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Comment by mrfusion | Hacker News Reader

Where did you get that kind of motivation? Sounds almost super natural.

It isn't supernatural, trust me. Very simply: I set a goal, understood what prerequisites I needed to fill, and just worked hard to get there. I put in about 5 - 10 hours a week in the first half of the year working through the OCW courses, then probably 10-15 hours a week during the CMU class. I work fulltime as a software engineer, so my 'class' time was usually a couple hours a night, after the wife and kids go to bed.

I struggle to focus after a full day of work and other tasks. I especially struggle to focus on technical work, and learning new things is difficult. How do you have the energy to sit down for another few hours of technical work after a full day of work?

I'm not gonna lie, putting in those couple hours can just be plain tough. Some days it is the absolute last thing that I want to be doing at 9 o'clock in the evening.

But I motivate myself by focusing on the long-term impact for my career, and thus the benefits for myself and my family:

Coupling my expertise in software engineering with deep knowledge in an adjacent field such as ML I believe can open up new opportunities and give me the freedom to take my career along paths that weren't possible before. That is what I remind myself when I sit down to work homework problems late in the evening.

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