“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” — Aristotle

The new popular tech stack? Your roommate’s new added skill? Your favourite online influencer’s new favourite language? The new famous online bootcamp or your class’s new course? Or even the new hobby you thought you’d start at the beginning of this new year?

All these things bother and excite everyone at the same time but why is it that we never start learning any of these “flashy, blazingly fast, completely awesome” tech trends? Or even if we do start, we leave them midway?

The Manipulative Sugar Coaters

Social media and so-called famous tech influencers have impacted the lives of thousands of young and upcoming engineers and developers who have no idea what information they are consuming online 24/7. Countless of them are not actually ever learning anything they are only wasting their potential and valuable time by blindly following “tech gurus” who manipulate viewers, spread hate between communities with tired old topics of language wars and paradigms, and make irrelevant comparisons like “X tech stack pays more than Y just because one online survey said so.”

All of this hinders your progress and your decisions about what you actually want to work with and learn. Instead, what ends up happening is you abort one skill and run toward another until the next new thing comes along.

The Fantasy Roadmaps to Mastery

Well, there is no such thing. Every day you learn something new something more than you didn’t know yesterday only if you just don’t quit. As long as you keep practicing, there is no need to follow anyone else’s roadmaps or “do this to get there in 3 months” tutorials.

It’s obvious that you are not going to get to where the person you’re watching is, because you are busy watching them instead of actually doing something productive.

The Lesser Shared Ideas

What most people won’t tell you is probably where you should be going. Meet up with like-minded people or even competitors. Discuss ideas and solutions instead of ranting about why X language is better than Y. Grow connections and create under passionate mentors who give you wisdom and a unique way to deal with problems that sometimes leave you clueless.

Do not quit the thing you enjoy developing with just because something new came along that all of your friends are running after. Question the existing standards and conventions, it is not always necessary to follow whatever you are given. Having meaningful, efficiency-based discussions that focus on betterment of society and yourself will grow you far more than following the rat race of being the most famous rat in a tech community.

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“There is no such thing as a good influence. Because to influence a person is to give him one’s own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else’s music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him.” — Oscar Wilde