Three career traps programmers fall into, part one

Two developers with the same talent can end up in very different careers. The difference is rarely intelligence. More often it is a handful of habits, and the first one is motivation.

Motivation is a cause, not a mood

Think of motivation as the force that makes you start. It is not something that arrives on its own. You generate it, deliberately, by aiming at work you actually want to do.

The trap

The trap is choosing work you dislike and then blaming yourself for not feeling eager. You cannot force enthusiasm for a project that bores you, and pretending otherwise just adds guilt to the problem.

Why this matters for learning

Learning to program takes many hours of practice that nobody makes you do. If the work is interesting to you, those hours pass easily. If it is not, every one of them is a fight. Choose the practice that pulls you forward.

The second trap is the subject of part two.