7-40 Challenge | Round 4, Day 25
My freshman year of college, I convinced myself I couldn’t handle music theory. I had the brain for it. I just didn’t believe I did. So I enrolled in fundamentals instead — the kiddie pool — while my entire cohort moved ahead into the real coursework.
I never caught up. That one decision put me out of step with the people I was supposed to be learning alongside, and I eventually changed majors. Not because I lacked the ability. Because I chose the safe version and paid for it with a path I never fully chose to walk.
Years later, I was working a data job and feeling my way into being an analyst. I’d pull data out of our system, export it to Excel, and got crazy good at making spreadsheets do what I needed. I didn’t know there was a structured query language that could do everything I was doing — faster, better, and repeatable.
I was really good at Excel. And I was really scared of SQL.
Then one day, someone showed me how to join tables. How to connect two data sets with a single statement and pull exactly what I needed. A light went off. I looked at it and thought: get out of my way.
Not only did I understand what I was looking at — it supercharged my thinking about it. Everything I’d been doing by hand, I could now write in scripts that ran themselves. I went from scared to unstoppable in one afternoon. And I never went back.
Same person. Same pattern. Two different choices, two completely different outcomes.
Right now I’m standing at the edge of another piece of unmapped terrain — getting the things I’ve built in front of people. Promotion. Marketing. Asking strangers to care about what I’ve made. I haven’t walked it yet, and the absence of a map feels like proof that I can’t do it.
But that’s what SQL felt like too. And I know what it cost me the time I chose the kiddie pool instead.
Somewhere in the first few steps, there’s a join tables moment waiting. I just have to start walking to find it.
David Willis 