What really helped us was scratching our own age right when we. Apart from the work project, which was a blessing then. But we have often said, like, well, what can we actually do? And then we looked at things we needed or were passionate about, or just could enhance our work experience or later. Pibytes. Hello, and welcome to the Pibytes podcast, where we talk about python career and mindset. We're your hosts. I'm Julian Sequeira. And I'm Bob Baldebos. If you're looking to improve your python, your career, and learn a mindset for success, this is the podcast for you. Let's get started. Welcome. Today we wanted to quickly talk about a topic that we keep getting lots and lots of emails about. Bob, what's that? Tutorial paralysis or tutorial purgatory? All different things. I don't know where the purgatory one came from. Anyway. Anyway, so this is a topic that we keep getting emailed about. Everyone's engaging with our emails about it. We thought, why don't we make our very first episode on the podcast about this major problem that everyone seems to be having? And I think the first way to really talk about it and dive in and. And relate to it is to share that. We cop it all the time. We suffer from tutorial paralysis. We have before, not so much anymore, because we're aware of it, but it is something that has been a problem for both of us quite a lot, and especially as we were growing in our careers. Isn't that right? Yeah. So what is turtura paralysis really? Right. Kind of sticking to the books, the courses, the theory for too long. Right, exactly. It's just. Yeah, it's just being to the point where you're so stuck on these things, on learning the next big thing and reading the next book, that you don't actually get anything done. And when it comes time for your New Year's resolution, you realize, well, did I actually learn data science or did I just read ten books throughout the year? You know, and it can be really disheartening. It can really lower your motivation. Yeah. And the paralysis part also indicates a little bit of fear, like jumping into the pool. Right. What we found then is to really get around that is, it sounds cliche, but get to actually code read the books, but do that in parallel. It's an interesting thing, right? I mean, we learned. I mean, we spent our entire childhoods, whatever, when we went to school and whatever schooling we had, it was always through reading books, through taking video courses these days, and even our companies that we work for. I mean, how many of them teach you to go and use something like LinkedIn learning to get all your education or go and watch YouTube videos or something? But at the end of the day, everyone misses that key point, which is to do something. It's to take that action. And as you were saying to me just before, Bob, it's not about completely cutting out the books, is it? No, you still need them for the conceptual learning. But what we found is that it makes more sense if you can actually relate to your experience and the practical side of things. So when I go back to reading about decorators and I've written a couple of my own kind of start to make sense. Right. So the other thing I want to highlight is that you remember that pyramid of retention that if you read something, you only retain, like, 10%. Read and watch. 20. Read, watch here, 30. You know where deliberate practices on that scale. Well, are you putting me on the spot? I don't remember. Somewhere higher. I assume 75%. 75%? Yeah. That's. That's massive. And, you know, I think this applies to anything, really. We're not just talking coding here, right? If you really think about it, how many of those times throughout your life did you feel like you, I'm never going to forget this for the rest of my life. And, you know, this is a different topic altogether. But normally that comes from failure. But failure comes from actually doing something, taking that step and taking action. So the act of acting is what lets you retain a lot of information. But how many times, Bob, and maybe not you, because you are a pro at reading books and you seem to have that gift, but I'll find myself reading the same line over and over again. I think everyone hits that at some point. And, you know, I really do struggle sometimes with textbooks and reference books and, like, python books and stuff. I do find my time myself struggling to retain that information. And, you know, it's only lately since you and I have been doing this that I've started to think to myself, oh, put the book down and open the interpreter, open the repl and start coding, you know? Yeah, but that's just me at the moment, really. So is that also maybe because the book is too theoretical, boring, or the examples are not really resonating with you? Yeah, sometimes. Look, and this is a personal opinion of mine, you know, this is not representative of anyone else, but sometimes I find the books not written for humans. I really struggle with that. I tend to communicate more with the human touch and the human language. I guess when you went in English, that is. But you know, some of these books are written in with such assumption that you know what all these terms mean and that you know about every library on the planet. And I just. Yeah, I prefer to figure it out myself these days. Yeah, that's a good point. There's no better way than getting your hands dirty yourself, right? Yeah, exactly. But that's going down a rabbit hole. So let's get back on topic. We wanted to share a quick story from each of us before we run out of time, on when we both, or each suffered some tutorial paralysis, because it happens to us all. So Bob, do you want to go first? Mention, I guess, what the story is and then what you did about it? Yeah, I think it was early on in my career when I had to make a web app and I definitely was reading two, three, four books about PHP JavaScript, and sometimes I still have that, like, I need to finish that book end to end, even now, right after having written a bunch of practical apps. So the revelation then was when I wrote a tool called Snapshot Miner, which was parsing server telemetry, I had this very concrete goal and I had to make it happen. And all of a sudden I was writing spaghetti PHP code. It was not PHP per se, it was because I just got into coding. But the good thing of that failing mode was that I started to see the connections of functions