Prior to learning for the SAT, I was quite a slow thinker.

Having surrounded myself with literature and writing pieces in college, I have developed a dreamy mind only suitable for chilling activities like reading or writing (please don’t generalize, that’s just me!).

At that time, my thinking was a bit convoluted and illogical, but I didn’t recognize that until I had to take the SAT and did the first few math questions on Khan Academy and found out that my answers were all wrong. Plus I was too slow to spot the correct choice among other misleading selections.

Needless to say, I panicked because if I couldn’t tackle those simple math problems, how I could be able to learn programming — an art that requires high level of logical and analytical thinking. However, thinking positively, now I knew what I lack to pursue this career and why don’t take this as an opportunity to practice my left-brained skills, and I did.

I started by learning the theory and formulation for each problem and forcing myself to really focus on each question to recognize the given inputs and by that drafting out the solution step by step. I even pushed it further by timing my work because anyway I would have to finish the whole MAT session in a limit amount of time (for anyone who doesn’t know, it’s 80 minutes for 58 questions and mind you, that’s tough!).

At first, I thought that I was too harsh on myself, but the end result came out fantastic.

Everyday, I found myself thinking a bit clearer, faster, sharper, and more logical, like I could just scan the question and immediately cross out the incorrect choices, leaving behind the more possible ones and quickly test them to find the most correct answer, then move on and repeat the process. Someday I could even solve 30 questions in 20 minutes or less.

This has helped me a lot now I’m learning coding as I can already draw in my mind the solution for each coding challenge right after reading the requirements. Also, learning to solve a problem step by step is extremely useful because it helps me write better code, knowing which methods to write first and from that develop the program. This has confirmed that brain is actually a muscle, and the more you practice it, the stronger and sharper it becomes.

Learning math and solving math problems have indeed built the foundation for my programming journey as they both require logical thinking. I highly recommend this way for people like me (who wants to start learning programming but find that their brains are quite slow or that they need a boost to stay real with code)

After taking the SAT, I move on to Sudoku. I have known about this game for ages, but playing it seriously means trying to finish it in the shortest amount of time, and similar to the above method, this forces my brain to process data faster and churn out the correct number to fill in the square, after looking at the whole battlefield and minusing the inappropriate candidates. It’s somehow similar to programming as you have to decide which sub-problems to solve first or which direction to build the program.

2 years ago, I started to learn coding the first time, but I failed. The reason: my brain was not ready for it. But I didn’t know that, and instead of preparing myself, I thought that it’s because of the programming language I choose. Now started for the second time, I know exactly where the problem is and how to fix it.

It’s like if you start playing tennis and find that you are too weak for it, before concluding that the sport is too heavy for you, try improving your physical strength first.

This post is to remind myself that if one day I find coding is too challenging, let’s pause for a sec and think of ways to become tougher.