It doesn’t matter if you feel like you are too busy, if you are going to be successful on your journey you will need to set aside time each day to learn.If you don’t practice and learn daily your motivation will quickly fade and you will inevitably lose interest in a potentially fulfilling career.Why you should avoid this: Pursuing data science is a marathon, not a sprint..The skill set required for the job is so diverse, it can only really be acquired through consistent effort over a long period of time..If you try to learn in short bursts, you will eventually exhaust yourself and extinguish your motivation to go on.Worse still, if you put off your learning until you feel like you have time, you will probably never even embark on your journey..And, if you do, you will have cemented in your mind the idea that learning is something that you do when time permits..In data science, that mindset is a quick end to a career.My advice: Set healthy habits, early on.Whether you are working full-time and want to make a career pivot, or are studying at a university and want to follow a career path that excites you; Either way you need to find healthy habits that allow you to overcome stress.A few healthy habits you can set from the beginning:Set time aside every day to learn something new.Try to get connected in the data science community..You’d be surprised how many people will relate to your feelings of anxiety.If you feel exhausted and anxious from learning, take some time off and build a project with something you have learned recently..This is a great way to de-stress and reconnect with why you are learning in the first place!Learn how to deal with being overwhelmed.When you actually start learning data science skills, you will notice that there are a LOT of things to focus on..At this very moment, I could probably list 8–12 skills that I want to acquire in the next 6 months.Unfortunately, this isn’t just me..Having a long list of skills you want to learn or practice will be a daily reality on your journey towards data science..Just look at Swami Chandrasekaran’s data science roadmap and you will see what I am talking about.Swami ChandrasekaranWhen I first saw this roadmap, my gut response was to feel overwhelmed by the sheer enormity of that list..How could one person possibly expect to learn all that on their own?.What I had learned so far was only a small fraction of the list, had I really made any progress at all?Unfortunately, this feeling of being overwhelmed will stick with you throughout your journey towards data science.One day you might feel that you have achieved mastery over a concept/skill, just to realize that five new things need to be added to your list of things to learn.. More details