Something common among all of his experiences is that he never seemed to have done projects FOR HIMSELF. Reading books and completing tutorials and examples doe

Something common among all of his experiences is that he never seemed to have done projects FOR HIMSELF. Reading books and completing tutorials and examples does gives an introduction, but if you don't have a goal, something that motivates you, it's like learning how to drive by making laps in a parking lot. Sure you'll know how to push the gas pedal and turn the steering wheel. You'll even learn how to brake, but it is utterly boring and shows very little on real life driving. My first personal projects where about downloading... files from irc networks and finding words for online scrabble games and little things like that. It allows you to make mistakes and get into design troubles. You learn what is nice with a GUI and how it eventually sucks to have spaghetti code. It is a real problem, not just a a spooky thing you read about in programming books. Examples and tutorials do not allow for that. They automatically guide you to the right choices with or without reason, but you will not have experienced the failures of the wrong choices and their implications. But most of all, I kept hacking those projects because they interested me deeply. I wanted those "files" and I wanted to best everyone with a fast scrabble solver. These days, the only reason I read tutorials like these is when I have chosen the language I need for a project to use but don't have enough knowledge on how to use it and never the other way around. Find a goal first, then worry about the journey, even if "it is about the journey", otherwise you'll be making laps in a parking lot and eventually give up.