Memorizing versus Understanding

The biggest lesson from CodeWars is there are more than 100 ways to kill a rat. Even the simplest problem could have more than one solution. I had no idea that there would be more than 5 scripts to convert an integer to a string.

The best part is now I take off the weight of perfectionism and strive to understand the basic concepts. Learning, for the longest time, has been all about memorizing, at least in my primary and secondary school curriculum. How quick can you memorize all the African countries' capital cities, the date of, independence and the ruling party? There was only one right answer and the exam questions would be phrased with one expected response; 1994-Nairobi-KANU! Anything different from that would be an automated failure. 

Whereas in learning to script, practice is more important than memorizing and there is room to contribute to the existing pool of responses. You can be wrong, no doubt, but there is no expectation of one or two correct answers rather than a test of concepts. 

After redoing my training and foregoing all kata, I am changing my perspective toward learning and letting go, very slowly, of the fear of failure. Now my goal is to learn to keep my script as simple as possible to allow others to read; which I have not had to do before. 

Now that I am kinder to myself, I only expect the learning journey to become more exciting and I will write all about it!