How be to learn good

This is not a motivational post.

Prologue

Febuary 2nd, 2023. Another aspiring programmer joins the ranks of the fallen.

My best (and longest) friend started his programming journey a few months ago. He's a skilled professional - working in offshore oil and gas for the last decade. For those that have never seen true industry before then take heed; the breath-takingly massive, monumental size of the machinery is the ultimate dose of feeling like a tiny, insignificant insect. I say this to emphasise the fact that people that work in here are not morons - they undergo years of training and education and the industry doesn't tolerate fools. Idiots cannot construct obelisks of such magnitude.

I've had many friends say they want to start programming before. I approach it the same way every time - I guide them through building a blog, introducing such radical concepts as terminal emulators and the CLI. Most people are borderline retarded when they use computers, and I explain that they are about to learn how to drive it properly and that it is going to hurt at the start. I spend hours of Zoom calls with my friends helping them through the shell and package managers and setting up dual-boot systems. A fair amount of drop out occurs here.

My friend was different. When he started the journey the fucker was running Linux with tiling managers on a dual boot windows machine. All right - I can get behind this. Training wheels never needed to come on before they came off. He came in strong and made some great progress, but soon like all the others he started to fade. When you've done this long enough you start to notice the signs. We live on different sides of the country these days but I knew the end was nigh; no questions, no logins to slack. Just another hopeful soul fading not with a bang but a whimper.

After not hearing from him for the better part of a month I confirmed with him he'd stopped. Experience shows that once momentum stops it's over.

RIP.

The Lesson

Learning is hard. It is hard for one reason, and one reason only:

Your brain is a tiny, egotistical, self-righteous psuedo-Hitler. Un das mini-führer is out to stop you.

See, your brain thinks it gets it. It's sure it understands. It knows it can do it. Heres the rip: learning challenges this opinion of itself. It turns out that it doesn't know. It turns out that its intuition is misguided. Or based in ignorance. Or just plain stupid. True learning exposes you to your own limitations, and by god will that little bastard in your head punish you for it at every. fucking. opportunity.

If you wan't to learn you need to be aware that old mate Adolf upstairs is going to pull tricks on you. These tricks will entail things like -

• Whenever you start you will suddenly feel really tired
• Whenever you start you will feel constantly hungry
• After starting for a few minutes there will be an overwhelming urge to "call up all my mates and go to the pub"
• A sudden urge to do menial household tasks. If there is one that you especially despise you will have a particularly intense, hawk-like focus on it.
• You know that TV series your partner loves that you have zero interest in? Well now you're on the Wikipedia page for it and are diligently researching the symbolic meanings of the source material.

Not big tricks. Never a soul destroying riposte. Just tiny, little, innocuous little fuck yous.

Learning is hard, but only because you let yourself be sidelined. Become accutely self-reflective of your actions whilst learning; if you're struggling with something and suddenly you're interested in finishing that book from 11 years ago, its a fucking trick and don't fall for it.

Sure, the above sounds a little facetious; but lets look at the alternative. We've all had moments where we suddenly "understood" something. The gears clicked; the penny dropped. Do you remember what happened then? I'll wager you weren't tired. You definitely weren't on Wikipedia looking up Phoebe trivia. Nope - you were focused and felt like the smartest person in the entire world. You'd just beaten back the intellectual Anschluss. You almost certainly got a new wave of energy and probably didn't sleep for another 18 hours whilst your mind turned over and integrated new found wisdom.

Learn to love the battle with yourself. Feel it. Embrace it. Know your enemy. The enemy is you. And when you realise that the enemy is fighting you this means progress. You're moving forward, one skipped South Park episode at a time. Use that as fuel to keep the fire burning.

Epilogue

I opened this by saying it wasn't motivational. My mate never came back to resume the journey he was genuinely quite attuned too. Just another passenger of Charon across the River Styx of Ambition.

People are smart, way smarter than they realise. I believe this down to the absolute bottom of my soul. But they never learn the rules of battle. They look for the epic failures and wistfully ignore the little ones. They are totally ignorant of the subterfuge their own mind plays on them; evading the fights that matter without even realising it.

There are no "big blockers". There are no cardinal hurdles that if you could just clear them will make it easier all of a sudden. There are only thousands of self inflicted, tiny, benign distractions that will constantly derail you from your goals.

Recognise these tiny demons. Clamp your hands around their tiny little necks, snap their fucking spines and git gud.