If you're learning to code in 2024, this is one piece of advice that I'd give.

If you're learning to code in 2024, this is one piece of advice that I'd give. And this is especially suited for people who have tried to learn programming in the past but haven't had much luck or fell through halfway. By the way, if you aren't already, make sure you give me a follow if you want me to help you learn programming. I'm going to break this up into three parts. The first part, and I've dedicated a part to this because most people don't do this, and that is you need to ask yourself why you want to learn how to code. This is so important that I think it's worth doing before writing your first line of code. Do you want to code because you want to get a programming job? Or do you want to code because you want to build your own app or website? Or is it merely that you just want to give programming a try? Each one of these reasons will have an impact on what you learn, how you go about learning it, and what you eventually do afterwards. And each one can take a different amount of time. For example, if you are learning how to code because you want to work at a big tech company, the time it's going to take for you to get into that position to start applying for that job is very different to the time it might take for you to build your first app or website. The point is, each of these can take a varying amount of time and so you need to ask yourself why at the beginning. Otherwise, you're going to waste your time learning things that you don't need to know. Once you've got the why under your belt, then you need to do some research. Now, I've made some videos about this on my page, so feel free to have a look. But let's just say that you want to learn how to code to build your own website. Taking that example, the next thing you need to do is to build your own learning plan. Now, this is probably the most confusing step of the journey and where most beginners give up, and it's because the pathway isn't as clear. If you were to speak to three programmers directly, each one of them would tell you or recommend you different resources or a different learning path. So what should you do in that instance? And my best strategy for dealing with this, and it's probably not what I like to hear when I ask for advice from other people about different things, and that is in this particular instance, don't overthink. Which is to say, pick one learning path and go with it. Maybe use your own judgement here to an extent. For example, if you're learning how to code to build a website and you're speaking to a programmer who did that last year, you're probably better off listening to them and the advice that they have to offer compared to, for example, someone who hasn't built a website but has built their own app. Use some judgement here, but the point is don't overthink, just pick one path. Once you've got the path under control, this is the last thing that you need to do. You need to set up a distraction-free environment. This is one of my pet peeves, but I think social media has not done a great job for helping us with our attention spans. If you've made it this far in the video, you're probably in the top 5% of viewers on TikTok. And you've probably seen on my previous videos where people complain that I talk too much. In any case, the point is most people want information and they want it quickly, and largely because they can't concentrate for more than 10 seconds. When it comes to programming, understand that it requires concentration. It's a different level of focus and it requires some hard thinking, because you'll often spend quite a bit of time having to debug problems. And so if you're being distracted every 5 minutes or so, you're not going to be able to get into a flow of learning and writing code. So my advice here is pick 2 or 3 days and times in the week where you can spend 1-2 hours and make sure you set up your environment for that study session. If you take this seriously, then I guarantee you'll see results. And in these sessions, I'd recommend probably pointing your phone if you can in another room. If you found this helpful, make sure you follow for more.