The permission trap

As I've written here before, I've spent 30+ years writing professionally for a living - as a full time job. Working for the man.

That has naturally resulted in me being fed challenges and work to do, every day, for the majority of my working life.

As much as I would preach the pithy words "Don't ask for permission, ask for forgiveness", and I did follow that path occasionally as a natural part of my determination to just get shit done, the usual part of my day was to be given something to do, and do it. The next thing? On a list, determined by an external source.

I do it now, to be honest - let's face it, there are very few jobs where you have complete and total autonomy to do whatever the hell you think is relevant, without boundaries of any type. That's not really a job - you're either a consultant in everything, or you own a company and do what you want.

Anyway - the point here is that my experience of learning to code has been stops and starts - because rather than simply implementing something, there is always this internal thought that I need to be guided by someone else who knows what they are doing, because I don't know.

That default position to seek 'permission' or 'guidance' is horrible, because it slows me down at every step. I'm always pausing at every point when I'm doing something new.

And yes, I know what the answer is - just keep on going. I'm only a week or so into doing this 'properly' - in that I'm actually trying to build an app that will be used by others, so I have plenty to get on with, and plenty of things I'm going to get wrong in the future.