The only source of knowledge is experience ~ Albert Einstein
"A 30 years old engineer is needed with 20 years experience". Lol, I'm just making a reference to some of the crazy job adverts I have seen in my country with employers asking for ridiculous experiences. I guess the potential employee had to be in the engineering field from when they are 10 years old, they are probably looking to employ Einstein. But what exactly is this experience?
According to the Cambridge dictionary, experience is the process of getting knowledge or skill from doing, seeing, or feeling things. It's said that experience is the best teacher and that's totally true because whatever will learn from experience (whether good or bad) tend to stick longer in our memory and we get better at anything the more we do it, thus getting more experience.
A remarkable experience
I have actually never really taken experience seriously because I have always felt that I can get good at anything by reading much about it or watching other people do it and learning from their experiences but I was so wrong when I brought that mentality into programming. I started learning programming back in 2020 and I watched a lot of Udemy courses, YouTube videos and also read a lot of tutorials on different websites.
I remembered my first reaction back then was "wow, this thing is fun and easy". I was just reading and watching video tutorials and I felt that I understood everything I was seeing. Then I finally decided to build some simple projects to test how far I know and that was when I discovered a surprising truth: I knew nothing! All I knew (or thought I knew) were theories but when it was time for me to apply does theories, I discovered I couldn't.
I actually gave up after that but I got back to it in 2021 after reading some stories of successful programmers on a Nigerian forum (nairaland). When I came back to programming, I used another approach: watching tutorials and trying to replicate what I was learning. Yes, the key is to experience those things for myself instead of just watching someone else do them and I realized that I kept improving as I kept working on little projects alongside watching tutorials.
Since then, I never joke about experiences anymore. Even if I learn something that feels too easy, I will always try to do it myself just to see how well I know and sometimes I realize it wasn't as easy as I thought. Our brain has a way of making complex tasks look easy but when it comes to actually doing that task, we realize we don't even have the coordination to do so.
It's just like thinking about some cool dance moves in your head but when you try to do them for real, you start fumbling and realize it won't go as smoothly as you thought. That was how I thought driving a car is easy because of how I always see drivers making it look easy until I got behind a steering wheel and started sweating like a sinner in church without moving an inch 😆
A shocking experience
Sometimes, it's better to learn from someone's else experience and save yourself the stress of going through something painful. If you see someone getting killed by electricity after dipping their hands in a river, would you say; "why will a river suddenly electrocute someone? Let me dip my hands in too and find out if it's true"? Just the mere sight of seeing the person dead will be more than an answer for you.
Unfortunately for me, when I was a kid, I have never seen anyone getting shocked by electricity, so I had to experience it for myself. I was easily bored back then and played a lot around the house trying different things that tickled my curiosity. I was playing with a thin piece of iron on this very day and I don't know what made me push the iron into an electric socket.
The next thing I realized was a quick jolt of electricity passing through my body and I quickly released the iron. I was just standing there for some minutes still in shock while looking at the wall socket. That was my first electrical shock! And it wasn't funny (but now I can laugh about it 😆). From that day, I didn't need anybody to tell me about the dangers of putting iron into any electrical socket, I have already experienced why it's dangerous to do so.
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Edited with Canva