There is a lot has been clarified recently about our minds and our biology which drives it. From the religious dogmatism, through Freudian and Jungian abstract bullshit, via down-to-earth behaviorism and then that Chomsky abstract bullshitter, all the way [back] to myelination and dopamine (and other neuromodulators). We have lost the the abstract notion of a “free will” on the way (what we do really is just a “Brownian motion” within tight social-economic, racial and biological constraints. Those very few who “broke free” just had favorable circumstances, which we could call “luck”).
Anyway, the point is that “repetitive behavior” which is what unitedly any “deliberate practice”, can be correctly reduced to “changes within some particular tissues”, be it muscle, nerves or brain tissues (composed of neurons and blood vessels).
There is a millennia old Indian maxim which captures and generalizes these biological processes:
You are what your deepest desire is. As is your desire, so is your intention. As is your intention, so is your will. As is your will, so is your deed. As is your deed, so is your destiny.
which is another way to say that your are what you repeatedly do.
Most of people, including me, are repeatedly performing some small tasks. Cooking food and running the house are the most fundamental activities – regular cooking goes back to the very beginning of mankind.
The most fundamental characteristic of these tasks is that they are short and the feedback loops (and dopamine rewards) are quick. Some simple physical exercises (not skills) are also of this kind too. So are most religious practices and rituals – you do someting and receive almost an instant gratification (usually unjustified) – a few hours (at most) of effort, and wallah – have your dopamine. Writing of short pieces… OK, nevermind.
Once one became used (addicted) to short tasks (tight feedback/neuromodulator loops) there is no way back (myelination, you see). People who excel at long tasks, characterized by a delayed gratification (yes, exactly this psychological meme) are very different in their resulting brain structure (I cannot test this with an FMRI, but I see the infallible biological principles).
Learning of the “long tasks” requires a lot of time (yes, another meme – the 10,000 hours of a deliberate practice) and mentors. There are biological reasons for this too. The most obvious example is a top-tier (world-class) musical instrument performance. Or any other competitive performance evaluated by “quality” (absence of flaws).
Why I am talking about this undergraduate psych 101 stuff? Well, this explains why a good programming is so hard.
Programming is Understanding, they said, and understanding is the hardest thing on Earth. Just like a violin, it requires tens of thousands of hours, a much delayed gratification (if at all) and a lots of very real psychological “pain” (mental states). It is way more difficult than any Bruce Lee or Tyson or Goggins things, because the mind decays much quicker then the muscles.
The most painful part is that a “professor” book-knowledge is not a substitute for the actual “finger” knowledge and “muscle memory” of a piano or a violin player. Not just that, but a practice alone will do (hello, mr. Carmack, sir). I know this because I am an outstanding UNIX system administrator, who learned everything the way Carmack leaned programming – by doing long hours. Notice, that “devops”, as they call it nowadays, is a short task. At least I never got stuck for more than a day or two.
So, there are two life-saving lessons. Programming can be mastered only by doing – by writing a lot of stupid, crappy programs. Just exactly as a violin of a novice sounds awful or “your first 10,000 photographs will be crap” (why, yes, I know a lot of memes).
The second lesson is that, unless your are Carmack, without at lest some of a professor bookish knowledge your code will be shit like PHP (a fractal of bad design, you know) or Ethereum (a PHP of crypto). This is exactly why good schools like MIT or Stanford or CMU or Cornell are teaching both, and why the online courses alone (without these lab practice sessions and especially the long “projects”) won’t go.
Yes, it is possible to slowly re-myelinate your aging brain so you could perform some “long tasks”, but only at a mediocre level, and this is why everyone are trying to hire the young and properly conditioned (“programmed since age of 8”). And, again, this is just biology, stupid.
Now what? Well, at least you begin to see things as they really are. If your are not a top-tier performer at your prime time (like Tyson), your probably should consider “plan B” .