Stop SELF-SABOTAGING Your Dream of Becoming a Software Developer

by far the biggest problem that I've seen for people who are going the self-taught route in programming so they're trying to teach themselves the code so they can get a job as a software developer or a programmer is that people self-sabotage themselves all the time and they don't even know they're doing it and you can most often see this where people will get really really excited to do this they go all in on it and they eventually burn out only to keep repeating that cycle over and over again and I've been people who are doing this for years so like five years they've been trying to learn they keep going through this cycles where their get really excited they're gonna learn it and then they end up fizzling out and so in this video what I wanted to cover with you is what does that mean to self-sabotage are you doing it all so a little bit about why we're doing it and then we'll get into how to overcome it so that you not stop trying to do this for years so you get into a programming career as soon as you possibly can you move on with your life and you're happy now if you're wondering who I am here I'm an Easter quits I'm a self-taught programmer I taught myself to code back in 2014 I landed my first job in 2015 and now I'm a mentor and coached people who are trying to do the same thing so before we move ahead here go ahead and hit the subscribe button below so you can get all my new content I really cover things about how to become a software developer also how to land that first job also by the way make sure to hit that Bell icon to make sure you get all the notifications every time I put out a new video so what exactly do I mean when I say that people are self sabotaging or that they are getting in their own way what I most often see is that people have preconceived notions and beliefs about what it takes to teach themselves to code and usually it involves some unrealistic expectations meaning they have to put in some ungodly amount of hours per week that there's no way they could do this just by spending maybe 20 hours a week doing this or they think that their amount of activity that they have to do is insane and so what this often leads to if you have unrealistic expectations about what it takes to be a software developer then if you can't possibly reach those high expectations you're going to have problems you're going to burn out or you're gonna get very discouraged and so this leads to what I call the boom-bust cycle of trying to become a software developer you can apply this to pretty much anything you know weight loss learning a new language learning a new skill but I so often see this in not only myself in previous Temps where I've failed but in a lot of people who I have helped to overcome this and the boom-bust cycle basically goes like this so it starts off with the greatest part which is you get inspired to get motivated maybe you had a friend tell you could do this maybe you watch one of my youtube videos and you're like oh my gosh I could change my life maybe your your job sucks and you can see an opportunity to get out of that all great reasons to do it but either way that's where it starts starts with the inspiration from there you go from inspiration to what I call the frenetic activity stage and since you have all these expectations in your head about what it takes to be successful doing this you start just going all in on it right and when I say all in I mean you go from zero to 100 very quickly you buy a ton of courses you watch a ton of YouTube videos you are constantly googling stuff you read everything you can get your hands on maybe you joined a few different discord or slack groups but you just go all in another part of the frenetic activity stage that is often overlooked is that people start sleeping less because they're trying to do more in the day they figure if they sacrifice and sleep that's more time they can be doing something they also tend to increase their caffeine usage because caffeine helps them to stay up it also helps them to focus another thing that happens as well as often people stop eating is healthy or they stop going the gym which are all things that help you to recuperate and so this frenetic activity stage can last for a couple days it can last for a couple of weeks if you're lucky maybe can last for a couple months but eventually you will hit your limit and you cannot keep up this frenetic activity stage and so you move to the next stage of the process where you run out of gas you hit the wall and you get disillusioned so when you kept up this frenetic activity for as long as you have for again a few weeks maybe in a few months your body will eventually give it on you your spirit will give out on you you just kind of get to the point where like you just can't quite do it anymore maybe you wake up one day and you're like I just I don't want to think about code I just want to do anything but code and what's even worse is a lot of times you'll look back on the few weeks or a few maybe months that you've been doing this you'll see how hard you've worked you know how hard you've stress yourself out and you don't really feel like you've made that much progress you feel like you've done so much and you're like if this is what it's gonna take and if I do this for another few more months how am I ever gonna do this and it feels like you're climbing Mount Everest without an oxygen take and so what happens at this stage you become very disillusioned you can't see a way forward and you're like I'm not even sure if this is even worth it anymore and so that moves you to the really the last stage of the process and that's called the what I call the avoidance or withdrawal stage so either you actively avoid doing the work because it causes you anxiety it causes you pain because you feel a shame that you had to quit this that it hurts your self-esteem or you actively withdraw from it cuz you're like you know what I burnt out I need to do if we track to get my energy back and get back to where I'm motivated and this cycle will often repeat itself so you go back to the top and you'll just maybe something happens where you get inspired you get motivated and you go through that entire thing again because your beliefs have changed you just figured okay this time I'm gonna do a little bit different and the worst part is the more often you do the cycle the more likely it is that you're going to quit after a few cycles because subconsciously you remember each time you fail and it does bruise your confidence a little bit it bruises your self-esteem because you're like you know what if this is my seventh time doing it am I really cut out for this so that's the cycle that I see so often people engage in it's not the fact that there are you don't have the right learning materials or something like that it's their beliefs about what it takes they think they have to you know work 80 hours a week to do this they have to slave over it they have to get sacrifice everything in their life they can't have fun anymore and that's actually the thing that makes them fail so you have to know this about yourself about our own tendencies if you're really going to overcome this cycle and so what I'm about to talk