this was always the case, but it certainly (and understandably) intensified since I switched careers. Every day, I go to bed knowing more than I did when I woke up. I like it, too; I think it’s one of the big treats of the software development trade.
All my life, I enjoyed acquiring new knowledge for the power it gave me. With it, I could do things more efficiently and also could do things I couldn’t do before. But precisely because of that, sometimes learning a new thing made me feel desperate: oh, how much time and effort would have been saved had I only known this before! It’s like spending two days disassembling and reassembling your engine to finally discover that the reason it refused to start was the empty fuel tank. All the precious time that could be spent fulfillingly, all the projects that would be possible, all the mistakes that could have been avoided; such a waste! I used to get really upset about it.