Thought I’d share this study tip with anyone who’s interested in hearing it. May or may not work for you individually, but I’ve found it’s helped me a lot with my intensive study program.
One of the hardest things to do is to “keep moving forward” when you’ve reached a point where you’re struggling to understand or can’t easily find solutions to problems. We’ve all been there at some point, you’re trying, but you feel like you’re spinning your wheels and you’re not making progress as quickly as you’d personally like.
I keep a stack of “easy learning” available to me, that I switch over to whenever I get really frustrated. This isn’t time wasting stuff done for the sake of artificial progress, it’s just learning that I know is easier for me, or that doesn’t have much complexity to it. It doesn’t have to be tutorials, if you know you’re going to need some projects for your portfolio and one of those projects isn’t too taxing, that works too.
I’m a third of the way through JavaScript and it is not coming as easy to me as other learning I’ve done. Frankly, I’m not used to getting stuck when it comes to learning, and it’s pissing me off. When I get really stuck, instead of getting frustrated and stopping (and throwing on Netflix and not working or whatever) I switch over to the easy stuff I’ve also got on my curriculum, until I’m over my frustration and I’m back in a mental place where I’m willing to take another run at the tough stuff.
You can only guess what’s going to be easy for you personally of course, but you can usually eyeball the curriculum you’re committing to and open up a few lessons as a preview to get a sense of things.
The trick here, however, is not to get addicted to the progress that “easy learning” affords and burn through all your easy stuff too quickly, leaving you with the tough stuff on all fronts, because that’ll make it harder on yourself at the end of the day.
If I could re-start my freeCodeCamp journey again, I’d definitely start working JavaScript in from the very beginning, concurrent with the Responsive Web Design. That’s based upon my personal background finding the CSS/HTML much easier than JavaScript, it might be the other way around for someone who’s done programming before (e.g. C++) but never built a website. There’s a danger of fighting battles on too many fronts (e.g. it can be overwhelming to switch gears and try to learn 5 things at once instead of 1), but I think in hindsight it would have been an okay trade-off.
Anyway, just wanted to share a perspective that’s helped me when I run into a tough set of tutorials that I’m struggling with and feel like I’m taking forever to understand and work through.
The primary thing is that it takes as long as it takes, whether it’s fast or slow, you’ve got to just keep putting in the work. It’s okay to get frustrated and discouraged along the way - it’s going to happen - the trick is not to get discouraged in a way that stops you from doing what you want to do.
Doesn’t matter what anyone else has done before you or is doing next to you , we only have control over ourselves, and it takes as long as it takes with the time we have available to put into it. Good luck to everyone! Just wanted to send out some positive vibes this AM.
