In my collection of blog ideas, I have an article titled, “Why Your 20 Year Old Self says to STFU.” Hindsight let’s us be so critical of ourselves in our young and stupid phase. I still have traces of how scared and mixed up I was then. That version of me does deserve a break.
The strange thing is that what reminded me to leave my poor younger self alone was another meme.
Would my younger self be proud of the me I have become? I think so. I’ve done some cool stuff that I hope would impress her. I also think she would like what I do for a living.
I am the administrator for a Customer Relationship Management database. Many eyes just went glassy. Let me try that again. I make sure that the computer program that holds our customer information allows us to access that info and pull the reports that we need to thrive as a company.
“Why on earth would a young girl care about that?!?!?” anyone still paying attention is probably thinking. When I was 12, my family got a Commodore 64.
I loved that computer. One summer I taught myself how to build a DOS-based program on it. I changed font and background color. I even had a quiz. It gave a second change when a wrong answer was entered, and it totaled the score at the end.
I remember how much fun it was to make and how proud I was of my accomplishment. As I continued with that program, however, I hit a snag I couldn’t get past. It wasn’t like I could Google the problem, and at that point there weren’t programming books at my local library. I simply stopped.
In my job now, whenever I build a new formula field and it works, I have that same level of joy I did when programming my Commodore 64. At least now when things go horribly wrong, I have a user community that will answer questions with remarkable speed. Then I get that satisfied feeling that I can now do something that was impossible not too long ago.
What would your young self think of who you are today? or What was your first computer?
Grown Up, Now What? 