Recently, I’m finding out that a beginner learns fast in programming,but for a junior programmer, it’s actually hard to go step further. Sometimes, when facing a problem that is so hard for me, I became so anxious to know the answer, thus my would keep stressed mentally and physically for hours. If I found out the answer, I got relaxed, and thought these suffering worth, but if I can’t find out the answer, I would lose confidence, and sometimes doubting if I’m really suitable to become a great programmer.

I know I’m too stressed with things that I can’t give an answer, and a career in programming must go through much more progress which is frustrating when no solution can be found. But for me, it’s like a nature reaction to get stressed when facing things I can’t handle, I felt that tension is building up in my body, but simply can’t release it, because the more I want to get relaxed, the more stressful it became. This is the thing that really destroying my health and inner passion, I really want to figure out a way to make a change.

I think this is a very common problem in many fields. Recently, I’m working on Chopin’s Etude in E Major (Tristesse), it’s a beautiful piece. I enjoy the A part (it’s a form in A-B-A) the most, it’s slow, melodic, elegant. But I struggled much with the B part, which is the full of passages of tritones. It’s quite hard to recognize the score, but the hardest part for me is that it does not sound pleasure because tritones are building long passage of tension, it’s really struggle to endure the unpleasant sound when practicing. But I can’t just leave B part, only play A part, because it’s an entity that related with each other.

Actually, for me, when I decided exercise one music piece, I really don’t like these passages built up with demon chords. I end out spending too much time practicing these passages, and sometimes it dried out my confidence in continuing practicing this piece.

So, the problem is we love programming, there are pleasant parts and unpleasant parts, when we spend too much time on the unpleasant part, we became hard to go step further and lose confidence. The problem is unpleasant parts are unavoidable, and sometimes incredibly important, how can we reduce pain when we working on it ?