Journey is the reward

Last weekend, I was trying to work on my pet project related to Observability. But the whole weekend was ruined just due to the setup issues.

Yea, My Vagrant box was throwing all types of strange errors, Kubernetes doing its part by throwing unique CrashLoopBackOff, etc… and I have to jump in Stack Overflow, GitHub Threads, Slack Channels, etc.. to get them fixed. By Sunday night, I was quite upset as the project was not even kickstarted.

The following week, I was telling my friend, the weekend was completely ruined and I was not able to learn anything productive as my setup took a lot of time. But My friend had a different view on this.

He said, the learning is not about the executable end product you intended to build but it’s all about the blockers you resolve while you are trying to build the project. So actually you had a very productive weekend debugging your Kubernetes environment.

Of course, He had a point.

Often we think, the end product we built, will make us a skilled resource. But the reality is, Not the target but the path you take, the obstacles you destroy, the forums you reach out to, the people with whom you discuss the issue to get the insights will make you the commendable person.

So don’t worry if you are taking one week to build the same project that was built by that YouTube guy in 1 hour!!

The verdict is, Success is not always about the results delivered but the efforts made to attain success :)