Grit and Work

-Do something to earn before you do something you're passionate about- I've heard that a lot, and I feel it. I also know it's wrong.  I know that talent * effort = skill I know that skill * effort = achievement. So what matters most is our effort, but effort doesn't exist in a vacuum. Yes we can apply grit to maintaining effort in a void. Yes people have managed to leverage effort against insurmountable odds. But effort is fueled by passion. 10,000 hours of grueling effort is impressive, but 10,000 hours of passionate work easily becomes 10,000 more.  I'm not passionate about this. I enjoy it. I like the people I work with. I like security. I don't generally like technology.  I am passionate about cooking, about information security, about writing, about children, about family. I always come back to technology at some point... I started with a good amount of talent on it, I remember fixing printers as one of my highlights. Unlike others in my field I didn't start with wanting to tear things apart and figure out how it worked... I just wanted things to work, and work well, for people using them. I didn't really care how it worked, I cared how people worked with it.  That's still how I am today, trying to make technology and information security easy for people. I've also just started to develop an interest and a bit of joy in it. For instance I think I like coding. I make powershell solutions, bash solutions, etc... but they're just little scriptlets to make something work more easily. So today (rather yesterday but who's counting?) I started learning web development again. But this time with purpose. With effort. I'm 3 hours in, and I now have an intermediate knowledge of HTML. Next is CSS. Later into Bootstrap, Javascript, and a few other things. Short and sweet, I like it. So, I'll make websites. Maybe I'll dig deep into it and start making websites on the side through those fancy quick contract sites like Fiverr.  Maybe not.

But hey, I'm now "Intermediate" at my HTML skills.