Preparing is the fun part. The hard part is doing the work. Making a study plan, picking out which books you'd like to read, making a list of all the chapters as TODO items, and even picking out the exercises you should do, is easy and fun. It's the equivalent of education fast food. You're imaging yourself in a future state where you know all this stuff without having put in real work.
The hard part is doing the unsexy work. Slogging through exercises. Confronting failure and embarrassment when you don't know something without lying to yourself and immediately googling the solution. Unfortunately there is no "one weird trick" you can use here. It's hard, but in the end all you need is discipline. Sitting down for an hour to focus and study has become increasingly rare and difficult in a society where we are conditioned by 10 social media apps bidding for your attention every second. If you are anything like me, sitting down and reading a hard textbook for an uninterrupted hour doesn't come easily anymore. And it's my fault for allowing myself to become so easily distracted.
And writing blog posts about how to study is surely more fun than actually doing the work. And posting comments on HN about how to study even more so :)
It's subjective, but I think a good metric to use is resistance. Whenever you feel resistance towards at task, that's work. Stuff you know you should do, but don't feel like doing.
A common example are textbook exercises in math or physics books. Most people don't mind passively watching lectures or YouTube videos on these topics, but they'll never do exercises that force them to think and produce something from scratch. They feel like work. Doing them is scary because they expose your weaknesses. It's easy to get the illusion of having understood something from watching lecture when in reality you haven't. But when you talk to actual mathematicians and physicists, they will tell you the single most important thing you must be doing are these exercises.
Writing is another common example. Sitting down and writing a book, or a blog, is scary and feels like work. It exposes gaps in your own understanding and knowledge. People have an inherent resistance to this. They'll start, but then drop it and give up early. There are probably 100x more people who have "prepared and organized" a blog or started and outline of a book than people who have kept up the practice or finished a book.
Personally, I read my code three times. The first time it looks normal, the second it looks like a horror script, and the third like a comedy. Thus, I achieve amusement.
The hard part is doing the unsexy work. Slogging through exercises. Confronting failure and embarrassment when you don't know something without lying to yourself and immediately googling the solution. Unfortunately there is no "one weird trick" you can use here. It's hard, but in the end all you need is discipline. Sitting down for an hour to focus and study has become increasingly rare and difficult in a society where we are conditioned by 10 social media apps bidding for your attention every second. If you are anything like me, sitting down and reading a hard textbook for an uninterrupted hour doesn't come easily anymore. And it's my fault for allowing myself to become so easily distracted.
And writing blog posts about how to study is surely more fun than actually doing the work. And posting comments on HN about how to study even more so :)