For as long as I can remember I have always loved learning things, but looking back I was not particularly good at it. Until I learned how to code, I would get invested in topics, and do a lot of research, enough to talk about these topics with others, but never enough to be considered much of an authority on anything.
This isn't the case anymore. I feel as if now I am able to teach myself things with relative ease. When I think about this I am reminded of the quote
“If you know the way broadly you will see it in everything.” - Miyamoto Musashi.
There are many different interpretation of this quote (including stuff to do with the inner functioning of your eye) but in my opinion Joe Rogan hits the nail on the head when he elaborates what the quote means to him
"The idea is once you understand what excellence is all about, whether it's in painting, or carpentry or martial arts, that you see how that excellence manifests itself in any discipline. I think that all the different things that I do enhance all the other things that I do." For me learning to code was a grueling process, despite being able to "talk the talk" early on I really couldn't make anything with out a tutorial (and honestly it was hard to convince myself to finish any of those) for a very-very long time. I think I was coding for somewhere between a year and a half to two years before I actually received a payment for writing a line of code. I was convinced I could teach myself to get a job a lot quicker than that since there was a company out there named "One Month".
At some point during learning how to code I had to really "embrace the suck" and just hit my head against the wall with basically a total emotional detachment so that I could really just focus on turning what I knew into what I truly understood. I don't really know if that is a good way to explain that, but it felt like I was transferring something I knew well enough to regurgitate it, the way we are taught and tested in school, into something I understood well enough to really use to solve problems. This time happened to coincide with me deciding to get back on Adderall, something I attributed to being the reason I was able to finally make everything click, but I no longer think that is really true. Maybe is shaved a few months off the total, but I actually ended up getting off it about a year later, and have since been able to teach myself other things since even better than the results I had gotten on the time on it. I now think that I was simply entering a stage where I started to want to take things more seriously, and try harder to improve my circumstances, getting on Adderall was just something I tried at that time to help me achieve those goals, but it was setting the goals in the first place, and really focusing on them that helped me achieve them.