"One more course" is not a learning strategy

You've been working through a course for three weeks. You're almost done. But there's already another one open in another tab (the one you'll do after this) because once you finish both, you'll finally feel ready to apply. Or to take on bigger work. Or to stop feeling like you're pretending. That feeling doesn't go away when you finish the course. You already know that. I used tutorials as a way to avoid the thing I was afraid of When I was trying to land my first dev job, I did this obsessively. One more project. One more certification. One more month of practice. I told myself I was building a foundation, but I was really managing anxiety by feeling productive. The courses felt safe. They had right answers. They gave you a green checkmark when you got it right. Real work doesn't do that. At some point I applied anyway: underprepared, convinced someone in HR had made a mistake. Within a month on the job I'd learned more about version control, debugging, and reading unfamiliar code tha