The Internet is an interesting and magical place. It’s a place where all sorts of information is exchanged by folks from all over the world. And around certain topics, folks will share their opinions on how something should be done.
I, most likely like you, am a consumer of a lot of information. And the information that I consume are based around my interests and who I am.
I’m a husband, a dad, a developer, a designer, a teacher, a maker, am interested in doing micro-to-small businesses, in my mid-thirties and an introvert.
While I’m curious about what others have to say around similar interests, I’m beginning to look internally as to who I am and realizing I’d rather do things my way.
Take for example when I was a kid, I hated playing any sort of group sports. But the norm was for boys to play things like basketball or baseball. I took part in all of those but I really didn’t enjoy it. I couldn’t quite understand all the rules and just didn’t find joy in taking part in them.
But when it came to things like roller blading or swimming, I enjoyed those things very much and taught myself how to do both of those things by myself because it just felt right to me. While I’m sure my swimming form wasn’t correct and I probably could’ve learned to be better at roller blading, picking them up just clicked in my mind and for my body.
The Internet is a catalyst for folks to find each other and form communities around trends. And I really do think this is awesome, but thinking about how I grew up, I’m beginning to take comfort in going against the popular crowd.
Take for example as a developer, in many online circles folks rave on and on about using VS Code as their main text editor. Feeling like I was missing out on something cause everyone and their mom was using VS Code to code, I’ve numerous times over the past few years have given VS Code a shot.
Sometimes it was for several days, others it was a few hours. But I feel like I’ve given an effort to fall in love with VS Code and I can confidently say, I still haven’t and at this point probably never will. For me, right now, I love Atom. I have for several years now and it is the editor that keeps me the most productive – it’s the editor I’ve used for my last four jobs, freelancing projects and built TinyWins, Spell It Out and all my other projects.
There’s nothing wrong with team sports or VS Code, it’s just not for me and I’m ok with that. These things may click and be easy to pick up for others, but for me it doesn’t, and it’s less stressful being who I am and what works for me versus trying to be someone else and what doesn’t work for me.
For a long time now, I’ve had annoying thoughts in the back of my mind that I might be missing out on something if I didn’t follow what others are doing. But by having these annoying thoughts and forcing myself to try to understand or be something that doesn’t easily come to me is actually causing me to miss out from focusing on my strengths, what does come easily to me and what’s fun.
So, I’ll do me and that’s cool.
