Here is a question about your skill building.

Do YOU practice your dev-task like you bake a chocolate muffin?

For Queen Raae's birthday we baked chocolate muffins, the Pirate Princess and I. You can learn from muffin baking, you can learn how NOT to build a dev-skill. How?

Let's bake a chocolate muffin and see what we learn about skill-building

Close your eyes and pretend to start up your chocolate muffin task. Gather up eggs, sugar and butter according to the reciepe. Observe your feelings. Do you feel IT as you start mixing sugar and eggs?

"BzzzZZRR!"

"Feel WHAT?" You ask.

Pain. Pain my friend, do you feel IT? No? Why?

Because you're doing skill-building wrong.

skill-building needs pain

Pain is how you know you're doing skill-building right. If your practice feels "ok" it's NOT skill-building. Your brain needs pain to get the three messages:

1. Brain! You don't know HOW to do this, yet.

2. And that's a shame because this is kinda IMPORTANT to know how to do.

3. Brain, buckle the H*LL up and FOCUS or else...

Make your dev-task Challenging and tiny

So when you prep your next dev-task, make it challenging enough for YOU to cause you pain. Challenging, but still a tiny enough dev-task for YOU to automate it in ONE sitting.

Sounds easy? No, of course not. If personalized prepping of a dev-task for skill-building wasn't hard, more devs would do it. Prep your dev-tasks right and now you have a competitive advantage. THE competitive advantage of every skill-building craftswoman throughout history. Do it. Get help to prep maybe, but do it. If you care about your professional future.