#ChooseToChallenge
At the beginning of February, a mail was forwarded by the Women’s Leadership Community of my company regarding the International Women’s day that was coming up on March 8. This year as a part of it one of the campaign's themes was ChooseToChallenge. Ideally, ChooseToChallenge is more specific towards challenging gender biases and inequality, but it is also about seeking out and celebrating women’s achievements. So this particular campaign within my company encouraged us to take on a challenge and continue it for 30 days.
I “jumped” at this opportunity and took up the challenge. I had been struggling to be consistent and, learn K8s and so I decided to do the #30daysofK8s challenge.
Before I get into the details, there’s a backstory to why I “jumped” into this opportunity.
In the early corona period, when India was in a complete lock-down, a friend of mine took up a 100daysofsketch challenge, wherein he would post 1 sketch every day on Instagram. I saw the progress he made throughout those 100 days and I was amazed at his consistency. I thought I could never do that. But then in August 2020, I took up the 100daysofGo challenge, on an impulse, in the hope that I would learn and get better at Go. You see, I had an on-and-off relationship with Go for 2 years, where I would pick it for the weekend and then completely forget about it for months. I even started a meetup group in the hope that I’d get to meet Gophers and that would motivate me into learning Go and getting better at it. So, I took up the 100daysofGo challenge and made a public commitment to it by putting it up on Twitter. Every day I would spend 30–60min either coding in Go, or reading a blog related to it, or listen to a talk about it and would post a tweet about the things that I’d learn during the day. And it proved to be successful to me, and a few other people I know. One of my friends who was following my progress took up the 100daysofPython challenge, she completed the challenge and even ended up getting into a summer internship program. One other friend got certified in Go. And as for me, a few months later, I ended up getting a place in another team working on the things that I had longed to work with professionally for quite some time, Go being one of them.
So you see, why I “jumped” at the choose to challenge program. With this 30daysofK8s challenge, I decided that I would use Medium as a platform. Partly, because I thought I had annoyed people in my Twitter circle enough during those 100 days and partly because I would take the challenge more seriously if I had to write a blog post about it. Every day I would learn something about K8s and take notes by writing a blog post here on medium. Initially, I had decided I would spend 1 hour daily on it, but I found it a little difficult to do so, but instead of completely giving up on the challenge, I decided I would stick to it and spend at least a few minutes every day.
I had always heard how “consistency” was the key and how little efforts always mount up to bigger results, but it wasn’t until I had been through these challenges that I realized how true it was. I learned that spending a few minutes daily(if not more) was far more effective than occasionally spending hours on something.
The concept of consistency is not new to me and I have had numerous failed attempts at it before, either by taking challenges or setting a daily reminder or by pairing up with a buddy. There is one more thing, however, in both the challenges, that was different from my previous attempts at it. There was always public commitment involved. I had made a public commitment to the world and it acted as a key motivation to me. I did not want to look bad by not being consistent or quitting. I also had the likes, comments, and appreciation from my Twitter & medium circle acting as another good motivation for me.
Sometimes I wonder what sort of person it makes me if I require a public commitment to learning something that is for my own good. But it worked for me and it worked for a few others. It especially worked for me, because the things I wanted to get good at were not the things I was particularly passionate about, but I wanted to get good at them because they would help me get ahead in my career and they did. So I think even if it might annoy people in my social media circle, if the need is, I would be more than willing to publicly take on challenges like these again.
