personal insecurities lead to inter-personal worries.

i’m on a self-defined path to becoming a web developer. right now, i’m learning how to design and implement wordpress themes. but that’s beside the point. this isn’t going to be my professional blog.

the point of bringing this up is that when you learn anything new and fairly complex — in this case i’m learning about php and how to use it to access and manipulate data in a mysql database — there is a point at which your brain stalls out. you reach what you think is the limit of your capacity to understand whatever it is you’re attempting. at that point, it’s tempting to give up. it’s easy to give up. hell, i have to give up!

but 99.9% of the time, you just need to change your perspective, and then something clicks. that click is an amazing feeling. you are micro-seconds away from throwing in the towel, and –click– it all starts to make sense.

i’ve had the click happen so many times throughout my life: tying my shoes, learning to ride a bike, playing the guitar, figuring out that a breaking ball isn’t a pitch, it’s a type of pitch. everything comes into focus after the click.

my click today happened when i realized that when you write php code to call data from a mysql database, it comes into the page totally unstylized. i had been under the misconception that there were some inherent styling properties involved, but the reality is it’s all up to me to figure out how to present the data. but all that is neither here nor there.

what counts is i had a click!