Why Most People FAIL to Learn Programming

all right i've been making programming videos on youtube for over two years now and in that time i've gotten hundreds and hundreds of messages of people asking me how to learn to code telling me their plan for learning the code saying they got super inspired but unfortunately a lot of these people they never make it now it's not because they're not smart enough but i strongly believe it's because they've fallen to one of four traps now these are mistakes that if you can avoid them the only thing that stands between you and that programming career is being distracted with youtube videos like this just one more though in this video i'm gonna talk about those four traps how you can successfully avoid them and i'm gonna try to give you a unique perspective and unique insights that you can't find in other videos uh by giving you my opinion as a programmer for at this point close to four years anyway let's get right into it with the first trap so you've heard the analogy of your brain being a computer before and okay hardware is important but more important i think is your operating system that is your mindset now i first found out about this concept from this guy owen cook on youtube you might be familiar with him he's a self-help guy and he didn't invent this concept but it is growth versus fixed mindset now growth mindset is what you want where you're focusing on how much better you're getting at something every day instead of how good you currently are so if you look over the past week how good were you on monday versus friday that's really what you should be focusing on because if you do that it's just a matter of time before you get closer and closer to where you actually want to be i'll give you an example i'm learning russian right now and at first i was just trying to say i like and it's and i couldn't remember it but then i finally got it and i realized hey now that i know this i'm gonna know it forever and i just have this in my vocabulary so it's the same with coding once you know how to reverse a linked list or traverse on the dom with javascript you just have that skill now and no one's going to take it away from you so growth mindset super important first tip and it's going to get more interesting from here don't worry now the next trap that you've almost certainly heard of is called tutorial hell i prefer to call it the tutorial treadmill though it's where you keep running doing tutorial after tutorial and you're not going anywhere you're in the same place and your enthusiasm just slowly goes down you get discouraged because you feel like it's too hard but i'm here to tell you that you haven't actually gotten any closer to mastery until you write your first line of code without help i'll say that again until you actually write a line of code not copy it then you're still at square one so that's why i encourage people to get on practice sites like code wars absolutely as soon as possible because that's when the learning starts and people feel like they're dumb because they've watched 100 hours of tutorials and then they go on code wars and they can't do the easiest problem and that's because you're still a baby in code years until you start writing code it's so simple but so many people don't understand this so just start writing code today do code wars start doing projects even if they're too hard and you will get there faster than you think i promise all right let's talk about trap number three which is not choosing a niche so a lot of programming youtubers will say don't focus on specific technology focus on general programming skills and you're gonna be fine so i don't necessarily agree and here's why companies are fundamentally hiring you to solve a business need and if you can't do that they're gonna have to train you from scratch okay you'll have the foundation of programming but if you can't solve the problem from day one and someone else can why are they gonna hire you just think about it what do i mean by niche and how do you choose one well a lot of people focus on programming as a whole that's way too broad you can go down to something like javascript or python that's still too broad though what you really need to do is keep going deeper so go into javascript go deeper into react and then start building react web apps with next js and that'll be your niche stack so now any company that uses react and especially next js on top of that they're going to see you and you're going to be the perfect fit so just from a marketing perspective and from an actual value you can create perspective uh going very specific on your stack very specifically into a niche is actually gonna help you a lot don't be the devops guy be the aws expert who writes the sickest deployment scripts and has a tattoo of all the aws services another example don't just be the backend guy or the python guy be the django specialist who is so good at django you can start pushing code on day one final note on this trap this is a little bit less true with large tech companies because they have the resources to train you but the smaller the company gets the more you're gonna need to know out of the gate because they can't waste their time or money on you and it's the most true when you're freelancing because the client is definitely not going to train you you have to be able to save them time now finally trap number four is trying to do it alone and there's a reason why people are willing to pay so much for a college or coding boot camp and that's to get into a community of like-minded individuals because without that a college is it's just a library and some old people reading you a book anyway these institutions are really expensive but the community is invaluable it's really good on the other end of the spectrum you have free forms and communities you have things like stack overflow reddit and you have open course communities like harvard cs50 you can join and people are doing the same course but the problem with these is uh and it might be because they're free maybe not but people aren't really invested in the community so they come one day they go one day they sign up they never do it that kind of thing so it can be kind of watered down with these people who are just trying to either extract value and not give it back or they're just very ephemeral the final option which is kind of in the middle community wise is a paid course that is going to have a strong group attached to it so i'll give you just a few examples of communities i've joined uh the first one is called visualize value i took this design course from this guy on i found on twitter jack butcher and i joined his community and people are just making great connections in there they're getting feedback and everything and it's super active and a few hundred people uh the other one i've done is parker walbeck here on youtube a guy who does filmmaking i joined his full-time filmmaker program and i learned so much from people posting in his community and uh actually it seems like people are getting more value from the community than the course and of course there's a ton more but this is something i feel is super valuable uh so much so that i'm creating my own community for freelance developers which also has a program inside that's going to take people from zero to successful freelance developer and we're going to be focusing on the e-commerce niche but also learning all the web development so i won't push it too much but if you want to learn more check out the description i'm teaming up with a partner on that too all right guys those are the four traps you definitely want to avoid when you're learning the code and if you can get around those mistakes you'll be in pretty good shape and hopefully you'll be emailing me your success story all right uh if you learned something hit the like button if you don't mind and with that i'll see you in the next video [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Aaron Jack

Views: 498,621

Rating: 4.949131 out of 5

Keywords: programming, web development, javascript, react, learn programming, learn to code, coding, software development, become a software developer, software developer, freelancing, freelance developer, coding tutorials, software, fail, why people fail, learning programming

Id: T7aSI-E1fCE

Length: 8min 4sec (484 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 05 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/AndydeCleyre]

If you post a video, please explain here what it actually is.

[u/rsclient]

Using hashtag #SavedYouAWatch: The video lists 4 traps that prevent people from doing well when learning programming.

1. Use growth mindset. Remember that everything you learn about programming builds together; you need to know a lot before you can program, and it's important to keep on learning.
2. Tutorial hell. Constantly watching tutorials instead of writing programs. And it has to be "without help" and without copying.
3. Not choosing a niche. You need to learn a specific programming language or framework that a company will hire you for. (This is something I approve of if you're attempting to get a first job)
4. Trying to learn alone. Having a community is highly valuable. There are open communities like stackoverflow and online courses. But it's valuable to be in a strong, focused community. As a timid introvert, I hate that he's right :-)