I believe that discovering what you’re naturally good at and finding ways to do more of it is the key to success and fulfillment. This is the premise behind an excellent book called Strengths Finder 2.0, a few years old now but still an inspiring read. At the same time, it’s sometimes worthwhile to push yourself to do those things that don’t come easily. If you’ve been reading my blog for any amount of time you will probably have surmised that I am a much better writer than I am a web developer. Having to design and manage a website is a necessary evil I’m willing to deal with in the name of getting my message out. Trying to make my site actually look good takes more design mojo than I’ve ever previously tried to muster. I’ve learned to make use of help forums, YouTube video tutorials, and the occasional support call to my web hosting company. Let me tell you, what these people call “help” sometimes feels like a cruel joke.

That said, developing a website has also been a surprisingly rewarding process. When I do buckle down and try to get a page or a post exactly right, I often get completely sucked in. Hours pass. I forget to eat. I enter a state of flow, which happens only when you’re doing something that is just difficult enough to require all of your attention,  without being so far above your ability level that you give up.

Though I’m not naturally gifted in web development, I am improving. My confidence grows each time I’m able to solve (or work around) some intractable problem. Like trying to make a small image fill a slider. Or trying to match the color of my logo exactly to the color of my hyperlinks. (I think I got it pretty close!) I also believe there are probably some spiritual benefits to the practice of slowly getting better at something that doesn’t come easily. It teaches you patience, humility, resilience. Small triumphs feel monumental. 

So why am I telling you this? Two reasons: 

One, I revamped my Curriculum page today, and I’m so proud of it. Before, it was a static jpeg image taken from an excel spreadsheet. Now, it has links to all the courses I’ve taken, all the blog posts I’ve written about my specific courses, columns of different sizes, and even an image slider. I think it does a much better job of cataloguing my coursework, and I expect it will be a much more useful tool to anyone who visits my site and is interested in following my example. I encourage you to take a look.

Two, isn’t this analagous to the opportunity MOOCs present?  The great thing about free courses is that they come with minimal risk. If you sign up for one and discover it’s too challenging, you haven’t lost anything. Which makes a MOOC the perfect forum to practice the discipline of being a beginner in a field that is unfamiliar. You might even discover an aptitude you didn’t know you had.