about here is how to overcome this boom-bust cycle how to get out of getting in your own way essentially so the first thing I recommend that you do if you're going to be successful in this if you're gonna overcome this cycle of self-sabotage is you have to start off with creating a realistic system for yourself a realistic system that you can stick to for a long period of time I've actually talked about creating that system in a previous video which I'll post right here about being more productive and what I talked about is if you're going to achieve this goal of becoming a programmer you have to reverse engineer how you're going to get there so you have to start with your yearly goals go down your monthly goals your weekly goals and your daily goals and so if you're going to have a system about how you're going to study about how you're going to attack building your portfolio you have to figure out one that's going to be sustainable so for many of you guys who are working a full-time job either that's part-time maybe you have a family you have to look at your schedule realistically and say how many hours a week can I put into this and then you have to figure out how many hours a week can I put into active study time like building projects that I'm gonna put in my portfolio versus passive study time and instead of assuming that you have to do this you know 40 or 50 or 60 or 70 or more hours per week to actually be successful just look at how much time you have and go from there so whatever system you design make it realistic we're all human by the way I'm human I know I have my faults I know I get distracted it's from time to time I know I have my weaknesses so whenever I design a system for myself I give myself a lot of leeway in the beginning because I know that hey you know for example if I'm trying to learn yoga I'm not flexible at all I'm just gonna go into it just try to show up every single day because that's much more important so create that realistic system that you think you can adhere to for a long time for years potentially if that's what you need because that's the thing that's going to be much more important than having some sort of system that you're gonna try to do in a month and cram it all in it's just not going to work from there the second thing that I recommend for you to get out of this cycle is to focus on consistency over everything else the only way you're going to learn to program the only way you're gonna really make progress with this is if you're going to do this for a long period of time that I have met very few people who can pick this up quickly and so what you have to get used to is showing up every single day building that habit of showing up and studying building that habit of being reading code building that habit of putting things together creatively problem solving day in and day out over a period of time and while it's not very sexy it's actually really boring to say that because sometimes you show up for a week straight even studying and you feel like you're not really going anywhere the thing is the progress that happens over long periods of time is often invisible until it's not meaning if you have this sudden period of growth that comes out of nowhere even though the past may be a few weeks or a few months it feels like you haven't been going anywhere but that's how programming works in fact that's how any skill that's hard to attain basically works so you have to get much more comfortable with the idea of being consistent of preserving the habit of showing up every single day then trying to cram in as much possible work in a short period of time as you can I will bet on anybody who is able to do this for months or even years who's able to keep up that habit despite all these crazy things that go on in their life then somebody who is gonna be really motivated for a month or two that's gonna try to cram it all in it's just tends to be how that works so focus on consistency and more than anything else focus on preserving the habit of showing up and following that system that realistic system that we talked about in step 1 the last thing I say about avoiding the self-sabotage loop is that you want to focus on recuperation and re-energizing yourself and recharging yourself so a big part of your system where your plan should be making sure you get enough sleep I hope this goes without saying but so many people cut corners on sleep because they think it doesn't matter well sleep policy helps you to think more clearly it helps to regulate your emotions so that you're not as you know you're not feeling negative emotions on a consistent basis and it obviously will give you more energy which you've been put towards applying to focus and study from there you don't want to cut out healthy habits that you already have so if you find that you're eating healthy you're exercising you're doing things that recharge you don't cut those out of your life for the sake of putting more time into coding more time doesn't always equal better and those activities that you're cutting out like let's say hanging out with friends is a big one if you're not hanging out with friends who you often hang out with and they give you more energy when you hang out with them then it's not worth cutting them out so any activity that you find that recharges you whether that's you travel every once in awhile maybe spend time with some of your extended family exercise sleep is a big one like I said before all those activities are extremely important and you have to focus on them it's not good to sacrifice time spent for recuperative activities just to add more to your coding it's not like you can't always look at things like more coding is better you have to know what is going to help you over the long term it because it's always the long-term focus on long term sustainability over the short term shortcuts so those are really the main ways that I even myself focus on the long term and I don't have those burnouts just like I had before so I certainly hope that this video has helped give you some clarity about how to get out of that nasty cycle that a lot of us get drawn into and if you did enjoy this video please leave a like also make sure to comment and let me know how this video helped by the way if you are interested in getting more content from me I have a free Facebook group that you can join if you want to get more content like that from me sometimes I do some Q&A sessions I keep spammers out of there I try to keep the content as high quality as we can possibly make it so if you're interested in joining that group I will leave a link in the description below here go ahead and sign up as soon as you possibly can and I guess I'll see you in there so other than that thank you so much for watching and as always guys [Music]

Channel: Andy Sterkowitz

Views: 50,907

Rating: 4.9791989 out of 5

Keywords: self taught programmer, self taught software developer, learning to code, computer science, software engineer, software engineering, software development, computer programming, programming, software developer, andy sterkowitz, code, self-taught programmer, self-taught software developer

Id: jnLtRv67T2M

Length: 11min 59sec (719 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 26 2020