o2l

I started strong at 18 with an explosive growth in knowledge and skill till about 23 years of age. I was praised by pretty much everyone around me and that had turned into a positive feedback loop.

The plateau started when I started giving time to other things in life like relationships and a few other changes.

I am sitting at 29 now feeling that I have not made any progress since I was 23 and I can't get myself to do something about it, much similar to you. I get started sometimes but do not follow through till the end which has now become a behavior.

Recently, after some self assessment and after talking with a close friend about this, I have observed that the things that led to my past success were - time available to commit to a single purpose, absence of any other priorities in life, youth and energy and the biggest one being social approval/appreciation, even if it was on a very basic level (being praised by teachers and friends who were regular people)

In my opinion, if I were to start socializing more in situations where I get to share my interests and knowledge and work with other people interested in the same field, I would start getting feedback again and can learn a thing or two from others at the same time. This would surely revive my interest and keep me motivated to do more, so I can share it with someone.

For us who work professionally, our words of appreciation/praise for others become shallow or emotionless over time and work becomes just work, hence work is rarely a place of motivation for most. (May be things are different at FAANG or fancy startups where people are more driven for excellence)

Another observation I have made about myself is that I have a tendency to day dream grandiose scenarios where I master a technology without anyone's help and build something so cool that the world is going to be in awe of me and I am going to get back to my glory days. This may be true in theory if I were to commit myself to learning or building something and keep making consistent progress but it never happens cause they are just day dreams.

I have a better chance at success if I put myself in a position where people around me are interested in learning and mutual growth. I haven't figured out what would be the right medium to do this yet.

Looking at the unrest in recent college pass outs, I would prefer if we could bring Apprenticeship back. In current times we have a variation of it called internship, but for most people they still have to go through a full fledged college education to become eligible for that internship.

Of course, Apprenticeship is not the answer for all fields but it would be good if companies also got into the business of educating people ( for money ) but treating them not just as a student but more like an apprentice.

An alternative would be to have collaboration between businesses and educational institutions to reduce the gap between learning and applying what you learned.

This can be relatively easily applied in developed nations and a bit hard to apply in developing / underdeveloped countries.

I graduated 3 years ago from a college in India. Luckily, I was interested in my field enough to start researching about how things we learned in college, worked in real life. But for most of my fellow classmates, it was just for the sake of getting a degree and supposedly becoming employable right after passing out. So when they actually passed out, the world was quite different than what they had expected.

Those are my 2 cents.