I just got obsessed with it while still in grade school and spent all of my spare time learning and trying stuff. I started hundreds of little useless projects,

I just got obsessed with it while still in grade school and spent all of my spare time learning and trying stuff. I started hundreds of little useless projects, all of them out of my league. Pre-planned courses never appealed to me at all, maybe because of some slight ADD tendencies. They try to titrate knowledge in a steady, regulated, and pedagogic way. That just bores the shit out me. The only thing that even remotely excites me is diving into doing things that are too difficult for me, failing, beating my head against my desk, asking real people for help (not supervisors or TA's), making tiny exhilarating steps of progress. I'm generally very skeptical about all kinds of teaching, upbringing, and so on. Like when parents and educators try to ensure that their kids turn out good by adhering to various "time-honored" methods and curricula, and fail to realize that they're just locking their kids up for decades, ineffectively preaching at them while they wait for the break so they can talk about whatever they're actually, genuinely, vitally interested in. Maybe I'm just weird, but to me joining a MOOC seems like tying oneself up in chains to learn how to walk. There does seem to be people who actually find sustainable motivation in that sort of thing, but the statistics seem to say they're not as many as those who only think they will. By all means dabble around with some courses to get your feet wet, but don't expect to become a good programmer by following other peoples' curricula!