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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   2596 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for July 5, 2023

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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How do I build this fundamental knowledge? I suspect it involves something I'd find mildly unpleasant like reading documentation, textbooks, or trawling through code on Github.

bingo

I'd rather not take Ritalin to indulge in a new hobby, but it's better to have the delusions knocked out of me early haha.

It's not about knocking down delusions. You are putting the cart before the horse.

You are asking "I want to do X, how do I know about the tool that can do X". Which is always.. a Google search (or chatGPT in simple cases) away. The only difference between the people who know about the tool and those who don't is those who do, just iterated on that process a thousand times. There are cheatsheets out there as well, for the exceptionally impatient. But it sticks with you a 100 times more when you really struggle to do X, then you give up all hope and search for the the tool that does X, and X just works. You will remember till you're 6 feet under, as opposed to reading a cheat sheet.

Focus on doing X and the rest will come. It sounds cliche, but as someone who taught programming to a lot of college students, etc. Wanting to do X is actually the hard part! Don't waste the gift of wanting to do X.

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