This is fantastic. Another method to "tricking yourself into being awesome" (also called learning) is to jump right in and start working on a project. Like the author, you'll come up with loads of questions that need answering, and if your project is going to be successful, those questions must be answered. Otherwise your project/startup will die.
Personal experience: this is exactly how I learned Ruby on Rails as a non-programmer. I had an idea for a project, so I tried reading books and tutorials for months. Nothing stuck. It just didn't make sense. I couldn't translate the words I was reading into code. So I said "screw it" and started hacking away at my project, with absolutely no idea what I was doing. Progress was slow obstacles were rampant, but it turns out those obstacles are easy to overcome with stack traces and google/stackoverflow!
I think the difference is that some of us need a little more structure. By providing a method and a repetitive activity, by the 21st day or so (3 weeks they say), it will become habit. After that point, making a point of solving problems for a particular purpose everyday will be much easier, and you'll be making more progress.
A few stories to illustrate:
1. I had a few friends that made it a point to learn a new technology every day of the month and blog about it. In the end, the friends had learned quite a bit, and even though they only had cursory knowledge of the subject, the structure allowed them to succeed at their goal to have a more general knowledge in their discipline.
2. I have another friend that started writing an application with the point for it to be the central product of a great new startup. This friend is not only intelligent, but very capable in the whole stack, self-organized, and I would have expected him to succeed. However, he lost interest in the end before go-live. there were competitors, and I think he lost the vision that he had in the beginning. He could still finish the product, but now he has another job. I credit this to lack of structure, which is not his fault; I've gotten no where near as far as he did on a myriad of ideas for products.
> I think the difference is that some of us need a little more structure. By providing a method and a repetitive activity, by the 21st day or so (3 weeks they say), it will become habit. After that point, making a point of solving problems for a particular purpose everyday will be much easier, and you'll be making more progress.
Yep, I agree. As long as you are able to find problems to solve. Personally, this doesn't work for me because I am not able to come up with problems unless the present themselves in something I'm working on. I can read 100 books on a subject, but if I can't apply the knowledge or imagine how I can apply it, it doesn't stick. Just different ways of learning, I guess.
Another method to "tricking yourself into being awesome" (also called learning) is to jump right in and start working on a project. Like the author, you'll come up with loads of questions that need answering, and if your project is going to be successful, those questions must be answered. Otherwise your project/startup will die.
That's closer to my approach. I thrive when given a never-ending stream of unique problems to solve, as I work through a project. But sitting down and going through some structured course or book or whatever can quickly become very boring to me. I like to just jump in with both feet and sink or swim.
That said, both approaches have value and I think it's more of a continuum than a binary dichotomy.
Personal experience: this is exactly how I learned Ruby on Rails as a non-programmer. I had an idea for a project, so I tried reading books and tutorials for months. Nothing stuck. It just didn't make sense. I couldn't translate the words I was reading into code. So I said "screw it" and started hacking away at my project, with absolutely no idea what I was doing. Progress was slow obstacles were rampant, but it turns out those obstacles are easy to overcome with stack traces and google/stackoverflow!