Background
Through my journey between web devolopment and data science I’ve wasted so much time, effort and resources without actuchlly leveling up my skills, I have always found my self in this limbo of being way better than a beginner and yet far from a profissonal. Now even though I’m no where near my goals for my progress in data science (which is my main interest currently) but taking note of these shortcomings of my learning journey is really helping me to be more productive. So the goal of this post is to help others save precious time that I wasted, so let’s get started.
You’re doing the opposite of “less is more”
I’ve always liked this qoute the first time I knew about it was when I was reading about linux commands and the “less” was used to show the contents of a file therefore more of that file, “but what does this have to do with me not making progress” you might rightfully ask, well the my first advice is to work with as LESS learning resources as possible (courses, books, blog posts,…ect) this might seem counterintuitive at first but if you’re anything like me (a person who litterly wants to know everything at the same time),you might find yourself very distracted with tons of courses you’ll never finish and PDFs you never really read. So the best advice I can give you is to not do more than one course or a book simultaneously this will make you understand details better and you will not feel rushed to finish it for the sake of it.
You’re comparing between technologies
So is it Python or R, Tensorflow or Pytorch, React or Angular or Vue, bla bla bla this is the most useless conversation or web search you’ll ever make, But believe it or not this kind of things really wast a lot of time becuase they will discourge you and get you to switch in the middle of the road. Recentlly I’ve come across a tweet by francios chollet (the creator of keras) which really summries my whole point here perfectlly “The best programming language is the one you know well and enjoy using. The one that makes you feel productive.”. so next time when you have this kind of thoughs try to think about “what” are you making and the “How” part will be easier and clearer.
You think you can master it in short time with little effort
By now you might start to see the pattern or what all of this have in common “The search for short cuts” this is your enemy I remember when watching “requim for a dream” the first time and thought it’s about how bad drugs are but then I read that the director darren aronofsky said that the film actully has nothing to do about that, instead it’s about the sequences of trying to cheat your way through life. I won’t spoil the film here but i think you’ll get the idea. when you try to finish more books and courses (or any other resources maybe series of blogs or articls) you’re doing the same, your goal changes from gaining knowledge and skills to finish this as fast as possible. Sorry to break it down for you but there no way you can gain skills without continuous effort. to be good at things you have to be consistant, displined and patient otherwise you’re cheating yourself and wasting your time. binge watching tutorials and courses will not make you a CTO.
you’re Hands are not dirty enough
“We learn by example and by direct experience because there are limits to the adequacy of verbal instruction.”-Malcom Gladwell. You have to extend upon the knowledge you gain from different sources for example if you’re watching a course about web devolopment and the instructor is making a simple Todo web app, one thing you can do is to try to add more functionallty to it, you can add a login and registration options so different users can have different todos maybe try to get the app to send notificatons to the users email or phone there’s a lot of other cool things to add even for a small project like this. My point here is you have to be brave enough to try and implement you own crazy ideas that’s the only way you can be confident in your technical skills, and confidance is way more important than any other skill another qoute I really like is “We learn through direct experience; to accept a theory without experience it is to learn nothing at all”.
You’re afraid of looking stupid
Every master was once a beginner, but we humans really care too much about our status and our ego can sometimes be our greatest enemy. to overcame this think about babies, (yes these little human ) they come to this world with zero knowledge about any thing and how do they learn? they don’t care or worry about looking stupid or silly, they simply try to mimic actions they saw from their family in there own and keep trying until they master every single human skills from crawling to walking to speaking.
You’re doing it alone
This related to the previous point, what is the best way to not look stupid or ignorant ? don’t show your work to others but it’s almost always a grandteed way to make poor progress. you think you don’t need anyone everything is on the internet one click away right ? why bother risking being judged and looking stupid asking people for adivce. This actuclly has some truth in it but mainly for techical problems sure you can find the soluation to any technical problem in the internet but, your learning journey consist of more than just that there will be moments of stress, doubt and might even feel lost in the plethora of technologies and career paths. In such case having a mentor or anyone who share the same intrests as you do comes really handy. Try to reach out to as many people as possible in your area of intrest this will make your learnig journey more enjoyable. You might be suprised by how many similar minded people went throught similar problem you’re facing now which makes solving them easier.
Final thoughts
This is the first real post in this blog I hope you enjoyed this post and found it useful, feel free to reach out to me if you have any comments. I’ll try to publish this posts more often.