There are three questions: how do you want to make money? how do you want to be entertained? how do you want to sell yourself? It's very easy to get stuck in t

There are three questions: how do you want to make money? how do you want to be entertained? how do you want to sell yourself? It's very easy to get stuck in the world of CRUD because it pays the bills, but as you noted there are a lot of technologies. Shifting out of that world requires risk tolerance because there will be failure after failure. That wall you speak of is the nature of hard things and the time you can dedicate bashing your head against that wall. My advice for climbing/breaking the wall: Pick a small project that you find interesting: build an OS, game, programming language, VM, etc... and just do it. The key is to cross the hump of understanding and get something simple working, and the good news is that conceptual understanding isn't that far away. The tool to help you get unblock is writing. Write the comments of what you are trying to do, and break it down until it becomes code-like. Read books on the subject and bounce back to writing what you read. However, going from conceptual understanding to professional environment is different because the concepts start to inter-relate and the complexity manifests. Prior writings on this: http://jeffrey.io/writings/thoughts-for-young-hackers-and-software-peoples.html http://jeffrey.io/writings/thoughts-for-young-hackers-and-so... http://jeffrey.io/writings/build-first-buy-second.html http://jeffrey.io/writings/build-first-buy-second.html