All right so let me just quickly tell you a short story of the kind of when I got started in programming and what happened to me when I got started I lost motivation several times and I kind of led me to quit several times and I just remember feeling like completely overwhelmed by the sheer amount of stuff that I didn't know and that I knew I'd have to learn in order to be able to do this the thing is I got started in the wrong end I tried to get a complex app built with absolutely zero programming knowledge at that point I didn't even know what a variable was and,
I remember struggling so hard with just trying to understand a for-loop and that was like one month into the build working on the app like eight to ten hours per day so this might seem a little bit strange that I'd been programming for several weeks for like ten hour days and still ouldn't wrap my head around a for loop the reason I didn't understand it was that I'd spent like zero time learning the basics so essentially what I did during these 10-hour days was I watched tutorials copied the code pasted it in and then googled the errors but when you have no understanding of the basics and try to stitch together complex pieces of code you'll have no clue what's going on and you'll run into complex or like semi complex errors that even if you find the solution you won't understand how to implement it or at least that's what happened to me I actually remember one thing that I was struggling with a lot which was like I'd spent three weeks I think working on this and I was getting like super frustrated super demotivated,
and it was essentially trying to build some sort of spreadsheet-type UI that was similar to kind of what Excel looks like I just spent like three weeks 10 hour days I couldn't get it to work and that's something that today would take me maybe like 30 minutes to do.
So in order to maintain motivation it's important that you start on the right end I'm 100% for project-based learning so picking a project that you're excited about and then trying to build it but and is important you need to learn the basics first and I'm just talking about spending an hour a day for just four weeks learning the basics and then starting your project so I'm in no way saying that it's impossible to start out that way by just building your own app or ID out straight away but I do believe that it's a lot harder than it has to be and when it comes to programming just a tiny bit of very basic knowledge will take you so far make sure that you don't start like I did look back at it if I would have just spent a week or two reading a book like Java head first before I started building my app I would have saved myself so much time and so many headaches so my strategy if I was trying to maintain motivation while learning,
how to code would be to start out with some sort of book because books are usually really well structured and you can kind of take them at your own pace I would do this go with this book so job I had first and that's because I've read this book and I know that's really good it's really easy to read and the explanations in this book works really well for me I understood them really easily and before I read this book I was kind of struggling with understanding what classes and objects were in programming but this book literally explained it in like two pages and I understood it perfectly after that and yeah it's just a really good book so just reading something like this even if you just read half of it you will get a really good understanding of kind of the fundamentals of programming because it will give you the understanding that you need to be able to learn other frameworks or languages and to be able to solve other problems that you'll run into.
So I would start with a book like this and then after I'd read that I then get started on a personal project that I'm really passionate about because then I understand kind of fundamentals so when I run into errors or problems I'm gonna be better or more well equipped to actually solve those problems faster so instead of wasting a ton of time because you don't understand some of the fundamentals you'll kind of understand that and you'll be able to solve the problems a lot better I also just wanted to touch on motivation I think a lot of people confuse motivation with excitement being motivated to do something is not the same as being excited to do something motivation is doing the things that you aren't excited about because you'll get you to your goal you may be excited about coding on a project today.
But that feeling may change tomorrow and it's easy to do things that you're excited about the difficult part is forcing yourself to do the things that you really don't feel like because you know it will get you to a goal so don't look for the feeling of excitement about what you're going to do because excitement is a fleeting thing instead about why you're doing it in the first place so that's kind of my advice don't let your first metaphorical climb be a Mount Everest where you're gonna try to ascend it barefoot and without oxygen because then it'll get really easy to get discouraged and just give up and quit instead spend a tiny bit of time just learning the very basics and then you'll go so far when it comes to programming alright that's it for this one I hope you enjoyed it
