I feel more drawn to almost anything except the books which teacher recommends me and every time, I rely on AI to summarize things for me and it is affecting me badly but I just cannot make myself read those books. Anything that feels necessary to me lose its importance in my sight and I try to avoid those things. Back in the days, I was doing undergrad with a different major but I did not get it and wanted to go to my current major. And now when I am in my current major (CS major, previously doing Electronics Engineering), I have lost interest in that field too. I have many books downloaded to read and many quizzes and exams to attempt but thing is I just don’t feel attracted to those books. Those books feel dry to me and boring as well.
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I mean yeah, it’s work. It’s not going to be fun. Building up tolerance for things that “aren’t fun” is a skillset. You have to develop it over time. Make yourself read an hour once a week for a month. Then up it two hours. Then up it to three hours. Etc.
I was thinking but now the quizzes and exams are arriving so I go in panic mode like oh man! I have to read this much chapters and this chapter is so big, how will I read, and so this leaves me demotivated.
If you’re gonna eat a whale, you gotta do it one bite at a time.
It would help if you are curious about the subject matter. Curiosity is an amazing motivator for reading.
What secrets does the book contain? What is it going to teach you about the universe? What parts of this book do you already understand?
What’s the chance there’s something in that book that will help you reframe something else in your life with new information?
What information in the book is going to be on the test?
If you want to know the answers to those questions, or the other questions that you might have floating around in your head, the only way to get them is to read the book.
Don’t read it because you’re being forced to read it. Read it because you want to know more. You want to be the kind of person who knows things. And the only way to actually know things, to have crystalline knowledge, is to read the books that contain the information that the people that have come before you have sorted out and assembled for you to absorb.
Surely you have a goal in life. You wouldn’t be forcing yourself to study in college if you weren’t trying to reach a goal. Reading these books are parts of the path that you’re taking to reach your goal.
If you can internalize this concept and apply it to those books, reading those books is not going to be a chore. It will become fun. It will become exciting. You will read faster and flip through pages faster and train yourself on how to absorb information quickly.
People achieve what they believe they are supposed to achieve. They go in the direction that seems most right to them.
Seems like reading these books are the right direction for you, and once you make it through, your mental muscle will be much more defined and impressive for the effort.
Pomodoro.
You can do just about anything for 20 mins. So set a timer and read for 20mins. Then you get to stop. Then set another timer and take 20 mins off. Then 20 reading again and so on.
One you are in the groove with that, then you reduce the off-time to 15 mins, then 10 and finally 5 mins - so 20 mins reading and 5 mins break and repeat.
At lot of it comes down to attitude. I remember a coach I heard responding to someone who said “I find it impossible to get out of bed when my alarm goes off. All I want to do is hit the snooze” and the coach said something like this, “Really? All it takes to get out of bed when your alarm goes off is to put your feet on the floor and stand up. If you woke up completely tired in the middle of the night but your bed was on fire I bet you would have no problem getting right out. That means you can easily get out of bed as soon as you decide its what you need to do. Decide the night before, when that alarm goes off in the morning you will put your feet on the floor and stand right up.”
Yeah, “just do it”. Mental health is fake and has no impact on your body. /S
Create the situation where there is nothing to do except reading.
Make the time. Make an appointment with yourself. Put the books to the place where you plan to read them. Shut off everything else, computer, laptop, music. Don’t put a clock near you. It’s not about “getting through this chore”. Focus on reading. If it’s a room with a window, the rising and setting of the sun will give you enough of a clue how early or late it is.
I just don’t feel attracted to those books.
Boohoo. Do it.
I like reading different type of books, not them
Sometimes you gotta do things you don’t like.
Maybe try to find people to study with. Preferably from your class, but even setting up a few hours a week with any other students to have coffee together and just read in a quiet space can help you stay on task. Make use of your library and treat it like a job.
People spend too much time doing everything in the same physical space, and having books downloaded on devices doesn’t help at all. How is your boring textbook supposed to compete with the universe of more attractive activities on your computer? Create an environment for yourself that facilitates study. Structure your life around it.
The CS books are boring, mostly. I was lucky in that I loved everything about the major- but working on actual code problems is where the joy has always been for me. Any other required book, in any other course? Nope.
The odd thing that worked for me was a comfortable chair (proper lazy boy) and isolating the world and distractions. Classical music pumped in via proper buds/cans- but not piano, and nothing with vocals. I had to make that book my whole world.
Its an ADHD thing I think… I’ve also since learned the phrase “structured procrastination,” so maybe look into that term.
This sounds crazy but tell yourself “wow this is really interesting”.
You can’t make yourself do it. That’s like dividing by zero. You can choose to do it. Do you want to learn the topic? If so, you can choose to start reading the book.
Isn’t CS supposed to be kinda fun? I mean, put interactive. Learn something, then immediately put it into practice and troubleshoot it?
Or is your educational system the stupid kind, where you just memorize shit in books and spit it back out with no expectation you know what it means?
I used to love it before going into it but when I went, I lost all my interest in it and especially since everything just revolves around AI, it feels like I am contributing to the humanity’s destruction.
That might definitely be dampening your motivation, no?
But there is a crisis in programming now, as people are figuring out exactly how to use AI to program (a different task than keeping bosses & investors happy.) I think programming might be fun again eventually, but maybe not.
Yeah I like learning retro languages like Pascal, Fortran, and other old ones and doing things that I wanna do rather than integrating AI into every single piece of code. Everything we study these days are discussed through the lens of AI and everyone just want to do things with AI, into AI. Even some teachers create exams using ChatGPT.
Yup. It’s kind of an open question that you want to do programming if its just going to be baby sitting AI. I wish I could give you an answer, but I’m simultaneously not a programmer and can’t see into the future. I definitely know that the mindsets of an old school programmer and a modern vibe monkey are RADICALLY different; you may be suited for one and not the other. I´d see if you can find people making educated guesses about the future of programming and then decide if you want to take part in it.
