Hustle culture nonsense aside, I find using whisper (AI) transcription instead of typing to be super efficient.
My workflow involves setting up a whisper server, downloading the Whispering(1) app on my computer, and binding it to a shortcut on my keyboard and mouse. Whenever I want to write something down, I just hit the shortcut, dictate and it transcribes instantly. With a Nvidia GPU (1070 in my case), transcription is nearly instantaneous. Although I haven’t set it up on my MacBook yet, I suspect it will be just as fast with Apple Silicon
Silvanus P Thompson | Calculus Made Easy (html book) - https://calculusmadeeasy.org/ (This shouldn't be your only exposure to Calculus. It is more for building intuition.)
The Discrete Mathematics course above is probably the most important for your work. In fact I would look for more Discrete Mathematics courses if I were you as it is far more important than anything else here.
Marco Taboga | Probability and Statistics & Matrix Algebra (html book, need calculus) - https://www.statlect.com/
On YouTube you can literally watch a good lecture course for just about any typical undergraduate course. You just need to know where to look. Also there are even some really good master's degree courses out there.
Of course the only way to really learn the mathematics deeply is to "learn by doing", aka problems and proofs.
There are a ton of channels starting to pop up like Grant's 3B1B (I find like a new one every week). He had a contest recently so maybe look at some of the winners.
Lastly this is pretty useful if you get into higher mathematics:
Consider using straight up Blazor which lets you take advantage of HTML/CSS but use C# in the browser.
I find Blazor to be incredibly productive. I built a rough[1] implementation of the board game “Aquire” to play with friends in about 3 weeks of part time development in the evenings using Blazor and am sold on its potential.
[1] http://acquiregame.azurewebsites.net/
Well, the difficult emotion is often some form of fear. Fear of failing, of making a mistake, in some cases, of making the problem worse. All of these fears are in a fundamental sense legitimate, but the direct solution is, insofar as it is possible, to prepare and practice.
The alternative is to tackle something even harder that includes the thing you want to make as a special case. This is a recent discovery of mine. The pressure of accomplishing the bigger, harder thing can often drive you to simply knock out the smaller thing to get it out of the way, and that's often good enough.
There's an apocryphal story in rabbinical lore about a farmer who's frustrated that his home is so noisy that he can't sleep. The Rabbi sympathizes and tells the farmer to invite another animal into his home night after night. The farmer gets more frantic, angry even that this "solution" isn't working. Then the rabbi tells the farmer to remove all the animals, and the farmer, now in peace and quiet, could fall soundly asleep. The solution above is the same: you don't eliminate the fear, you replace it with a greater fear such that the original fear doesn't seem to matter!
Weird, I still love ClearType more than any others... I find it actually sharper and crisper than the others, yet still smooth. Microsoft botched font rendering when they started migrating everything and its mother to GPU (Direct2D? or similar) rendering and decided to replace ClearType with grayscale smoothing just to spite users (e.g. taskbar, Office ribbon), but in other places where we still have ClearType I find it fantastic.
This is why some people make it look easy - the ones who you describe as "folks who are disciplined, are ruthless executors, are self-motivated".
It's not actually that hard for them, they're mostly just doing what comes naturally to them.
It may be they were able to develop these tendencies at a young age, or maybe it's inherited traits from their parents.
This is the dark secret behind the self-help industry; it usually doesn't work. At least not just by reading a book or attending a seminar or following a methodology.
Those programs will describe techniques that supposedly work for other highly successful people, but what they don't tell you is that those other people don't really need to follow any program, and the "discipline" they show is actually not the kind of discipline you're punishing yourself with; for the people who make it look easy, it just flows naturally, as their subconscious mind is just attuned that way.
Here's the thing: you can change your subconscious mind. There are specific techniques that enable you to do it. But they require consistent work over a long period of time, and a lot of patience with yourself along the way.
The main goal of such a program is to figure out just what it is you really want to do with your life - what objective is going to give you purpose and meaning and motivation, then to gradually remove the emotional/cognitive barriers that prevent you from working towards it with energy and focus.
One of the better known subconscious healing programs is NLP, but I have no idea if it's the best; I haven't really done it. I've done other things that are less well-known, and after more than 7 years of steady work, the results have been profound for me.
Search around for "subconscious healing" or "subconscious emotional clearing" and see what you can find.
Choose a program that feels good to you; ideally talk to people who have done it and ask about their results. Of course you shouldn't do something if the people running it or recommending it seem kooky or exploitative, and the field is a minefield in that regard.
But if you search thoroughly you'll find there are programs and techniques offered by really down-to-earth, decent people, and a solid number of authentic success stories to point to.
I use that term because its gender neutral and relationship neutral. I find it irrelevant to a discussion whether we are married or not, or a member of the LGBT community or not. However I don't hide my gender or my partner's gender (ie. I use he and she forms due to practical reasons).
My workflow involves setting up a whisper server, downloading the Whispering(1) app on my computer, and binding it to a shortcut on my keyboard and mouse. Whenever I want to write something down, I just hit the shortcut, dictate and it transcribes instantly. With a Nvidia GPU (1070 in my case), transcription is nearly instantaneous. Although I haven’t set it up on my MacBook yet, I suspect it will be just as fast with Apple Silicon
(1) https://github.com/braden-w/whispering/
You can also use an API like grok, but I'm generally wary of such services.
I'm a bit of an introvert, so I found talking out loud to be awkward at first. But now I can't go back to regular typing, given the efficiency gains.