I've built my entire career on lies I had to make true.

Before COVID, I was doing a very basic desk job, earning just enough to have nothing left by the end of the month.

I seriously wanted to earn more, either by doing something online or by learning a high-income skill and switching to a better job.

I had a friend who was on the same page as me. Doing a job he didn’t love, and looking for some opportunity to earn more.

From the very beginning, I’ve disliked two types of things:

• Anything people promote as a get-rich-quick scheme
• Anything where luck plays a major role

I’m mentioning this because at the time, almost everyone on YouTube was saying to start trading or dropshipping, and both fell into one or both categories I dislike.

But there was another side, more traditional videos telling you to learn a skill, designing, coding, writing (naming a few that were trending then), and freelance to earn some extra cash. That’s the path I decided to go with.

I thought I’d learn to code and switch to a programming job (it was in high demand with a good package), and until I landed one, I’d freelance.

Because of COVID, my job shifted to work-from-home, which gave me a lot of free time.

So everything was in my favor. I had a goal and more than enough time to work on it.

But as they say, nothing ever goes as planned in this accursed world (by Madara, Naruto).

I wasn’t able to work as planned. I wasted my free time right and left, binging anime, watching self-improvement videos on YouTube (which gave me the illusion that I was at least doing something productive), working out, reading books, and some other nice and not-so-nice things.

Two months into this plan, and I was only halfway through a 4-hour Python beginner course by freeCodeCamp. It was my first time learning to code, so I had to rewatch it from the beginning more than three times in those two months.

In short, I was making close to zero progress on my main goal.

I was doing other things that made me feel like I wasn’t completely wasting my days, but it wasn’t enough to cover the guilt I felt every night before bed.

And that’s when I learned about the cycle of self-hatred.

You go to bed hating yourself for not doing what you planned, tell yourself you’ll do it tomorrow, and tomorrow you again find other, important-seeming things to run from the discomfort of the work that’s actually hard and actually matters. You go to bed hating yourself even more than yesterday. The cycle repeats.

So how did I break free from it?

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Tell a lie

One day my friend called, and we started talking about how our work-from-home vacation was going, and whether we’d started learning anything new since we were both looking to switch jobs fast.

He said he was learning web dev and could make basic sites.

When he asked what I’d been doing and how much progress I’d made, I told him I was learning Python, had already finished the basic and intermediate concepts, was onto advanced stuff now, and had built some cool projects I’d show him next time we met (already planned for a month out).

A big lie. So big I didn’t even know how I’d cover it up.

We ended the call, and I couldn’t stop thinking about what I’d do if we met and I had nothing to show. I’d lose all respect.

I had one option left if I didn’t want that to happen: make the lie true.

I opened that video I was only halfway through and finished it in three days, writing every line of code myself in the editor.

freeCodeCamp also had an intermediate Python course I’d saved for later. I finished that in about two weeks.

Then I learned to make games in Python using PyGame, built a snake game (mostly by copying code, but I understood every part of it), then a tic-tac-toe game, then hangman. Then I built a scraper to pull anime data from different sites, searchable by genre, rating, and other filters.

All of it, before we met.

So when we finally sat down together, I had a lot to say and a lot to show.

I’m 33 years old. I’ve lived over 400 months. There are only a handful I remember vividly enough to recall almost every detail. That was one of them.

I was amazed at what I was actually capable of once I sat down and seriously worked on something.

I coded 2-3 hours minimum for the first few days because I had no other option. I sat with the discomfort no matter how many excuses my mind threw at me.

Slowly, that became a habit. By around day 30, I was coding 5+ hours without forcing myself to sit down. And only once I started taking it seriously did I realize how fun it actually was.

Coding became my first love, work-wise.

And that month became the foundation for everything that came after.

A few months later, once I was solid in Python, I decided to move into data (Data Analyst, specifically), since I’d loved math since childhood, and started learning it seriously alongside my job.

Over the next 6 months, I landed a few freelance clients from LinkedIn, making more than my job paid. Juggling both got exhausting, so I quit.

I kept freelancing while prepping for interviews, and landed my first programming job before the end of 2022.

Around twenty months after I started learning to code. Seventeen since I got serious about it. Twelve since I started learning data analysis.

All because I told a lie bigger than I could cover up.

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It happened again