Perseverance — Year Two

Sofia learned to code when she was nineteen.

Not because she wanted to be a programmer specifically, but because she’d looked at what she was good at and what the world needed, and it seemed like a reasonable place to start. She bought a $14 course online and started.

The first month was fine. She learned the basics — variables, loops, functions. It clicked. She felt smart. She thought: this is actually going okay.

The second month, she hit functions and began to understand how little she actually knew. She felt stupid for having felt smart. She quit for three weeks.

Then she came back. She wasn’t sure why. Probably because she’d already told people she was learning to code and didn’t want to explain why she’d stopped.

The third month she asked for help and found some online communities. The help was useful and sometimes condescending and occasionally cruel. She kept using it anyway.

By the end of year one, she could build simple web apps. Not impressive ones. Functional ones. She applied for three internships. She didn’t get any of them.

She applied for five more. She got one — unpaid, three months, at a company she’d never heard of, doing work that was mostly fixing other people’s bugs.

She did the internship. She fixed the bugs. She asked questions that were probably too basic and didn’t care. She built a small internal tool that no one had asked for and presented it at the end of her term. Her manager said: “This is really nice. Did anyone ask you to do this?” She said no. He said: “Good.”

Year two was better. Not because she was suddenly good — she still wasn’t — but because she had enough experience to know where her edges were, which is different from just feeling lost. She got better faster because she was less embarrassed about being bad.

At twenty-two she got a job. A real one, paid, at a company she respected. She was the least experienced person on her team by a significant margin. She knew it. They knew it.

Her first six months were hard in a new way — not the frustration of not understanding, but the pressure of being watched not understanding. She made mistakes in public. She had to ask for help from people who were clearly a little tired of helping.

She persevered. Not heroically — just stubbornly. She showed up. She fixed the things she broke. She got better. Not quickly, but steadily.

By year three she was good. Not exceptional, but good. Competent. Trusted. The junior people on the team came to her with questions.

What perseverance actually is:

Perseverance is not the inspiring kind of stubbornness people post quotes about. It’s the boring, unglamorous kind — the kind that looks like just not quitting.

It doesn’t feel noble while you’re doing it. It mostly feels like:

• Being worse at something than you thought you’d be by now
• Continuing anyway
• Repeating that indefinitely

The thing about perseverance is that it requires accepting that you’ll be bad before you’re good, and that being bad takes longer than you want it to. There’s no shortcut. There’s no trick where you get good at something without going through a period of being bad at it.

The people who get good at things are almost never the ones who had early natural talent. They’re usually the ones who kept showing up after the natural talent people got bored and left.

Perseverance looks like year two. It looks like coming back after three weeks off. It looks like fixing bugs no one asked you to fix, and presenting the result anyway.

It’s not dramatic. It just keeps going.