As important as shipping products, hitting release dates for new web portals, delivering books to publishers on time, etc. is, it is at least as important to:

enjoy the process, get totally caught up in what you are doing in the moment, and look at learning and skill acquisition as a life long process.

If anybody hasn't yet read Peter Norvig's "Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years", it's really worth checking out.

http://norvig.com/21-days.html

I am not sure that I learned much from the article. Pretty much, it summed up to "work hard". HN crowds are probably more enlightened to know how much that "hard" is, compared to average people who think going through related education would be enough.

Anyway, those fast-track programming books are not totally useless. I started with those too. The important think is to not stop there, but continue to work with more technical books and actual standard/specification.

If I want to learn new language i.e, Clojure, F# etc, I'd probably start with fast track books (free ebooks) too. It has become a habit, I guess.

Let me sum up that page in two words: Do it.

Obvious, don't you think?

Isn't it rather: Do it REPEATEDLY. KEEP doing it, even if you're bad at first. LEARN TO LOVE doing it. Do it GREAT.

So yeah, i have to admit, in the end it all boils down to: Do it.

Yeah, "practise it" would have been what I should have written. I had it in my head before visiting the site but then it changed to "do". Meh. :)

Long ago I learned "Do it Right, Do it Right now".. but it's more "don't half ass it" rather than "do it perfectly"

Seems that adapting Buddhist practices to general tasks became a mainstream. ^_^

Yes, there are detailed guides how to avoid distractions, concentrate, focus and enter so-called "flow" by trying again and again.

btw, recently I've seen a very simple quote on the wall of Sri-Lanka's Immigration department - "The secret of success is a hard work. That is why it is still a secret".

Nearly 70% of population of Sri-Lanka are Buddhists.