In the last article (The Joy of Learning) I described that it’s actually really fun to learn new things. But how do you even start learning in this day and age, with countless distractions like TikTok and Reels?

If you’ve been wondering why you’ve been so unproductive while other people still get shit done, it’s usually because they are not distracted. If you open Instagram the second you feel even a tiny itch of boredom, you’re basically frying your dopamine and distracting yourself instantly. So you never get that feeling of wanting to learn or build something.

Before I get to the sauce, let me say this: motivation is shit. From my personal experience, you’re motivated like 5-10% of the time. Motivation goes away extremely quickly. If you think I’m running on motivation, you’re wrong.

There’s a simple trick though. All you’ve gotta do is nothing. Literally. Most people are scared of silence because it forces them to think.

Turn off every screen. Turn off music too (otherwise you’re just vibing to music and still consuming something). After a while, you’ll become distraction-free and ideas will start to flow. You may have noticed this same thing when you can’t fall asleep.

After a bit, you’ll be like: “This game idea is cool, let me try building that.” And boom, now you have a weekend plan. You can learn Godot, or whatever tool you’re using.

Now you just have to keep expectations small, so you don’t burn out from complexity. And after the weekend is done, you’ve built your first thing and learned the basics of the language/framework.

At that point you built a habit, so continuing is easy. Now you just repeat and build incrementally bigger projects until you become the developer you always wanted to be.

It’s always easier to continue when you already have the habit of building every day. That’s how I do things.

All you had to do was remove distractions. So think about your next move: is it going to be Counter-Strike, Instagram, or your IDE?

Here you go. Now you can BUILD SHIT.