Whenever I start learning something new, like programming, I feel alive. I feel excited and focused. I can study for hours without getting tired. Things seem easy to understand, and I can see my progress clearly. At that point, learning feels natural and almost effortless.
But, as the time passes.. as I make a noticeable progress.. as the learning goes deeper, something changes.
I can feel that the concept is become harder.. understanding require more effort.. double, sometime triple.. and the progress slows down rapidly. Motivation weakens. I start losing interest-not because I don’t care, but because things no longer feel clear or rewarding.
This is the stage where I begin questioning myself.
Why could I easily understand the introduction?
Why could I complete chapter one so smoothly — but struggle so much with chapter two?
Why does everything suddenly feel so hard?
I feel stupid. I keep asking myself:
“What’s wrong with me?”
“Why can’t I understand this?”
“Why am I not progressing?”
I know I’mn not losing interest, and I know the motivation is still there. It hasn’t disappeared. It’s just buried under frustration.
And over the years, this pattern has haunted me.
I tried learning many programming languages.
I tried cybersecurity.
And almost every time, it ended the same way.
For a long time, I believed this was a flaw in me.
I thought maybe I lacked discipline.
Maybe I wasn’t persistent enough.
Maybe I only loved the excitement of beginnings, not the responsibility of depth.
And every time this happened, it stopped me from moving forward.
How I realized what was actually wrong
1. The first trigger came from a book I read last year: Ultralearning by Scott H. Young.
As a fan Ultralearning, I picked it up again and reread parts of it to refresh my memory. It was in the early chapters, where Scott explains the core principles of Ultralearning, that something clicked.
One point in particular stood out to me — point number four.
It says:
“Drill: Ruthlessly attack your weakness by isolating difficult sub-skills and practicing them intensely.”
When I looked back at my own learning history, I realized something uncomfortable.
I always skipped this stage.
I avoided my weaknesses instead of drilling them. And that realization hit me hard.
2. The second trigger came from something simple: an MKBHD video.
In one of his videos — “I Shrunk Down Into an M5 Chip” — he talked about how people worked incredibly hard to shrink a transistor from visible size to something so small our eyes can’t even see it.
“Technology only gets better because of the people working really hard on it. Like, without this hard work none of this improvement happens” — MKBHD
What stayed with me wasn’t the technology, but the truth behind it — that “working really hard”. Nothing improves without sustained hard work.
This made me realize something simple but powerful:
to achieve something big — something meaningful — hard work is unavoidable. And giving up is not part of the process.
That’s when my perspective shifted.
This isn’t actually a problem.
It’s a stage.
It’s the stage where learning stops being driven by excitement and starts demanding endurance. A stage where the brain no longer recognizes patterns easily and must work harder to create them. A stage where things feel slow, heavy, and uncomfortable — not because something is wrong, but because something new is being built.
At this point, the brain enters a different mode.
Not motivation mode.
Not excitement mode.
But problem-solving mode.
A rewiring mode.
My brain wasn’t familiar with this mode before, so it resisted. Not because it was weak — but because it was being asked to do unfamiliar work.
This stage requires repetition.
Repeating the same idea until understanding appears.
Repeating the same struggle until familiarity forms.
Repeating the effort until comfort replaces resistance.
Only after that — confidence arrives.
Confidence is never the beginning.
It is always the result.
Now I understand there is a stage in learning — and in life — where repetition is unavoidable. Where doing things again and again is not a sign of failure, but a sign of commitment. A stage where staying matters more than feeling motivated.
This stage doesn’t ask for excitement.
It asks for patience.
And once I stopped seeing it as a weakness, it stopped controlling me.
Because the moment learning becomes difficult is not the moment to quit — it’s the moment real learning begins.