Don't beat yourself too much. 100% of the "overnight successes" you hear from the media bubble were ALWAYS X years in the making, where X >= 10.
If I want to do kaggle competition: I won't even try to do single submission thinking - "I won't make it to the top 10, why bother, instead do something else."
If you want to achieve mastery, you already lost. When the Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa received a honorary Lifetime Achievement Award at Oscars at the age of 80 he said, "I don't think I understand the cinema yet".
Seeking mastery has nothing to do with learning and everything to do with our own insecurities: "If I'm the best maybe women will love me", "If I'm the best maybe people will like me", "If I'm the best maybe I will find my own identity".
Give up mastery. Embrace learning.
"It doesn't look like the one I saw on the internet".
This is the wrong mindset. Instead ask yourself: Does it look better than the work I did yesterday?.
Maybe I am completely unaware of how time it actually takes to master something and setting up wrong expectations.
"As you study this book, and continue with programming, remember that anything worth doing is difficult at first. Maybe you are the kind of person who is afraid of failure so you give up at the first sign of difficulty. Maybe you never learned self-discipline so you can't do anything that's "boring." Maybe you were told that you are "gifted" so you never attempt anything that might make you seem stupid or not a prodigy. Maybe you are competitive and unfairly compare yourself to someone like me who's been programming for more than 20 years."
Comments
Don't beat yourself too much. 100% of the "overnight successes" you hear from the media bubble were ALWAYS X years in the making, where X >= 10.
If you want to achieve mastery, you already lost. When the Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa received a honorary Lifetime Achievement Award at Oscars at the age of 80 he said, "I don't think I understand the cinema yet".
Seeking mastery has nothing to do with learning and everything to do with our own insecurities: "If I'm the best maybe women will love me", "If I'm the best maybe people will like me", "If I'm the best maybe I will find my own identity".
Give up mastery. Embrace learning.
This is the wrong mindset. Instead ask yourself: Does it look better than the work I did yesterday?.
It takes time and consistency. Small, quantifiable steps every day. This applies to everything: dancing http://danceinayear.com/, web development http://jenniferdewalt.com/, ...
Good luck!
See "A Note on Practice and Persistence":
"As you study this book, and continue with programming, remember that anything worth doing is difficult at first. Maybe you are the kind of person who is afraid of failure so you give up at the first sign of difficulty. Maybe you never learned self-discipline so you can't do anything that's "boring." Maybe you were told that you are "gifted" so you never attempt anything that might make you seem stupid or not a prodigy. Maybe you are competitive and unfairly compare yourself to someone like me who's been programming for more than 20 years."
http://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/intro.html