2-Minute Rule to Learn Coding - Atomic Habits

Key Takeaways

do you ever feel like you are just watching online video tutorials but not actually getting closer to becoming a software engineer you always tell yourself that this time you're going to finish the online course you started but when you actually sit down to learn coding it just feels like any other boring task like washing dishes or doing laundry and you find it impossible to make any progress so the question is how to stay motivated when learning to code and that's where Atomic Habits by James Clear comes in if you've not heard about this book you're probably not into self-help books at all this book answers questions like what are habit Loops how to prime your environment to make progress on your goals and how to use dopamine spikes to stick to good habits by answering these questions I'll show you how you can build the life-changing habit of learning programming let's do this imagine a plane taking off from Los Angeles for New York just before the takeoff the pilot accidentally changes the flight path by 3.5 degrees which is almost negligible it's such a small change that neither the cabin crew nor the passengers notice anything when the plane lands the passengers find themselves doing a sniff test because they they are walking on the clean streets of Washington DC instead of New York the point is that very small changes can completely change the trajectory of our lives and just like the cabin crew and the passengers we do not see the immediate results of these changes but in the long run the effect of these tiny changes compound and the final outcome can be very different as a new programmer you would think that you need to build something revolutionary to make it into the tech industry but in reality all you need to do is take small steps towards your goal every day and you will be there before you know it keep scrolling Instagram and watching Netflix you will be no better programmer than today in one year build tiny Atomic habits that help you learn programming every day and you'll be very close to Landing that software engineer job in one year building habits is fine but sticking to them is where the real challenge lies that's because you might not feel that your programming skills are improving from day to day when you start learning programming you expect to see a linear Improvement but here is what actually happens in the beginning you will not see any results James Clear calls this part of the craft the valley of disappointment this is where most people lose motivation give up and go back to their old habits but in reality the returns for your effort are actually delayed once you go past this initial phase you will start feeling like a superhuman learning a new language building projects and getting a job you want will suddenly start coming naturally to you when you look back at the first piece of code you wrote you will definitely laugh at yourself my wife and I still make fun of the first portfolio website I made to this day by the way if you are wondering that's not the website I made I'm too ashamed to show my website but I'll just say this the website I made had this rotating Cube where each side of the cube had the name of one of my tech skills anyway in rest of the video we'll not just learn how to build these Atomic habits but also how to stick to them let's start with how to build the habit of learning programming before I can answer that we first need to understand how we built any new habit and that's where habit Loop comes in queue craving response reward that's the loop that builds any good or bad habit that we repeat over and over again let's understand the Habit loop with the help of a bad habit we all suffer from the phone vibrates that's your cue you crave to see who the notification is from response you pick up the phone and the reward 30 minutes of dopamine release scrolling Instagram Q feeling bored with the video tutorial craving want to see something entertaining response you pick up the phone reward whilst Entertaining Mr Beast videos for another hour soon your mind starts making these associations between watching YouTube when you're getting bored with your tutorial and you end up building this bad habit of wasting your time during your programming session but can you use the same habit Loop to build good habits let's start with the queue when you want to learn programming what is that one thing that you need without which you cannot even start your lesson no I'm not talking about a cup of coffee here I'm talking about your laptop can you use laptop as your queue and kill yourself into learning programming the answer is yes that's exactly what James Clear recommends in atomic habits He suggests that you should make your queue unmissable by placing it in the middle of your room in full view even better if you can place it where you waste the most amount of your time if you play a lot of video games place it near your gaming chair so that it's visible when you start a new game queue alone would not be sufficient you also also need to use implementation and tensions to your advantage Studies have shown that often why people don't stick to good habits is not because of lack of motivation but because they don't have Clarity of what they want to achieve when you say tomorrow I'll learn programming it's just an intention that has no Clarity so instead of saying that you should attach an implementation plan to your intention so instead of just learning programming you should say something like every time the alarm goes off in the morning I would get up and do a programming lesson for two hours on my desk by making the small change you will provide your mind Clarity on what to do right after you wake up another way to do the same is by stacking habits stacking habits simply means attaching a new habit you want to build with the current habit so instead of doing a programming lesson when the alarm goes off you would say something like right after I brush my teeth which I hope is a habit you have already built I would do a programming lesson for two hours on my desk if you stack habits like this you're more likely to stick to them provided to practice them long enough and don't forget to place your laptop in the middle of your room for this to work queue along with implementation intention will give you the motivation you need to start learning programming but this Motivation by itself is not enough to keep you going that's because we humans don't do things for which we get nothing in return to understand why that is we need to First learn about the motivation hormone dopamine in 1954 neuroscientists did a study where they blocked the release of dopamine in Lab Rats with the help of electrodes and what they found was astonishing without dopamine these stats lost their will to eat drink or reproduce and as a result all of them died this sad experiment tells us how important dopamine is for motivation and here is how it affects us humans dopamine is released every time you swipe up on an Instagram reel and the same dopamine is also released when people do drugs in both cases dopamine is responsible for creating these Cravings that make us do these bad actions again and again to a point where these actions become our habits but can we trick ourselves into using the same dopamine to build good habits before I answer that if you want to give me a huge dopamine Spike you can subscribe to the channel moving on an engineering student from Ireland named Ronan managed to use dopamine to his Advantage Ronin wanted to become fit by exercising more but he could not find the motivation to work out instead he would spend hours watching Netflix so what did he do to exercise more he comes find the two he connected his bike to the laptop and wrote a program that would let him watch Netflix only if he was cycling above a certain speed this is called Temptation bundling you take something that you already enjoy doing and use it as a reward for the Habit you want to build here's how you can use Temptation bundling to help you progress in your programming lessons you can write a program that tracks the amount of time you spend in your code editor this program can then use this time to control the amount of time you get to spend on your phone by doing this you can directly tie learning programming to a habit that you already enjoy doing if anyone in the power Community wants to take up this challenge to build this program let me know in the comments I'll make sure to share your program with everyone in the community another thing that can help you build the habit of programming is the two minute rule when you set unrealistic goals for yourself it becomes very difficult to stay motivated to work on them James Clear recommends making habit building Easy by taking small steps every day he recommends starting with only 2 minutes a day for example if you want to build the habit of reading more you can start by just reading 2 minutes a day and if the book is interesting you will be reading much more than that in no time for programming in Java that would mean writing this public static void main function and that would do us no good so here is what I recommend two exercises a day and if you stick to it for 30 days I'm very sure that you'll be doing more than two exercises in a day at the end if you're willing to take this as a challenge write hashtag 30 day challenge in the comments come back in 30 days and post a reply to this comment to share your progress I'll be waiting building The Habit to learn coding is one thing but being efficient when learning to code is even more important if you want to know how to learn more in less time watch this video my name is sahil and I'll see you in the next one