Serial Learner
Web Development
In the summer of 2018, I attempted to start my own web development business. I had hoped to grow the business during my Junior and Senior years of college so that I would be financially independent by graduation. Another main goal was to show myself that I can teach myself difficult and valuable skills from the resources I have access to and my own discipline. For the first four months, I outlined the skills of a web developer, as I saw them, and began learning as many as I could. These included learning various programming languages, determining my niche in web development, and creating a project workflow. I also began searching for clients as well as creating the logistics required with running a business.
During the fall of 2018, I had acquired three clients that would provide me with consistent work. However, I realized that I was not physically capable of attending UW and running the web development business because it was negatively impacting my ability to love life, which is extremely important to me. After reflecting on my experience, I learned that while I would love to be an entrepreneur, I currently do not possess the ability to run a business on my own. I also realized that I did not possess a clear definition of success for my business, which shows a lack of maturity on my part. Because of these realizations, I am now content to allow myself time to mature in both my thinking and discipline through following a more standard career path before attempting to run a business again.
Nextours
Scope of Competence
Through approaching a challenge as massive as learning web-development, I needed to break it down into many bitesize pieces before I was able to start acting. Otherwise, I would have been overwhelmed by indecision. I broke down running a web development business into several categories, which were: technical skills, soft skills, business organization, marketing/client acquisition, etc. A key unforeseen benefit of doing this is that I was able to filter out a majority of potential projects based on my current skill level. This eventually led to me declining a project for one of my clients once I discovered it was out of my skill set
Self-Development
Once I knew exactly what I needed to know and currently didn’t know, I began looking for a time-effective way to learn those skills. Through this process, I learned that while YouTube is quite helpful for specific issues, it is largely unhelpful for entire skills. After doing some research, I discovered an online platform called Udemy that became my go to resource for learning new programming languages because of its quality and affordability.
Vision
I learned about the importance of through competency from experiencing its absence. Towards the end of my time with web development, I discovered that I had absolutely no vision or motivation beyond achieving financial independence and even that was not a strong driver. Because of this, when I had to choose between allowing my school or web development work to be dropped, I chose to leave web development. I do not regret this decision, but I understand now better why it happened.
Personal Values
In November, I realized that working on my web development business was directly damaging to my mental and emotional health. Because I was overwhelmed by my stress and worry from the business and being able to generate enough income to live off of, I discovered a key value I have. Namely, I value enjoying my life, and I want to enjoy being with myself. If I am not in a place where this is the case, something must change. In this case, I ended up stepping away from web development because of this realization.
Responsibility for Personal Behavior
I have mentioned this several times already, but this is, in my estimation, the most important area of growth during this process. Since I positioned myself to fail or succeed only by my own effort or ability, my “failure” at my initial goal in web development to achieve financial independence cause me to seriously re-evaluate my estimation of myself. I realized I overestimated my discipline as well as several other key things.
Leadership Competencies
Websites I have made
These are a few of the websites I made during some online courses that I took while learning web development. They are all one page apps that allowed me to learn key web development ideas. I do not have the websites live right now as my web hosting ended a few months ago. So below are pictures from the sites.
