Mastery

Hi, All!

How are you?  🤩

I was on a coding cloud, infatuated with my new career as a web developer. For weeks, I would wake up at 06:00, sneak out of bed, and start coding until my eyes turned square, twelve hours later.

After finishing my first freelance project a couple of weeks ago, the fatigue kicked in, and so did the blues. I felt slightly sad in the way that one may feel the day after completing a race.

Thus, I’ve been taking it easy this week. Trying to be patient and allowing myself to return to my emotional baseline.

From here on, there’ll be no more sprinting toward mastery. I’ve realized now, learning to code is marathon material.

Words

To balance all this code talk, I’ve some news from my alter ego, the blogger. There’s a new post up on mirhamasala.com

As promised, it’s about The 10-Step Korean Skin Care Routine. Here’s how it starts:

With a solid layer of dirt on my face and between my toes, I walked into my hostel dorm. When straight away, in the far right corner, I saw a big yellow tube on the sink. From up close it read ‘cleansing volcano something.’ I took the cleansing part as a sign, and then, I took a dollop.

In this post, you’ll also find all the skincare products that I use and some advice on how to get your routine going.

Meet Me

I’ve got a few trips coming up to Tel Aviv, Amsterdam, Madrid, and Sarajevo. If you happen to live in any of these places, please do let me know. I would love to meet you for a coffee.

Cheeky Fact

June 11 marks seven years since Mr. G and I sealed our friendship with a big, fat french kiss.

Advice I’m Pondering

Nobody tells people who are beginners — and I really wish somebody had told this to me — is that all of us who do creative work … we get into it because we have good taste. But it’s like there’s a gap, that for the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good, okay? It’s not that great. It’s really not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not quite that good. But your taste — the thing that got you into the game — your taste is still killer, and your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you, you know what I mean?

A lot of people never get past that phase. A lot of people at that point, they quit. And the thing I would just like say to you with all my heart is that most everybody I know who does interesting creative work, they went through a phase of years where they had really good taste and they could tell what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be — they knew it fell short, it didn’t have the special thing that we wanted it to have.

And the thing I would say to you is everybody goes through that. And for you to go through it, if you’re going through it right now, if you’re just getting out of that phase — you gotta know it’s totally normal.

And the most important possible thing you can do is do a lot of work — do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week, or every month, you know you’re going to finish one story. Because it’s only by actually going through a volume of work that you are actually going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions. It takes a while, it’s gonna take you a while — it’s normal to take a while. And you just have to fight your way through that, okay?

–Ira Glass, Art of Story Telling (transcript)

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That’s it for June, All!

With much love,
Mirha
🎈