This is both good advice, and completely useless advice. > Stop and think about all of your personal interests and solve a simple problem related to one of the

This is both good advice, and completely useless advice. > Stop and think about all of your personal interests and solve a simple problem related to one of them As someone who has spent many years as an "aimless excited programmer", I would like to point out emphatically, that this idea did, in fact, occur to me. So I thought about it. I asked myself that question. But then what? I didn't have unsolved problems lingering in other hobbies. If I did, I would not have been aimless! This is specifically the task a person in this position is asking for help on. Then there were the rare times that I did have unsolved problems, but they were always way too big to practice on. Programming has two fundamental natures: abstraction and implementation. You can become an expert in the abstract, like a mathematician, but that doesn't make you an engineer. Just like mathematicians manage to keep learning math without engineering, we can keep learning programming without ever programming. It's a very unsatisfying position to be in.