Once in a while, I get asked questions of the form: "I want to learn programming, where should I start?", "I have an exam on topic X, how should I study?", "I have heard a lot about artificial intelligence, I wanna know what is going on, what should I do?", "Hey brother, could you lend me some money?" (Oops, this is not the place for it). Getting the right advice or not can make a huge difference in the future course of the person asking. I know that it could be the difference between loving something or hating it; passing the exam or failing it, etc. I am not here to undermine the importance of getting good advice. However, from what I observe, some people ask for advice, do research about learning resources; just to procrastinate the actual job, which is sitting and working. If you can learn a new programming language in 50 hours, you shouldn't really spend 50 hours getting advice on how to learn it.
Most people are not content with or proud of how they spend their time, and they feel guilty about it. They wanna do something productive, something useful for them. Asking for advice, searching for learning resources gives the best of both worlds: people do not feel guilty about how they spend their time, and they don't do the actual "hard" work. I am not here to criticize people having it. I am fully aware that the digital world around us is designed to make us do impulsive things. They shorten our attention span. It is getting harder and harder to just sit and work and it is really hard to get out of this positive feedback (positive has negative meaning in this context, like medicine:)) mechanism. You can't really expect someone struggling with money and anxiety about the future to do things that pay in the long run as if everything is alright around them. The point of this writing is to point out this observation in case the reader is not aware, and to put it out as a reminder to myself: "once I had it"(Big breakthrough). As Jerry Seinfeld once said: "... you can put all kinds of furniture in, but you gotta have steel in the walls." Similarly, you can search for the best advice all over, but in the end, you should follow the advice.