How makers stay productive

I think the harder issue is where to get started. Many people know what they want to achieve in life, their dreams & goals, but they don't quite know where to start.

When you start from scratch it looks like a much more titanic task.

I would say (well, at least in my case?) that many people find learning overwhelming, but maybe not for those specific reasons?

For me, I usually have a pretty good idea of what I want, and what skills I might need to get there, and there are huge numbers of tools and websites and training opportunities for learning. The challenge is both figuring out what I need to learn first (how one skill builds on the next) and doing it consistently. My challenge is mostly time and energy.

What is a dream career? Dream and career in the same sentence sound like an oxymoron. Who wants a dream career, does it even exist? I picture a corporate slave stuck in a cubicle. It's better to be open-minded and set realistic SMART goals and then work on them every day. A way to trick you into learning and keep going is to start a project and then commit to working with it every day. That way you build habits and after a while, you see where you need to tweak and optimize to be more productive. This way learning and building a career will be by-products from your projects and you will have a toolbox and your own support systems after some time!

Dunno. "Dream career" doesn't sound particularly confusing to me? I usually think of that as someone's ideal career path -- usually a job (or multiple jobs in the same field) where the person gets paid to do something they are interested in and passionate about.

in my experience, most people have an idea of what they want to do, but they are simply too lazy to do it. especially in today's instant world. i don't think that starting is difficult for many. see new year's resolutions.

but which is really hard:

• no matter what barriers come, follow your dream -> not give up
• find the path that leads you to your goal (not the starting, the path between)
• willing to make sacrifices

Thanks a ton for your responses! I'd say that so far the story around the challenge is:

1. Determining dream career path & skills required to get there is relatively easy.
2. The real challenge seems to be 2-folds: (a) It's hard to figure out the sequence of learning/developing for required skills (and how they interrelate) (b) The time & energy required to keep going to make meaningful progress is too high.

The mind-boggling part is that (as Ben mentioned), there is an evergrowing sea of learning resources out there to learn (perhaps that contributes to the "titanic task"?) and an even greater variety of career paths out there. Therefore, I am led to think that the challenge is behavioral…

As someone who is currently facing the challenge myself, I think the bottleneck (and what prevents us from getting started) is the fact that learning in itself (taking courses/nanodegrees/bootcamps) won't be sufficient in upskilling, but instead must be paired with projects. When you see that big picture, it's quite daunting.

What do you guys think would be the best solution to this? How do you go about it (if at all) currently?

I can't say I have the solution, but I agree that moving from learning to putting that learning into action is essential. I'm doing some VueJS courses at the moment, an honestly, it's just going in one ear and out the other. I think I have to have a project where I apply what I am learning in order to actually remember this stuff.

Ben, what prevents you from "having that project"?

@Jae - Lack of time, mostly. Or the feeling that the project I'd like to build is larger or more complex than my skills will allow. I'm just saying I think I need to learn by actually doing, rather than simply reading/observing.