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I saw your post and it made me think of my own experience in desiring to grow spiritually. I come from an evangelical Christian background and for those unfamil
by kaptain 12y ago
I saw your post and it made me think of my own experience in desiring to grow spiritually. I come from an evangelical Christian background and for those unfamiliar with this sub-culture there's a saying that "everyone should have a Paul, a Barnabas, and a Timothy."
What this means is that, if you're serious about your personal spiritual development, you need three things:
* a mentor (Paul): someone that is more experienced than you and can help you grow in ways that you were unaware of and who can help you develop your personal gifting.
* a comrade (Barnabas): someone that is at your level whom you can mutually encourage and grow with.
* a person to mentor (Timothy): someone whom you are a Paul to.
I think this has applications beyond spiritual development; it can be applied to any field/dimension that you want to grow in. Part of my problem in college that I was always fixated on having a mentor but never asked myself who my Barnabases and Timothys were.
As the years passed, I put aside this unhealthy fixation on having this spiritual mentor and I found myself begin to grow as I embraced the people around me as Barnabases and Timothys. I don't want to discourage you from looking for a mentor; it's awesome to find one. But don't feel like you can't grow as a programmer/developer without one. Growth takes lots of different forms and it would be a shame, in my opinion, if instead of growing, you spent your time waiting for Godot.
- kenferry 12y agoThat structure is more or less what we're doing with our iPad app, Understudy, for SICP. If someone signs up for SICP, we pair them with another user a bit ahead, to talk to once a week. Once they're a ways in, they start leading another user just starting out. http://blog.understudyapp.com/learn-sicp-make-friends/ http://blog.understudyapp.com/learn-sicp-make-friends/ [Obvious disclaimer - I work on this. It was posted to HN a few weeks ago.]
- neil_s 12y agoWish this was available on the Web. I need this to make me actually finish a Udacity/Coursera course rather than keeping on dropping them halfway through.
- d23 12y agoThis is a really fucking cool idea and I hope it works out for you. It's been my opinion for a while now that something like apprenticeship should have a higher weight in the educational experience. And $5/mo is chump change if your app actually works like it seems it has the potential to.
- kenferry 12y agoThanks! It seems to be working quite well so far, but we're still very small, of course.
- dzink 12y agoIn medicine/surgery they call this "see one, do one, teach one". We are applying this principle on http://doerhub.com http://doerhub.com where everyone who joins shares what disciplines they are learning in, mentoring in, or doing/leading something in so you can pair with someone who is complementary or similar to you in one or more levels and work on projects or just learn from each-other. Here is how the search works: http://peoplesearch-doerhub.herokuapp.com/viz/ http://peoplesearch-doerhub.herokuapp.com/viz/