Getting Comfortable with Discomfort

When I decided to learn how to code, I made a promise to myself that I'd do more things that made me uncomfortable. Still, it took weeks of me skipping the "Share your progress on Twitter" prompts at the end of the 100 Days of SwiftUI lessons before I actually made an account. It wasn't until I listened to a podcast episode about the benefits of learning in public that I realized I needed to take the plunge to maximize my chances of achieving my goals.

The thing I wish somebody would’ve helped me realize when I was younger is that I wasn’t going to magically wake up one morning and be comfortable with something new and scary. I was going to have to do it scared, over and over again until it wasn’t scary anymore. I was not a social media person at all. I took the advice of “one post or reply per day” and a lot of times that one post was the “I finished Day [whatever] of 100 Days of SwiftUI” tweet template at the end of the lesson. Slowly, I started to get encouragement from the iOS community and was made to feel welcomed. I shared my progress, my challenges, and soon began the journey of building my own app publicly.

That took time, and was not a comfortable experience at all! Without telling myself over and over again to do the thing even though the mere thought of the thing was excruciating, would I have gotten the opportunities I have today? Would I have been able to speak at an international conference? Would I have found the support I needed to finish my first side project, much less publish my first app? Met the genuine friends I’ve made? Press ‘X’ for doubt.

Even worse than creating an online presence, was the in-person networking. The entire concept of networking was anxiety-inducing and I made excuse after excuse about why I wasn’t going to do it. “Unauthentic,” “transactional,” “fake,” anything I could come up with to talk myself out of having to speak to strangers. I felt I had nothing to show, and nothing to talk about. I was only learning Swift for a few weeks before I went to my first in-person event.

There’s an important story to share about that very first event I went to. I saw there was a tech meetup and I decided to show up, uncomfortable as hell. The doors to the venue lock after a certain time, so I waited outside to be let in. Another gentleman around my age arrived outside and asked me if I was there for the event. I engaged in nervous, likely incomprehensible small talk, and we ended up sitting at the same table. He started telling me about these things called Hackathons, which I had only barely heard of. He was a student traveling across the country and competing in them to network, learn, and build with others.

In my new quest to do all the uncomfortable, scary things, I found out there was one happening the following weekend and sent a message to the organizer asking if it’s okay to join even though I know nothing. He was very kind and made me feel like I would be welcomed.

But wait, there’s more!

The Hackathon was being put on by a Google meetup group, and the theme was AI apps using Gemini and Flutter. I, an aspiring native iOS developer with all of 3 weeks coding experience, was joining a Google hackathon centering around Flutter? I have no idea what I was thinking except for “Scary thing? Do.”

I joined the team that had the most people on it (hack?) and desperately wanted to make any contribution. I told the team leader that I had no idea what I was doing, and it turned out that two other people on the team were also Swift developers who knew nothing about Flutter. Far more general experience than me but still, I wasn’t completely alone. He asked me to make a settings view, gave me some general direction, and I took the approach of writing the view in SwiftUI and trying to use the mid-2023 version of ChatGPT (I mean…. cough Gemini cough) to convert the code into Dart/Flutter.

That went… as well as you can probably imagine. It took hours of prompting to get something even remotely close to the SwiftUI view but I managed to figure it out! I turned in my little view and waited to see what I could help with next. They were setting up Python servers, connecting to the YouTube API, and doing all kinds of smart brilliant things that went so far over my head that I just froze and shut down. I couldn’t even begin to wrap my head around the tip of their plan. I mostly stayed out of the way and tried to feel proud of being able to contribute anything at all to the project.

When it came time to present the project, I got to talk about my small contribution and somehow... someway… we won?! First place?! I was a hackathon… winner?!

Again, I want to reiterate, that I had been learning how to code for 3 weeks. I made what felt at the time like an insane decision to join a Hackathon that had very little to do with the skillset I was practicing. I survived debilitating discomfort and anxiety about my ability to contribute to this team… and we won.

But wait, there’s more!

One of the judges told us they had ties with the summer internship program at one of the largest and most iconic companies in our area. I thought nothing of this because, again, I had three weeks of experience and knew nothing about anything. The company they were talking about wouldn’t want to hire me in my wildest dreams so this person definitely wasn’t talking to me. That message was addressed to the rest of the group, clearly.

We’ll fast forward four months of growth, discomfort, learning, building my first side project, our team getting invited to speak at a local conference about our hackathon experience, starting my very first internship (unpaid. do not recommend.), facing debilitating health issues, yada yada. I get a message on LinkedIn from a recruiter of said iconic, legendary company. She asked me to set up a screening call. Fast forward another month and four interviews, I got a call at the very end of 2023 that I would be receiving an offer.

My first paid professional experience.

All because I forced myself to do something uncomfortable.

In 2024, I got flewed out to Paris to speak at my first international conference.

All because I forced myself to do something uncomfortable.

I was able to ship 10 apps in a year.

All because I forced myself to do something uncomfortable.

When I decided to do all of these uncomfortable things, I had no way of knowing anything would come out of it. I can’t promise that if you go and do excruciatingly uncomfortable things, all of your wildest dreams will come true. What I have learned in these past two-ish years is that luck finds hard work. Luck finds audacity. Luck finds the people stepping out of their comfort zone in the pursuit of growth.

It may be time to get comfortable being uncomfortable.

Good luck to you.