Prior to lockdown I had a very active life working as a professional speaker running school science events/workshops and performing as a street-dancer. My social and work life was built around schools and public events. As you can imagine it was a drastic change to adapt to a confined space within the walls of my own home.
Two weeks in to the lock-down I had cleared up a back log of work and I had run out of things to do. I was gutted and disappointed to have lost most of my work and engagements. I lost a lot, and like most people my future plans were halted for at least a year. So, after sometime wondering around my home I realised I had to gain something. I had plenty of time, and I thought maybe turn this into an opportunity. For years I wanted to learn coding and programming. As an engineer it's a very powerful and a useful tool to have in your skill set for problem solving and analysis. So I embarked on a new indoor adventure to learn this new skill.
I started off learning some basic courses in Python from Youtube and subsequently decided to built several robots for my future school shows. I learned so much and in the end built a facial recognition human interacting robot. Following that I learned the basics of few other programming languages and custom built my school business website completely from scratch (something I thought I would never learn). I then went onto develop few coding STEM workshops for schools. As time went on I actually ended up looking forward to waking up every morning during the lockdown so I could carry on with my work. I completed over a half dozen courses and it got to the point now where I won't have enough time to learn all the things I would like by the time schools return in September.
What did I learn through out this period? I could have thought "let's just wait this out and pick up things next year" but you only get one life. Did I really want to wish a whole year of my life away? life is too short for that! Who knows how long the Covid nightmare will drag on for. Use your time wisely. It is never too late to learn something new and there is always something to do. I look forward to returning to a "normal" life like most people but the future is unpredictable. All the work I have done over the last five months will help contribute to the future growth of my business and work. I like to think that in the end every little thing you do matters. Now is a good time to pick up that project you had always wanted to do. I hope my article will help inspire you to find some motivations to complete your own projects.
