These Rules Can Help To Learn Coding Early. Do you ever feel like all you’re doing to become a software engineer is watching online video lessons? You always say to yourself that you’ll finish the online class you started this time. However, learning to code is like doing anything else that you don’t enjoy, like doing the dishes or the laundry. Besides that, you can’t move forward at all. “How do you stay motivated when learning to code?” is the question.
And Atomic Habits by James Clear fills that need. You most likely don’t read self-help books since you haven’t heard of this one. What do habit loops mean? This book answers these and other questions. How can you get your environment ready to help you reach your goals? How can someone use dopamine spikes to keep doing good things? All of these questions will be answered, and I’ll also show you how to make learning programming a good habit. Let’s move on.
WHAT SMALL CHANGES CAN DO
Take a look at a flight from Los Angeles to New York. Just before takeoff, the pilot changes the flight path by 3.5 degrees without meaning to. This change is not noticeable. Because the change is so small, neither the passengers nor the cabin crew know about it. The people on the plane believe they are in New York, but they are walking on the clean streets of Washington, DC. They have to do a smell test.
The main point is that even small changes can have big effects on how our lives develop. We don’t see the changes right away either, just like the passengers and the cabin crew. In the long run, though, these small changes may add up to big changes, and the outcome may be very different.
WHAT YOU NEED TO DO TO BECOME A SOFTWARE ENGINEER
As a new programmer, you might think that you need to come up with something completely new to be successful in the computer industry. However, all you need to do is take a small step every day toward your goal, and before you know it, you will have reached it. If you keep going on Instagram and YouTube, you won’t get better at programming in a year. In a year, you will be very close to getting that job as a software engineer if you make small daily habits that help you learn how to code.
HOW TO FORM HABITS
It’s great to make habits, but it’s hard to keep them up. This is because it’s possible that you don’t notice that your programming skills are getting better over time. When you start learning programming, you expect your skills to get better in a straight line. That being said, this is what happens. At first, you won’t see any changes. As James Clear puts it, this part of the graph is “The valley of disappointment.” At this point, most people give up, lose interest, and go back to how they were acting before. But the results of your work are being held up.
You’ll start to feel superhuman once you get past this first stage. All of a sudden, building things, learning a new language, and getting the job you want will come naturally to you. When you think about that first piece of code you wrote, you will probably laugh at yourself. My wife and I still laugh at my first website to show off my work.
PUTTING TOGETHER THE HABIT LOOP
In any case, we will learn how to create and keep these atomic behaviors in the rest of the movie. First, let’s talk about how to make a routine for learning how to code. Before I can answer, we need to figure out how new habits are formed. That’s what “Habit Loop” does. Want, Reaction, Reward, and Cue That’s how habits are formed, whether they are good or bad. To understand the habit loop, let’s look at a bad habit that we all have. You can tell by the way the phone shakes. You feel like you have to find out who sent the message.
To answer, you pick up the phone. And as a reward, you get to use Instagram for 30 minutes to feel good. You’re bored with the video tutorial, so you want to watch something funny. Please pick up the phone. As a reward, I watched more funny Mr. Beast videos for an extra hour. As soon as the tutorial gets old, your mind starts to connect watching YouTube with that task. Because of this, you get into the bad habit of wasting time while programming. Is it possible to use the same habit loop to make good habits?
How to EFFECTIVELY Form Good Habits
The cue will come first. Why is this the most important thing you need to learn how to code? You can’t even start class without it. Not a coffee cup, that’s not what I mean. It has to do with your laptop. Using your laptop as a reminder, can you make yourself learn how to code? Yes, and that’s exactly what James Clear does in Atomic Habits. To make it impossible to miss, he says to put your cue in the middle of the room, where it will be easy to see. It would be best if you could put it where you waste the most time. If you play video games a lot, put it next to your chair so you can see it when you start a new game.
Use of implementation intentions alone is not enough; you also need to plan how to use them. Studies show that people often don’t stick to healthy habits not because they lack motivation but because they aren’t sure what their goals are. I will learn how to code tomorrow is just a goal that doesn’t say how I will do it. Instead of just saying that you should include a plan for how to do it for your purpose. In other words, you shouldn’t just say, “I would learn programming every morning when my alarm goes off. I would sit at my desk for two hours and do a lesson.”
By making this small change, you will have a clear idea of what to do when you wake up. You can also get the same result by stacking behaviors. Adding the new habit you want to form to an existing habit is all that stacking habits is. That’s why you would say, “I would do a two-hour programming lesson on my desk right after I brush my teeth,” instead of “I will start a lesson when the alarm goes off.” Being consistent with these habits for a long time will make it more likely that you will keep them up. Make sure your laptop is in the middle of the room for this to work.
WHAT MAKES DOPAMINE WORK
Along with the implementation goal, the cue will give you the motivation you need to start learning programming. But this drive isn’t enough to keep you going by itself. That’s because people don’t do things for which they don’t get something in return. Before we can understand why that happens, we need to learn more about the hormone dopamine, which makes us want to do things. Neuroscientists used electrodes to stop lab rats from releasing dopamine in a study done in 1954. They were shocked by what they found.
Without dopamine, these rats couldn’t eat, drink, or have babies. And because of that, they all died. This sad experiment shows us how important dopamine is for keeping us going. Here’s how it affects people. Dopamine is made every time you scroll up on an Instagram reel. In the same way, dopamine is released when people do things. drug use. Dopamine makes us want to do these harmful things over and over again, to the point where they become habits in both cases.
DOPA TO FORCE GOOD HABITS TO STICK
Can we trick ourselves into thinking that the same dopamine is used to form good habits? If you want to give me a big dopamine boost before I answer, you can subscribe to the channel. On to the next subject: dopamine helped an Irish engineering student named Ronan. It was important for Ronan to get fit, but he didn’t have the drive to do so. Instead, he would waste hours watching Netflix. Then what did he do to work out more? He put them together. He had to be cycling faster than a certain speed to watch Netflix, so he hooked up his bike to his laptop and made a program to keep an eye on that. This is called “temptation bundling.”
You use an activity you already enjoy as a reward for the behavior you want to change. These are some ways that temptation bundling can help you get ahead in your programming classes: Software that keeps track of how long you work in your code editor could be made by you. Based on this time, this program can then tell you how long you can be on your phone. This will help you connect learning programming to a fun habit you already have. If anyone in the Power Community wants to work on making this program, please let me know in the comments. I will make sure that everyone in the neighborhood knows about your plan.
THE RULE OF TWO MINUTES
“The 2-minute rule” is another thing that can help you get into the habit of programming. When you set goals that are too high, it’s hard to stay motivated to reach them. James Clear says to break up new habits into manageable pieces and do this every day. He says to start with just two minutes every day. If you want to make reading more of a habit, you could start by reading for just two minutes every day. You will read it much faster than that if it is interesting.
It would take Java programming skills to write this “public static void main” method. And that would be very bad for us. So, this is what I suggest: “Do two exercises every day.” And if you do it for 30 days, I’m sure you’ll be doing a lot more exercises every day than just two. If you want to take the challenge, write “#30DayChallenge” in the comments. Check back in 30 days and tell us how things are going by replying to this comment. I will keep an eye out for you.
