An unresolved mental dilemma is a part of a lot of my worry and inaction.
Basically it goes: If you just keep working, will you always keep making progress towards where you want to be?
I don't necessarily mean "if you just put in the effort then you'll succeed," which I do not believe in. People talk about "practice with purpose." You have to know the parts that you need to improve on and correct them if your actual intention is to get better at something. I believe that works better than taking any arbitrary action at all, with the same goal in mind.
So it's not knowing if writing that 10K LoC program actually does help or not. I forget things I've done. I lose interest.
Then I extrapolate from this and think, then there must be some spectrum of things in between that are not practically useful, and if I keep doing them then I will not improve in the ways that I want. I will believe that maybe writing a stringly typed C++ application is just reinforcing bad habits that I will have to expend extra effort to undo later. I then believe if that's the case then I ought to not do that thing at all if I believe it's just going to hinder my progress.
The problem is that this mindset costs me a lot of my action, because I figure if what I'm doing is not beneficial for my skills then I'd better get something else. A lot of the time that "something else" is something less challenging, all the way to nothing productive at all. So I end up believing I'm just coddling myself in an attempt to avoid "wasting time" not really improving.
I think this kind of fallacy stems from a fear of banging my head into a wall expecting to get better at some point without knowing if I'm actually on the right track. At least if someone knowledgeable teaches you they could suggest so. And that fear stems from placing too much value on intellectual success as opposed to enjoying the process. If you only enjoy something on the condition you improve, then it discourages you. I've been discouraged a lot.
It could also be due to divorcing enjoyment of something from improving at it. I simply always care about improving, and if I don't see improvement then I'll lose interest. But some say that people who enjoy things just improve on the basis of doing it at all. I just can't seem to get myself to believe it, though.
1. For each activity that you want to improve in know exactly why you want to improve. If it’s because you hope it’ll be fun later but it’s not fun now you should probably stop. There will be a time it’s less fun than it was in the beginning and you’ll give up then anyway. If it’s to get to do something different on the other side, stop expecting enjoyment and just pay the price.
2. Bias towards action. If you want to start running, just go run. Don’t read about it. Don’t sign up for a race. Don’t buy better shoes. Just go run for a while (or write some code or say all the Spanish words you already know out loud).
3. Spend 10-20% of your training time (do not go outside of this range) on improving your training. This is when you watch that video about your activity. People naturally gravitate towards 0 or 100% of time in planning. “A little bit” is the best but rarely done.
4. Check in with someone better than you on a regular schedule to make sure your training is progressing well. Weekly is very good. This could be a coach, mentor, partner, something like that (not an accountability buddy).
I think you are, you are better having done that than before. It might not have been the best improvement you could have gotten out of it, but still.
The relevant XKCD is this one: https://xkcd.com/1414/