Wednesday, February 8, 2012

If at first you don't succeed... Eat your words.

I wonder sometimes if adult learning is so hard, simply because we're used to feeling self-assured in whatever it is that we do on a regular basis.

I've been dealing with this issue for the better part of the last day or three. I'm trying to put together a website that I'm happy with, but I've been having to learn a lot from scratch. And I have to say, for all of my talk about Ruskin, and learning new things, and making honest mistakes, I've really been eating my words.

My mistake was an obvious one: I bit off more than I can chew. And the only two options when you bite off that much are to spit it out, or work your way through it, and try not to choke.

I had an idea in mind of what I wanted to make and there's a that I've had to figure out. Individually, I was able to make the parts work. But assembling them all into a cohesive whole has been a little more challenging. This is why I usually tell everyone to start small, and work their way up to more involved projects. As a 'grown-up,' I'm so used to being able to tackle larger, more involved projects, that I forget sometimes what it's like to start from scratch. I'm used to acting like a grown-up.

I need to challenge myself like this more often.

2 comments:

robert said...

Are you writing your site from scratch, or using something like golive? If you are doing it from scratch, I might could help you out. I'm not a professional by any stretch; I got bored and taught myself to code about 5 years ago by reading books and trying things.

JW said...

Using a mix of Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and Photoshop Elements. But I'm learning all 3 from scratch.

I learned a little bit about web design and html during a semester of web programming in college... but that was 9 years ago.