Currently want to become a programmer, but my motivation/drive to actually learn Data Structures and Algorithms is very little.
Curious if any have any studies or proven techniques to improve drive/motivation.
Find ways to rely less on motivation. Shift to discipline and habits or patterns.
I don’t feel like going to the gym 9 times out of 10. I go because it’s on my calendar and it’s what I do Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday.
I don’t want to practice the language I’m learning most days. I do it because I have phone reminders to practice at the same time every day right after breakfast.
If I get to the point of dreading the thing, I reevaluate why I’m doing it to begin with and whether I really want to continue. I’ve worked really hard on being able to drop things that don’t “spark joy”, to borrow from Kondo, without feeling guilty for quitting.
Maybe unpopular opinion, but… if you’re not interested in learning DSA with any form of rigidity, you don’t have to learn those right out the gate. Just get your feet through the door. Build a small project, automate something - you will learn about your chosen language’s data structures by default. If there comes a point in time where you’re expected to know about DSA, you’ll probably have found the reasons/motivation by then
definitely. you can keep pushing forward on topics that reward you, and use that to passively pick up datastructures without the focus or name. then later you can re-formalize it and understand why what you were already doing was reinforcing datastructures, etc, and have a jumping off point to expand that.
Same way botany tends to work. Focus on field work, learn about biomes, learn the easy parts of flower morphology and ecology, then later you can start getting more into systematics and taxonomy. Starting by feeding the dopamine beast is often a great way to get into a new field.
You should study cognitive surplus. What you’re dealing with is a daily workload that has more decisions in it than your brain can handle and still have energy left over.
When you run out of think, you can no longer even.
Study a few pages every day of whatever is not motivating, and keep going for months and months
Have a vision of what you want to do later with that skill (for example "6 months from now, I program an app that can send Morse code through my phone’s flashlight ")
Every day, do the studying chores first, THEN do the fun stuff like playing video games or scrolling through social media. Never the opposite
Spend more time with those that have similar goals
What I do is open up a window and get it all set up at the beginning of my day, and then I tell myself some number of hours in advanced that I’m going to go just 20 minutes of that work. So it tricks my brain because its already set up and ready to go, its so far in like 6 hours so I can relax for now, and when the time comes its been on my radar for so long it feels like I can’t just not do it at that point and its only 20 minutes I’ll have to slog through. By the time the 20 minutes is up I’m already in the swing and got momentum going so I then don’t stop.
