Non-sarcastic question, how do you fare in situations where you are uncomfortable, like learning new skills; Where you are just BAD at a thing. New sport, new technology/language, etc?

I learned a while back that I had to lean into those things and just get through the awkward if you wanted to keep learning.

You raise a great point the more I think about it.

I thrive when learning new skills and being "uncomfortable" and out of my element.

It's probably because I'm picking at rust for fun in my personal time that I don't want to deal with the uncomfortable parts. In my own time I coast and comfortably stroll through new problem spaces rather than get to that "my brain hurts" part that's all too familiar.

If rust + intellij was a work requirement I probably would just pick it up and discover that my brain can handle perfectly, two sets of bindings the way people claim to be able to do qwerty and Dvorak interchangeably.

Personally I pick one new thing per personal project and leverage my skills on the rest. If I go too far into the new things then I get bored or flummoxed with say "buck build system" and "learn kotlin" in the same project, and never actually make progress.

I think this is why I bounced off of react 4 times before sticking, too many things to learn at once. Then again I bounced off of antlr 4 times and only really got it to stick because it was a work need, and antlr is the only new tool in that chain.