and how things tie together. I was still reading my PHP book, but it also started to make more sense as I was doing it. But that clear goal of making that application I had envisioned really, really tied the pieces together. That's cool. And I think actually that's the project I think you were working on when we first met chat at the company. So the company that shall not be named, I can dig that up on the Internet, that's googleable. The thing I want to bring up though, that I just want to touch on. Bob. So you mentioned. Yeah, you were reading all the books you were researching and everything, you're in that tutorial paralysis, but it only started sinking in and making sense when you worked on the project. But what is the difference between, say, making that step to work on a project, because that's a dedicated project that you had to make for work. You had a goal, you knew exactly what it had to do. But not all of us have that project. So I guess what would be the alternative? Well, even a simple calculator, for example. I mean, it has been built hundreds of thousands of time, and it might be boring, but it might not be so boring because you still can challenge yourself to make a class or break it out into functions. So there's a lot with boring stuff that you can make it interesting. Actually, you know what I like about the calculator, and I think this is important about any project that you want to take on to try and sink your teeth into is has to be something that's usable by you. Yes, I know all of our laptops and computers have a calculator built in, but it's going to be that much sweeter when you're using something that you made. So, you know, if you can't have a project like this program Bob was writing for work, come up with something that you can find useful. I think that's the key, right? It's what really helped us was scratching our own age, right, when we, apart from the work project, which was a blessing then. But we have often said like, well, what can we actually do? And then we looked at things we needed or we're passionate about, or just could enhance our work experience. Or later, pie bytes. And we came up with scripts, for example, when we did the 100 days, that script a day, a lot of like, what do we need? Right? What's this pain? What is painful? What can we automate? Yeah, that's it. I remember writing something that did some FTP automation for me. I mean, it was just simple FTP command scripted in, but it solved a problem I didn't realize I had until I was looking for it. So, yeah, there's the encouragement there. You remember when we did the 100 days, we had our GitHub markdown file with the log of every day, and we had an automation that would grab the tweet, so if we didn't deliver on time, it would just tweet out a blank tweet. Yeah. So that make it fun, right? Well, that was also like essentially our accountability partner script. It held us accountable. If we did get the project work done in tweet, it'd embarrass us on Twitter. So there you go. But, yeah, I was just going to say that's a nice segue into, to my story, because my example is of when we made the 100 days of code in Python. Course, that course, it really stretched me at certain points. There was. I think that was when I really started to dive into flask really deep, you know, or deeper than I had needed to before. And there were certain aspects where I was struggling to understand it. And I remember just reading tutorial after tutorial on the Internet because I didn't have any books on it. I, you know, very limited. I really struggled with some of the YouTube content that was available at the time. And, yeah, I was just reading nonstop, and I was getting stressed out, I think, at a certain time. And, you know, I'm always blunt and honest in these things, but I was falling behind with the schedule that we had set. I remember that. And then that just started spiraling. I started feeling bad. I felt guilty with you and Mike about not keeping up. And then my confidence was taking a hit. You can see all of this just spanning from the fact that I was stuck in what I now recognize as being tutorial paralysis. And the way I got out of it was to just start working on the code for the actual course and knowing that I had to present something, knowing that I had to teach something, and I had to, I guess, encourage people to code a project as well in the same technology in flask that was what forced me to code. And so a lot of people don't have that little thing that's forcing them to go get away from the book, to get away from the paralysis and to actually do something. So I was lucky that I had that to force my hand. And, yeah, when I started coding things, things started making sense because I wasn't following a tutorial. I was making something for myself. I was like, well, I want to make a. I think it was a BMI calculator body mass index. Right? Remember that? So I just wanted to make something simple that. And at the time, I was like, I want to calculate my bmI. And that worked out well. So I stole it from you for one of the bytes I think might be in my calculator. Did you use it? Yeah. Not lately. Oh, yeah. It took you a while to answer that. I know where I stand. Anyway, having a deadline is definitely helpful. Right. And, yeah, course is a bit extreme, but even if you don't have a deadline, then accountability partner or committed to the world, like saying that you're going to do it, can be a nice way to pressure yourself to actually deliver. Yeah, that's it. And we'll talk about those concepts a bit later. But for now, anyone out there who's listening stuck in tutorial paralysis. Or don't even know you're stuck in tutorial paralysis, look at what you're doing. Analyze your situation. One of the greatest ways to tell is, what progress have you made? Have you gotten any better at it? Have you learned the topic that you wanted? Have you gotten anywhere with it? And if you haven't, well, maybe it's time to have a look at what your process is and see if you are stuck in tutorial paralysis. We hope you enjoyed this episode. To hear more from us, go to pyrite friends, that's Pybit es friends, and receive a free gift just for being a friend of the show and to join our thriving slack community of Python programmers, go to Pibytes community. That's Pibit es forward slash community. We hope to see you there and catch you in the next episode.