[mburney]

Think of a creative side project that you would really enjoy doing. Then do it. And take your time on it. Slow down. Tune out from what everyone else is doing. You have to give yourself time and space to breathe. Don't put pressure on yourself, make it fun!

Don't worry about reading SICP or becoming an expert at some technology. That will come automatically over time. Just choose one stack for your side project and go with it.

It doesn't matter if you code your project in C, clojure, or ruby. What matters is that you produce something that you feel good about. If you make a goal to produce something good, you will learn the technologies and you will become a good hacker over time.

I write all this because I was in the same position as you a couple years ago, so I scrapped my ambition of reading theoretical CS books and learning all the latest hot new technologies (I will do all that stuff later). I decided I'd make a game, and learn what I need to add the features that I imagined. And I progressed. It was so much more fun that way.

[dazedconfused]

Thank you.

I have several ideas for side projects, at first I am really motivated and very excited but very soon the motivation wears down and by then it stops being fun, I lack the will power of sticking through to the end because in the end I constantly fear that I will fail and if I am going to fail anyway, why try it?

This is ruining me I know I can't be like this but I don't know what to do to stop having these thoughts.

[billpatrianakos]

I've done that a million times. The trick is to have the right goal. Usually you'll have visions of how it will turn out in the end and not even half way through you give up because it seems that vision won't come true. Think of these projects in terms of years, not months. Then break them down into the very smallest possible parts. Im talking about thinks like making an entire day's goal to just write a single function that does something really small like connect to a database or something. That's how I've managed to finish despite having the same issue.