[Afforess]

I agree with everything you said. What needs to be feared is complacency. If you ever feel that things are going too easily - that's when to be afraid.

I will be the first to admit I let many _months_ of complacency pass me by before I identified the signs. All the above advice - forcing yourself into the haze of discomfort, breaks this away and forces you to learn new skills. Learning is often glamorized, but in reality, the actual _learning_ phase is painful and uncomfortably hard. I still don't enjoy it, even though afterword, I appreciate the knowledge and extra skills. Instead, it's important to build habits that lead to continuous learning, rather than one-off improvements. Paradoxically, it's easier to become normalized to regular discomfort than rare, unusual discomfort. It has never stopped being uncomfortable to learn for me, but I also have built it my psyche.

[meric]

I remember back before I knew about variables, when I started learning programming, thinking about a programming problem for whole days, and figured out how to store intermediate computed values in MacOSX text fields and retrieve them later (the values was state for the adventure game I was trying to make), and that allowed me to make a lot more interesting things before, I thought I was so clever; and then I remember the epiphany I got when I finally understood that web page talking about variables; I had been reading it daily for months and had no idea what they were and how they could be applied to my programming, then finally it clicked! What a high! Being able to store values without placing hidden text fields everywhere! I don't think I've been more excited ever again since those summer afternoons, even trying to figure out stuff in shower and in bed... I was 11 or 12 stuck with a Mac at home. I didn't have money to buy my own games and back then it was Apple's dark ages so there were hardly any games anyway; I tried to make my own. Was learning difficult? For sure. Was it uncomfortable? In a way. Was it the best and most exciting experiences in my life? Oh you have no idea. (Ok my marriage to my wife comes a close second; in case she reads this one day.)

Something about childhood experiences makes them a lot more intense...