You stop doing "whatever" because there is no emotional incentive. I have found that straight out learning per se, without some sort of emotional reason to do

You stop doing "whatever" because there is no emotional incentive. I have found that straight out learning per se, without some sort of emotional reason to do do so, is never successful. My eyes just glaze over, and I get sleepy. (Which is merely my mind and body trying to 'get away from here'.) When I am trying to learn something, I have found that I have to have a 'project', otherwise all that learning is just pure blather. Like, ferinstance when I moved from coding a well-known-to-me text user-interface to learning and applying a new-to-me graphic user-interface. With some form of project, you have to solve lots of new problems that you haven't solved before. You have to learn something specific that's new and unknown to you before you can make progress in doing that project. When you can fix that obstacle, you can move on to solving the next obstacle. Meanwhile, you are getting more and more knowledge, and more and more insight into whatever it is that you are learning. The 'project' in itself can be meaningless. In effect you are going to "Build One to Throw Away", as the saying goes. By the time you have completed the project, you will have learned so much, that you will want to rewrite/redo it in the light of your new-found knowledge and insights, anyway. That first attempt will be so bad that you will know what needs to be fixed, and your new knowledge will tell you how to best do it. Learning a new language? Try to read a book in that new language. Learning a new graphical toolkit? Convert one of your previous programs to use that new toolkit. Learning mathematics? Try to solve mathematical puzzles. So, find YOUR project.