WHEN I STARTED PROGRAMMING
Let me just quickly tell you a short story of when I got started in programming and what happened to me.
when I got started Programming I lost motivation several times and I kind of led me to quit several times and I just remember feeling completely overwhelmed by the sheer amount of stuff that I didn't know and that I knew I'd have to learn to be able to do this.
The thing is I got started on 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 couldn't wrap my head around a for a loop.
The reason I didn't understand it was because 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 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 was getting super frustrated super demotivated and it was essentially trying to build some sort of like spreadsheet-type UI that was similar to kind of what Excel looks like and 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 and it's something that if I would have just spent a little bit of time learning like the fundamentals of programming I would have saved so much time.
How to Stay Motivated?
To maintain the motivation you must start at 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 this 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 start your project.
So, I'm in no way saying that it's impossible to start that way by just building your app out 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 me 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 with some sort of book because books are usually really well structured.
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 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 of why you're doing it in the first place so that's kind of my advice don't let your first metaphorical climb be Mount Everest where you're gonna try to ascend it barefoot and without oxygen because then it'll get easy to get discouraged and just give up and quit instead of spending a tiny bit of time just learning the very basics and then you'll go so far when it comes to Programming.
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