1. I look for a paid course where possible. If someone is taking your money, they make a commitment to teach you. As with salaries, people will charge more when

1. I look for a paid course where possible. If someone is taking your money, they make a commitment to teach you. As with salaries, people will charge more when they can get away with it. Think of the ROI - that $100 course will likely increase your TC by more than $100 within the same year. Many free courses do not make that commitment. About 90% of the free ones are incomplete in some way. Plenty of free courses are just a form of marketing for freelancers and job applicants. 2. Apply the knowledge. Al-Ghazali said that knowledge without practice is useless. One can have ten sharp swords and know how to wield them, but it's wasted resources unless used in battle. You can learn something abstract like functional programming, but it's only useful when you start thinking about how to apply it to your work. Maybe it lets you write better functions or easier to understand code, even if you're not adopting the whole paradigm. 3. "I wonder if these high-rank players no longer need help or are capable of solving all problems on their own?" Get used to reading primary sources. Invest time in learning to navigate docs. ChatGPT is awesome for this. It's there to help you find the right terms, tools, or methods, but you should refer to the primary docs, not the AI response. You can even use ChatGPT to decipher the docs if you're not used to it. 4. With new tech, e.g. AI, web3, blockchain, frameworks there's usually this mental block that comes from fear/hesitance. Figure out how to get rid of that block first before trying to tackle the material. Otherwise you'll be expending lots of energy against your own mind. 5. Learn the hard things early in the day. Major things have an energy threshold. Some people will practice easy things early, like increasing typing speed or Duolingo. You shouldn't eat the frog first thing of the day, but learn to warm up as quickly as possible. Also allocate a little time to figure out your top priority to spend energy on the next day.