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My buddy Dave bet me $20 I would give up learning Python within two weeks. He almost won.
Back in January I told my friend Dave I was going to learn Python, and he laughed and said I would bail by week two, easy money. To be fair, he had watched me quit guitar, that bread baking phase, and a half finished birdhouse sitting in my garage, so his confidence was not crazy. But I signed up for a free course on a site called freeCodeCamp and set a timer for 30 minutes every night after my kid went to bed. The first week was rough. I kept mixing up lists and dictionaries and honestly wanted to throw my laptop off the porch around day nine. What saved me was writing tiny dumb scripts like one that picks tonight's dinner from a list of five meals, which took me 4 tries to get right. Dave texted me on day 15 asking if I had quit yet, and I sent him a screenshot of the dinner script running. He Venmo'd me the $20 without a fight. Now I am messing around with a script that tracks my gas receipts. What is the dumbest little script that kept you going when you almost quit?
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hunt.rowan13d ago
Wait, did you actually finish the bread baking phase though? Because I gotta push back on one thing here. You said Dave had watched you quit guitar, bread baking, and the birdhouse, but then you make it sound like the Python thing was different from week one. To me the dinner script IS the whole point, not some side trick that saved you. That little script was dumb on purpose, that's why it worked. You weren't learning Python, you were solving a tiny real problem, and Python just happened to be the tool. Same reason the gas receipt thing is keeping you going now. So the lesson isn't "push through two rough weeks," it's that the small dumb project has to come first and the quitting problem kind of takes care of itself. Dave owes you way more than $20 for that realization honestly.
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