 What's going on everybody? Welcome back to another video. Today we're going to talk about why you need to stop taking courses like right now. All right. Let me take a step back here because you guys know that I love courses. I've taken a ton of courses myself and I've recommended a lot of courses to you and I still recommend them, but courses really only get you so far. Now when I was first starting out, I was a course pro. I took a course on everything and I took a multiple of them. So I would take three, four, even five courses on Python if that's what I was learning at the time. And I thought that the more courses I took, the better I was going to be at it. But it turned out that when I actually tried to apply that skill, I usually was not as good at it as I thought I should be. It turns out that I was really learning these skills in a closed environment where they were basically spoon feeding me the answers. And so I felt like I was learning a lot. But at the end of the day, I didn't really know it that well. So when something came along or had to apply it, I failed a lot. And so I was caught in something that I like to call course purgatory. It's a place where you basically just keep taking courses and you kind of know that skill, but you never actually really know it. You know you're in course purgatory when you've done so many courses that everything starts to become a little too familiar and a little too easy. And you start to think, man, I've seen like 10 tutorials on how to do joins or I've seen like six different ways to do for loops. I still don't fully understand it. That's when you know it might be time to stop taking courses. Now how do you get out of course purgatory? It is very simple. You need to start doing projects. All you have to do is get some data and start messing around with it. You can visualize it, you can analyze it, you can clean it, whatever interests you. On this channel, we just completed four portfolio projects in SQL, Tableau and Python. And I think you should absolutely check those out. I think those are a fantastic place to start, but do not stop there. Otherwise you'll get caught in something that I like to call guided portfolio project purgatory. And that can be just as bad as course purgatory. Now I get asked a lot, where do you find this data for your projects? And there are two places that I like to go the most. The first one is Kaggle. It's a really good place to find data. There are so many different data sets. Another one is something called Google data sets. And I'm not just talking about Googling data sets. I'm talking about an actual place within Google called Google data sets. You can find just about any kind of data set on either one of these places, but I would try to find one that interests you that you think would be really fun to analyze. And you don't have to use a data set that's already been created. You can create your own. So if you want to scrape data from Amazon or Twitter or Facebook or the weather app or the weather website that you use, go for it. And then you can download that into an Excel or a CSV and you can use that as your data set. So if you're thinking about signing up for your six Python course, I would recommend not doing that. And instead trying to do a personal project using Python. With all that being said, courses are fantastic and I highly recommend them, but there does come a time where you need to stop taking courses and you really need to learn how to apply those skills that you're learning. I hope that this video can save a lot of people from entering course purgatory like I was in for many months and save you a lot of time and build up your skills faster. Thank you guys so much for watching. I really appreciate it. If you liked this video, be sure to like and subscribe below and I'll see you in the next video.