The problem does not lie with "spending 4 hours per day for 5 years". It lies with the way you had been spending them. I mean, with so much time investment, you could have easily aced the whole Leetcode and landed a job at FAANG if you wanted to lol, or you could have built several awesome products or open-source libraries by yourself, all the while having a reasonable work-life-balance and hobbies. Learning things from various step-by-step guides could feel exciting and fun, but it ultimately produces limited value, since you were consuming things from the others, not creating on your own, which is ultimately how value is created.
Of course, focused and purposeful learning in order to be a better creator or to expose yourself to new ideas and fields is totally fine and should be encouraged. However, learning a lot of similar languages and frameworks which don't fundamentally introduce new ideas or thought patterns is a shallow form of learning, and guess what, you feel safe and happy because you encounter little resistance just trying to follow the instructions in the guide and seeing shiny things work exactly as described, but not trying to hack at actual new problems or new products.
I also fell into a similar pitfall during my undergraduate days. If I could give myself back then some advice, I would have said "quit dispersing your attention at various things and actually build and finish what you started, or at least heed the conventional wisdom a bit more and prepare for coding interviews" 😄.
I still think that reading HN etc. is helpful though. It's not necessary to put it into the same basket as reading similar tutorials over and over again. You could come across some really unique piece of thought that opens your eyes. You just need to strike a balance and make sure that you're not reading HN for 4 hours every day and end up not building :)
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The problem does not lie with "spending 4 hours per day for 5 years". It lies with the way you had been spending them. I mean, with so much time investment, you could have easily aced the whole Leetcode and landed a job at FAANG if you wanted to lol, or you could have built several awesome products or open-source libraries by yourself, all the while having a reasonable work-life-balance and hobbies. Learning things from various step-by-step guides could feel exciting and fun, but it ultimately produces limited value, since you were consuming things from the others, not creating on your own, which is ultimately how value is created.
Of course, focused and purposeful learning in order to be a better creator or to expose yourself to new ideas and fields is totally fine and should be encouraged. However, learning a lot of similar languages and frameworks which don't fundamentally introduce new ideas or thought patterns is a shallow form of learning, and guess what, you feel safe and happy because you encounter little resistance just trying to follow the instructions in the guide and seeing shiny things work exactly as described, but not trying to hack at actual new problems or new products.
I also fell into a similar pitfall during my undergraduate days. If I could give myself back then some advice, I would have said "quit dispersing your attention at various things and actually build and finish what you started, or at least heed the conventional wisdom a bit more and prepare for coding interviews" 😄.
I still think that reading HN etc. is helpful though. It's not necessary to put it into the same basket as reading similar tutorials over and over again. You could come across some really unique piece of thought that opens your eyes. You just need to strike a balance and make sure that you're not reading HN for 4 hours every day and end up not building :)