I know this place very well. I spent many many lost nights there. But, I wasn’t sent there by some outside force. I willingly chose this path over and over and over again in the hopes that I could speed things up. I had all the concepts organized in my head, and I just needed the code right? (no, not right)

Well, in retrospect it was a bit arrogant, or naive depending on how you want to look at it. Not only did I want to learn quickly, but I wanted to learn it exactly the easiest most to-the-point way. Sometimes you fall into this trap for a night, or a few days, or a month, but when you string them together I’ve seen people stuck in this loop for years. It’s not only that you are losing time, but each loop seems to further distort your mental models and leave you with less and less confidence. The optimism that I could bend time and somehow skip the line was like a drug.

But, it’s not really a situation I fell into, or that someone put me in. I was choosing this irrational path. I thought that I could learn faster than reasonably possible. I did that to myself.

So, I guess this sorta looks like an above / below type of thing if you’re trying to relate this to heaven and hell. But, I don’t think that the top is really a heaven, it’s just normal. I’m unsure why up seems good. I’ll draw it out again, with a different style.

Now it’s more clearly an obstacle instead of a path.

It looks like a whirlpool here.

A whirlpool is a body of rotating water produced by opposing currents or a current running into an obstacle.

So, if it’s two opposing forces I’d say that they are wanting something to be easy and it not being easy.

If it’s an obstacle then it’s the fact that we don’t know how to do it? I’ll have to think about this more.

So, I’m not really sure what to say about the problem. I’m much more interested in the solution.

It’s hard to fit a never-ending stairway in this image. So, hopefully, the way this is stacked still makes sense.

If you were to bounce around learning a little bit about A and a little about D and not really putting your understanding of F into practice, things start to get disconnected. This is where you’re building your mental model for how things work and it can get really distorted. You can always adjust your mental model later, but I find that it takes 10x the work. The other thing is that we create these really vague ideas of how things work and then we accept them without even understanding them consciously. Those are really hard to untangle. Maybe that doesn’t make sense, but I’ve had to reteach something to someone who was sure they understood it perfectly and it was wild to see how very little they could explain their understanding of the subject. When you’ve got a bunch of distorted/disconnected tools it’s hard to put them together, and it’s hard to even know how to ask for help.

If you have a clear set of mini-goals, then you can layer concepts in order of importance. Then you need to practice each concept until it clicks. In a real-world situation that means something to you. If you’re just following along as someone pulls in all sorts of 3rd party dependencies and follows a happy path to creating some twitter clone, it’s probably not going to stick.

Instead, you need to think up your own project! And you need a path that layers up the concepts based on importance.