Determination & Passion Are Key to Success

Hello readers!

This is my first article ever written and I want you to see it from my point of view so getting to know me might help. So here is a small introduction. My name is Daniel and I come from a small yet beautiful country in Northern Europe - Latvia. Been into coding since I was 12 and started working full-time as a software developer right after high school - when I was in the first year in university. It is almost 10 years now and the longest break I have had is 3 weeks vacation. A pretty decent experience, one might say.

Since I was a teenager I was trying to make some side projects - Fantasy Hockey for KHL ice-hockey league, geographic location based social network, navigation app that allows users to race each other, search engine which allows to rate and comment on each search result and of course - bunch of different computer games.

I can guess the first question that might pop-up into your head after seeing this list of side projects - why am I not running my own business yet? This is where we get to the determination.

For a long period of time I could not get over the first big struggles when making my project. Either I get to the point where I understood that this will take insanely huge amount of time, I need big investments to make it happen or I just lose interest and stop working on that project. And project is dead.

This happens, yes. But the key is to take something with you when a project dies, even if it was never finished. And I did it. I tried many different programming languages - PHP, Python, Java, C#, Kotlin, Elixir, Clojure, Go etc. This gave me some basic skills in these languages and of course a broader look on programming itself. I developed myself while I could not develop a project till it is finished.

After like the millionth project that was left alone in the dark and comments from my wife that I have been ditching them more often than a Don Juan ditches his girlfriends I started to understand that I need to stop this. Before starting a project I must think this through and stop wasting time.

Basically all my life I have been into sports - basketball, football, rowing, weight lifting etc. I am quite skinny so I stopped with weight lifting - wanted to gain weight and look better. Hopped on and off of going to gym for several years - weight lifting was boring for me and I could not motivate myself to go to gym regularily.

And then I found out about calisthenics - body weight fitness. I was a bit skeptical about it. My first thought - you do push-ups, pull-ups, squats and sit-ups. What else is there? But a few articles about calisthenics opened a whole new world to me. You are not getting super-huge but muscular, possibility of getting injuries is lower than with weight lifting and most importantly - it is really fun! Instead of having a goal to bench press 5kg more than last month I can train to unlock new moves like front lever or planche.

After doing calisthenics for a while and trying out a bunch of different mobile applications that could guide me through this journey I found out that none of them were perfect and suited my needs. So as a developer I thought - calisthenics is what I love doing and I am a developer so why should not I make an app that helps me out in these trainings? And I started yet another project. But this time I had experience in starting a project and failing.

Now, when my calisthenics mobile application Caliverse is officially launched and has been running for 4 and a half months, I can say that a combination of determination and passion for the thing you are doing is the key to success. I want to continue working on Caliverse because I know that it will help me and others when working out. It gives me motivation to stick with my schedule.

In these first months I have almost 2 000 registered users and every day Caliverse is used by more than 100 people. And this is achieved without spending money on advertising. Just with some basic marketing skills from a software developer and a huge help from my friends from United Calisthenics Group.

This was hard and it will not get easier but the feeling when someone writes you an email to say thank you and that Caliverse gave him the stepping stone to start working out is priceless.

Determination + passion is my formula to get things done and I believe that it might be yours as well.

Cheers to that!

Daniels