It’s useful to learn through tutorials, and examples are extremely helpful, but it’s easy to fall into the trap of just copying what someone else has figured out, changing it a little, and then pasting it. It could be anything from code, to how you structure your day, to how you stay organized.

I’ve found myself in this situation lately and have had to recognize it happening and make a conscious effort to stop. It’s hard to actually think for yourself. It takes a lot of mental effort when you’re not used to it. Take the structure of your day example: I’ve been reading books on how to effectively work from home and I’ve found that I keep going back to the author’s examples of how he structures his day. I know that my day and priorities are different, but I still try to fit his system into mine. It doesn’t work. I’ve had to learn to think for myself and figure out what works for me. I have to actually sit down and think about it.

Copying is extremely useful for learning. It’s like learning to cook. You start off following recipes and then eventually you know that salt makes stuff salty, so you can adjust. Then, when you know what ingredients taste like, you can start creating your own recipes. With cooking it’s not really a big deal if you follow recipes your whole life, but if you’re actually learning how to be a chef you have to start thinking for yourself.

Try to acknowledge when you are copying and determine whether you are using information as examples or just doing things verbatim. Then see if you can “give yourself advice”. I tend to ask myself, “What would I tell myself to do if I had asked for advice?” So far this has been helping, but it’s not an easy thing to actually sit down and give something some actual thought.

This process gets easier when you start to recognize it. I feel like this is the first key to being independent and making your own decisions. Once you’re able to do this you’re able to make better choices and learn things that will actually stick.

One good way to do this while learning to code is to do coding challenges. You can still print out the answers, but don’t look at them unless you are REALLY stuck. This takes practice, but you will start learning how to put things together on your own. If you end up looking at the answer after a couple of hours of struggle you’ll remember it, because of the struggle that you went through.

It's hard to learn new things. Tutorials help, but they only take you so far. Sometimes you have to force yourself to do things on your own. By doing this you will become more confident in your knowledge and be able to take an idea and make it into reality.