All right. Moving on, we have a question from Omar. Omar asks, how do you study self-study technical things well enough to be employable? For example, programming or data analysis. He elaborates that he currently works in sales, but is looking to make the switch over to software engineering. In his sales job, he's doing a bunch of just emails and following up with prospects.

So Omar, I'm going to say-- I mean, I see in your elaboration you say you don't want to spend a ton of money. You don't want to go back to school. I think that's OK. I think you should spend some money. You should spend some money so that you are making yourself accountable.

Hey, I spent money on this training I'm about to do, so I'm going to show up. Also, I'm signaling to myself that I take this seriously. I'm not dabbling. I really do want to pick up this skill. I would say spend some money. So what do I mean by some money?

Well, probably in this case, some sort of boot camp. It's going to take place over a fixed amount of time. You're going to master a particular language. You're going to get a particular certification. You probably need to do an introductory boot camp, and then you're going to need to do some sort of training at a higher level after that.

Spend some money on that. Don't do something that's free. Again, you want to signal to yourself you take this seriously. Two, ultimately, you need to produce real things. It's the best way to learn. It's the best way to show other people you know what you're doing. So you're going to need some sort of actual projects that you're doing on the side, perhaps, to show I can actually program.

But more importantly, that's how you're really going to learn how to do it. I built this project. This took me a long time. I was constantly Googling things. It's constantly on Stack Overflow. Oh, but then I did this next project. Wasn't so hard. And the third one I did on my own, I think it looks pretty nice.

OK, now I think I'm ready. The final thing I'm going to say is be ready to begin at a basic level if you switch jobs. A lot of good coders out there, a lot of people to choose from for these jobs. So that you might be actually starting at a pretty low level, technically speaking.

And say, that's OK, because here's my plan. I'm going to get after it once I have that job. I'm going to crush the low level stuff they tell me to do, the easier programming. I can do it really, really well with a level of skill and polish that they don't quite expect.

And then I'm going to use that to leverage up to the next level, the next level. So I'm going to leverage myself level to level to level. So in a year, I will actually be at a pretty good spot. So you want to be coming into this being like, I want to learn enough to get a technical job that would allow me in one year to be in the job I want.

So to be in a job and be working your way up to a higher position is much more productive than just being on your own for that time, just trying to on your own polish your skills. So let's summarize the three points here. One, spend some money. I'm not talking about tuition and to get a separate undergrad degree.

But spend some money for a non-trivial boot camp. You probably need to do two levels of training. Two, build things. Build things until you can build things that look pretty good, at a pretty high quality, and it wasn't like pulling teeth. You're not Googling where does the semicolon go in a C++ for loop.

You have that stuff. You're not praying and compiling, compiling and praying, something we see a lot in intro computer science classes. You're like, I don't know, compile. Ah, errors. Let me just change things randomly. Still errors? Like you're past that stage. Fine. And then get hired not for the job you want, but for the job that will make it possible for you to get the job you want a year later if you get after it, if you deliberately practice, if you prove your worth.

All right? So Omar, I'm glad you're making the shift. I haven't read all the details on air that you sent me here about your current job, but man, it sounds like it's just context switching central. It's just email all day long. Yeah, let's get out of there. Let's get you somewhere better, somewhere deeper.

I love the way you're thinking.