I'm professor Seth Frey. Now I want to discuss for a second the delicate subject of feeling worthy to code. This maybe sounds a little funny, but there's lots of feelings associated with programming. If you have no exposure to it, and never thought you'd have any exposure to it. There's a feeling of intimidation. I've experienced trouble is like literally sitting still sitting down long enough to get anything done. There's doubts about what it takes and uncertainty about that. There's questions about why to do it and if you're worthy to do it. I want to just tackle these one by one, and puts you on his confident foundation as possible. As we get through the term, I want to make this accessible and family, and good for you. Maybe you don't need a pep talk, maybe you do. If you do this for you. Let's start with the intimidation. Maybe you've thought that's not how I think or I'm bad at math, or I've got to be good at it. None of those things are true. How you think is how you practice thinking and I'm teaching you a new way of thinking. You're supposed to learn new things. This is one of them. I'm bad at math. There's math in code. But math was always ungrounded. There wasn't a point. It didn't do anything. When you can tap into the motivation, the thing you're doing, a thing you're building that has effects in the world when you can close the feedback loop on your little tweak here, and then something that occurred that you can watch. It's a completely different way of thinking and one that slight easier to get a handle on. Let's see, I have to be good at it. Well, we'll get to that. You don't have to be good at it. Just to give it to those personal, I had to teach myself to program, a lone. People who know taught themselves just had to figure it out, thrown in the band and figuring it out. I was put in that position myself. One big thing that undermine my confidence was this weird thing that would happen. I'd be sitting for like two minutes. I would just write a couple of little characters that gets super antsy and fidgety. I was getting paid too. I was paid to code with no experience. I literally was getting paid. I was taking a walk around the block every five minutes, 10 minutes. I felt like I was crazy. It was hard and what was hard about, it wasn't necessarily for me, the thinking, but literally just sitting still. It was like I got amped, and I didn't know what to do. It felt totally abnormal. I just had to get used to it. I learned essentially practice, made it possible for me to sit still long enough to get anything done, and be worth what I was getting paid. It can still be undermining or frustrating. You do have to want to learn these skills, and make them a part of who you are. There's some motivation that's necessary to be in place maybe, if you're having a lot of physical and psychic troubles getting into it, but you will not be the first to have gotten through it. It is possible it is doable for you. Let's talk about what it takes to get these skills. There is a steep learning curve. There is such a thing as aptitude. There's some people who take to it more easily than others, but there's no myth. You don't have to start young. You don't have to start, and you're like to with ballet. I didn't learn until my mid 20s. More important than aptitude or anything, it's just practice. Now there's a good metaphor here that gets us into why to do it. Being good is irrelevant. Let's take a comparison to something a lot less loaded. You don't want to have to be good at driving a car. To drive a car, to be recognized as a car driver legally, to get hired to drive a car, to have a car do really useful things in your life. There's no shame of being bad driving a car. If you're bad at driving and someone says you're bad, you're like, I'm bad, buckle up. It's the same with the code. There are some people who are amazing at it. There's some people who can get by and do stuff and it's okay. There's no shame in being that person. If you like, if you're getting things out of it, then great. Don't let code be more romantic or mysterious, or terrifying, or mystifying than driving. I don't know how my car works, but I can drive it. I can get from one place to another even though I'm awful. One of the biggest obstacles for a lot of people is just feeling like they could do it. You don't have to feel intimidated. You're not alone. No matter what you're going through, whether it's physical or you don't think you're smart enough or whatever. What it takes more than anything else is practice and there's plenty of reason to do it for yourself. You don't have to do it for anyone else. You can get a lot out of it personally. Hopefully that puts you on a good foundation to start if you had any concerns that you weren't up for this, I think you are, and it's super important to me to make you feel that way too.
