Why Learning to Fly (or Code) Is Easier Than You Think

I expected there to be some sort of rigorous process--a waiting period? a physical? some paperwork?--before I'd be allowed to publish an essay to hundreds of thousands of readers. But here's what happened instead: On a whim, I called a friend of mine who's a columnist for his local alt-weekly and set up an appointment for a $79, 45-minute lesson. Two weeks later I picked a mildly unusual experience of mine and gave a brief, rushed overview of it, remaining about as deep as a kiddie pool throughout.

Thanks to my friend, I knew the secret to writing modern middlebrow pop-culture essays -- just draw some arbitrary connection between your topic and another topic that seems, at first, to be totally unrelated. Unfortunately, I ran out of time before my deadline, and I never really found an interesting connection. But it's hard to complain when you're playing in the clouds.

Then I started looking at my total monthly expenses for instruction and plane rental. When I looked at the numbers, I decided that this must be a good time to buy a house. I was spending what was, for me, a great deal of money. The money I was spending on flying easily paid for a house payment once I made that decision.

One other thing that was quite unexpected. At the time, I was working as a consultant doing large ERP system implementations for fortune 500 companies. As anyone who does this for a living will tell you, this can be a very stressful occupation. The multitasking aspect of flying was like: watch 15 things all at once, make sure nothing goes wrong, and if you screw up, the consequences will be extremely dire, and everything is very time critical, and all eyes are on you as you make very important actions. At some point, it occurred to me: "hey! This is exactly the same kind of stress I feel at work!"

Another thing that surprised me initially about flying small planes. It feels like being in a flying lawnmower, nothing at all like being in a commercial jet. It made me feel very sick at first. They say you get used to it with time.

I think, though, that at some point the situational awareness and multitasking becomes second nature, and you can do it feeling merely alert instead of stressed and overtaxed. But I never spent enough money on flying time to get to that point personally.

There's nothing like the fun of staring at a map and plotting where you're going to go, though, I hope I'm financially successful enough to get back into it some day when other affairs are in order.

I wouldn't say that's what programming is. I would say that's a good way to just create something simple. A thoughtful understanding of the entire stack is necessary to create a solid base, but given the fact many people just wan't something quick his approach should be fine.