Had it been left to me, I suspect I would probably still be sitting on my 1st-year electrical engineering courses without completing them.
Ok, I am exaggerating a bit. But without the external pressure of exams and getting a degree, few of us would voluntarily go through the mind-bending complexity of engineering courses.
Learning is hard — there is no way around it. And like in a pressure cooker, without the pressure, there is no cooking.
Here is a real-life example: Coursera’s most popular course — Stanford’s machine learning by Andrew Ng — is not the real course. It is actually a diluted version of CS 229 taught at Stanford (with simplified math).
The course designers would have figured that without the pressure cooker of a college environment, most people would give up on it.
Our mind wants to do the easy stuff. But life is not designed for ease and fun – it can be just hard and sometimes, life just sucks.
So when you take up a hard challenge, find some workarounds. Find friends to walk the journey with you. Commit to someone externally. Use accountability. Put some pressure on yourself.
And when it still sucks, don’t give up. Remember — only the hard things change you.
– Rajan