One Quality Every Programmer Needs

Patience.

It's impossible to succeed as a programmer if you are impatient.

Today I spent hours messing with a component to make it work how I needed it to and it made me think of this. In fact, every project is a battle of attrition between myself and the problems. If I was impatient, the table my laptop sits on would be flipped daily.

Now I'm not saying I don't lose my patience, that happens at least once a week. The patience doesn't come easily though, the hard part is getting used to failure. Failing at solving small problems over and over again.

When I was first starting out, I never understood how my brother Kevin just knew how to solve these problems. I never thought I'd get over the frustration of failing.

But now I know: get used to it. Fail till you don't feel frustrated anymore. Fail till you develop patience and learn to operate within frustration. Fail till there's only one way out. Fail till the only thing left to do is succeed. Fail till you don't.

Fail till you win.