-You will experience burnout in your programming career. Things will come at you that will overwhelm your ability to cope with them. You will find yourself stuck in loops wondering if this is really what you should be doing. Understanding what you're feeling and acknowledging your feelings as valid is the first step to changing the course from one of burnout and stress. Programming shouldn't be drudgery (no work should be drudgery). There should be something in your programming day that keeps you motivated, and helps you grow your skills. Adding bits of learning, joy and wonder (along with periods of downtime) will help sustain you through the emotional turbulence that awaits.
+It's also cliche to say "learn to say no", but this is an important skill as a programmer. Too often we think of ourselves as super-beings that can do anything because the computer can do anything. But we have finite physical and emotional resources, so learning to pick and choose the projects that are most important to us (depending on our own internal criteria) will help sustain us as we progress in our programming career. If we say "yes" to everything that is pitched to us then we'll have less time to work on the things that really matter to us. We'll be at the whims of external folks whose priorities and desires may not match our own. The most effective way to burn-out on programming is to spend all of your energy working on projects that don't match your own desires and priorities.
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+You will experience periods of burnout in your programming career. Things will come at you that will overwhelm your ability to cope with them. You will find yourself stuck in loops wondering if this is really what you should be doing. Understanding what you're feeling and acknowledging your feelings as valid is the first step to changing the course from one of burnout and stress. Programming shouldn't be drudgery (no work should be drudgery). There should be something in your programming day that keeps you motivated, and helps you grow your skills. Adding bits of learning, joy, and wonder (along with periods of downtime) will help sustain you through the emotional turbulence that awaits. And recognizing when you're burning out and renegotiating your agreements with yourself and others can help reinvigorate your desires to keep programming.