University doesn’t teach you to be successful in life. Success can be understood in different ways; let’s put the following into it: a good job, well-being, a social role in life, the ability to set high goals and achieve them (the kind of people for whom nothing is too hard). At university they teach programming languages, engineering methods, social disciplines. After five years of study, the person is already a graduate, not a student, and has a large store of knowledge, but what do you do with all of it next? How do you apply it? Alas, university does not give answers to these questions.
Give a person in need a fish, and he’ll be fed for one day. Teach a person in need to fish, and he’ll be fed for life. And what happens if the person in need was simply given a fishing rod, but not taught to fish? That’s what happens at university: they gave out a set of rods, but didn’t teach anyone to fish.
I often talk with students. Besides answers to purely technical questions, like “how to solve this or that problem in Objective-C,” we also have to discuss the question: “So where should I even be heading?”.
Here I’ll single out four levels:
- Ideal motivation.
- Goal.
- Plan.
- Way of life.
About ideal motivation. Ideal motivation is the kind of motivation that is necessary, but not sufficient, for achieving any goal, however high. Maybe someone dreamed as a child of becoming a programmer, or someone is inspired by the stories of other successful people, dreams of creating their own social network, their own operating system, a new fantastic computer game, someone dreams of building their own team of like-minded people (in any field; let’s not shut ourselves inside IT), someone wants to earn a lot of money in order to help people in need (look into what Bill Gates is doing in retirement), and so on. Maybe the dream is even so distant that you won’t get to it in a year, or in two. Maybe that’s even better. The main thing is for that dream to exist. I believe that always, if you listen to yourself, you can find this ideal motivation. In difficult cases, true, you’ll have to isolate yourself from the outside world (the internet, TV), so the information noise doesn’t keep you from hearing that inner voice.
If there is no ideal motivation, then there is no goal. Ideal motivation is necessary for achieving a goal. And if there is no motivation, then the goal always remains unreachable or unjustified. Without ideal motivation, there is nowhere to draw the energy for achieving the goal from.
A goal can be set like this: “Become the technical director of a software development company” or “Become a software engineer.” This may not be the goal of your whole life, but it can be a goal for the next 5 years of your life, and it still has to be sufficiently high relative to your current position.
If there is no goal, then there is no plan. If we don’t know what we want to achieve, that means our plan has no corresponding actions. Remember Alice in Wonderland:
— Which road should I take?
— And where do you want to get to?
— I don’t care.
— Then it doesn’t matter which road you choose.
How do you make a plan? The plan comes from the goal. For example, if a student has set himself the goal of becoming a software engineer, then in the labor market there are certain requirements (standards) placed on programmers. Yes, they may differ across organizations, but they are quite freely available in job descriptions, in conversations with employees of organizations, for example at career-guidance events or open houses. The plan will consist of studying the required disciplines and acquiring practical skills. That’s when it will turn out that all those unclear and difficult disciplines at university (discrete mathematics, data structures and algorithms, software engineering) are exactly what is required of a graduate. It’s better to understand this in the third year. But some understand it a year after graduation and come back to finish learning with a diametrically opposite view of these subjects.
One of the traps of choosing an IT career is its apparent ease. Some students prefer “seeming smart” to being smart. In my practice this happens: a student explains how everything is obvious and easy to him, while others sit quietly and do the work. In the end, the other guys have a practical result, while the student for whom everything is easy has no result — not after a week, not after a month, not after a year. The ease and accessibility of IT technologies does not mean that everything will be easy and that little work is needed. It means that every person, having mastered IT, can do a lot, make a big impact on our society.
And you’ll ask me: “Vladimir Igorevich, so what is the solution to this problem?”.
The solution is searching for and forming ideal motivation. Most likely, no one else can help here except the person who is looking for it. Hold an “internet Shabbat”: live a day without a phone, computer, internet, TV. Listen to your inner voice. What is it telling you? I want to become a programmer? Or I want to play a round of Dota?
Make IT a way of life. Start constantly doing something. In the first half of the day, that’s classes at university. Don’t mock the instructor and his subject. Don’t complain and don’t whine about the difficulty. Believe me, in the profession you’ll have to solve problems an order of magnitude and two orders of magnitude more difficult. In the second half of the day, homework and work on your personal or collective project. Join various clubs, look for like-minded people. Take up counter-regression.
See also “Devalued Values”.