“Keep quiet and people will think you a philosopher.” ~ Roman proverb
Do you remember how we, as students in high school, tried to impress our teachers with big long, Latin- or Greek-based synonyms? Even though we were trying to adopt new words into our writing style, it actually brought quite the wrong effect. The lack of focus on content lowered the grade because not only were we overly concentrated on big words instead of writing quality content, the words themselves were often incorrectly placed. Now, I admit that I’m still a beginner when it comes to writing, but I learned a valuable lesson when my English teacher finally smeared my stack of turn-in papers with red ink during my sophomore year in high school.
The same thing applies to every skill in the world. When you flaunt your mediocre skills as if you were a master, the reception will be cold. We humans have an innate ability to detect pretenders. Some people are good at deception, and rightfully so, since they are masters of deception. But most of the time deception fails, and the loud talker only ends up proving how little he knows.
Don’t Get Discouraged By Not Being Able to Apply Your Skills Immediately
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Positive Thinking
Last time I talked about why people quit so easily. There can be many underlying reasons why we end up quitting activities. One major discourager is not being able to apply the skills immediately. We know how much time we’ve invested in learning a skill, but after all those hours we realize that we still aren’t able to put them into use. It is quite understandable to become disappointed in the results to such an extent that it causes us to quit the pursuit altogether.
It’s understandable, and also very regrettable. We humans are controlled by our emotions, and even our own emotions don’t always know whether their advice will be good for us in the long run. They just want to make us feel better and more comfortable by pulling us out of the predicament.
To know why I started this blog, you’ll have to hear my confession. But first, allow me to tell the story from the beginning.
“BBAs graduating from this program may be employed as IT designers, web application developers, IT consultants, programmers, et cetera, et cetera…”
— paraphrased from a university’s website
It was in February 2006 that I formed, based upon the description on their website (quoted above), my impression of the university program I applied for. It sounded pretty much like something that I might want to do for a living. So I was excited to go to school and begin my studies as I had always dreamed of studying IT since elementary school. But what actually followed didn’t connect with my expectations, and I really wondered if I had gone to the same institution where I had applied.
A few days ago, I wrote a post about how tutorials are an effective way to learn technical skills. Today I’m going to be sharing a collection of hand-picked beginner’s web design tutorials that I’ve personally found useful.
1. HTML Beginner Tutorial
HTML
If you want to learn how to create websites, this is where you should start. HTML Beginner Tutorial starts from the basics. In fact, it even shows you how to print a row of crude text without any tags or decorative attributes.
2. CSS Beginner Tutorial
CSS
CSS lets you decorate your website with cosmetic attributes. If HTML represents the skeleton of your website, CSS is the flesh (and a bit of makeup too).
Let’s face it. Studying at school entails some pretty nasty things that we struggle so hard to avoid, but unless we throw in the towel and quit studying altogether, we should learn to accept them. Ready?
Self-Learner is a blog about self-education and self-improvement based lifestyle design. Goal? To become the best "version" of yourself, and feel excited to jump out of your bed every morning.