Despite the low resolution arguments against meritocracy, hierarchies have served humans very well over our evolution. Indeed, Nicholas Christakis includes preference for mild hierarchy in his social suite, the blueprint for how it is humans are evolutionary predisposed to create good societies.
Read morelearning to focus
The hardest part about facing the mountain of knowledge that I need to overcome is knowing where to start, and how much I should try to handle at once. No-one climbed anything by approaching it from every angle, just as no-one climbed anything by thinking about every single step. I know that the best way to do this is by thinking about it one task at a time, but I can't help but sometimes step back and look at the enormity of what I'm facing.
The unfortunate truth is that I don't believe my intelligence or capability even approaches that of people such as John Carmack, or Mike Ash, but what I do share is their passion. I spend as much time as possible trying to figure this stuff out and get better at what I love to do. I know that inevitably I will have to learn advanced server-side programming, and before that I will actually need to figure out the intricacies of hosting and maintaining a server. Out in the distance I also know that I will face tough deadlines as well as intense pressure, but I need to focus on these baby steps I'm still making even 6 months in to learning iOS app and games development.
On my mind at the moment I have the constant fear of stalling my in app development experience, the awareness that I need to complete my Train2Game portfolio projects, and a need to expand my web development skills. With that comes my week being split up into working with cocos2d, following the (brilliant) iOS 6 by Tutorials book from RayWenderlich.com, and learning PHP, MySQL, HTML & CSS.
I am a logical guy, and I have a strong feeling that I need to back away from one of these things, but they all seem far too important. I hate the fact that I need to sleep, and I hate the fact that I don't have the ability to work every hour of every day, because at the end of 10 hours of coding I just want to read a few comics or play a bit of a videogame before I go to sleep. The fact is that I'm not a machine, but figuring out how to function optimally as a human being makes that a pretty annoying fact.
the learning / doing dichotomy
I could, and do, spend my whole day studying in an attempt to get my skills to a point where I feel confident taking on a client and knowing that I will be able to develop the app that they want beyond what they imagined it could be. However, I also recognise the fact that completing Objective-C tutorials, and following a PHP book are entirely different froms sitting down to create something with no frame of reference as to where to start, what will be required, and how it will all fit together.
I have read a decent amount about HTML & CSS, and I have followed a few tutorials. I came away feeling confident because, in all honesty, HTML & CSS are easy to understand. What isn't so easy though, is the web-design that this mark-up language and this styling language are used for. Facing a simple task of making a header for a web page, and I found that I simply didn't have the experience to just do it in the way that it should be done.
How do I plan on tackling this problem? By buying another book of course. This may sound counter-intuitive, because I have just explained how reading a book about a thing, and then actually doing the thing are two separate concepts. Regardless, I know that by making my way through this book, simultaneously using what it teaches me to tackle my problems, I will get the experience and confidence I need to finally get this website designed. This is where learning and doing meet beautifully, and so this is what I will take advantage of.
Source: http://infinityjames.com/