I think it was Bruce Lee that said he would fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times rather than the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once. I think the same holds true for any technical skill.

I left college with a degree in Western Lit with a focus in journalism and the military said "that sounds like a communications degree, communications sounds like computers and radios, we're sending you to cyber school" (true story).

I was all hyped because I thought that I could just run down some checklist of things to learn. Like many noobs I asked "what's the first programming language I should learn?" under the assumption that learning a programming language was like learning how to do calculus or learning how to build an engine.

I assumed that it was finite and discreet and you either knew it or you didn't, but the longer I'm in, the longer I realize how much closer it is to learning a sport or a craft. There's a blurry spectrum of skill that people will fall on.

In that sense I only ever learned enough programming to meet whatever need I had at the time, and nothing more. Much like carving wood or painting, I can recognize when someone is in a league of their own vs me being proud of my sharp stick. To that end, it stopped making sense for me to "learn a programming language" or "learn how to hack everything".

Now it's more of a focus on improving my craft. Learning C and Python and CSS and javascript etc was the naive me putting my time into learning 10,000 different kicks.

After a lot of time and mistakes I've learned to accept that I won't be the best dev, or the best blacksmith, or the best Cyberdeck maker, but I will focus my efforts on hacking in a specific area. That's the 1 kick I'll practice 10,000 times. Hope that helps somebody