Yep, anything at all

You’re not dumb, and they’re not smart

Some people think that they are not intelligent or smart enough to do something, that they need to have some essential quality in their brain that allows them to begin reading a book or practicing a subject that they are interested in.

Yes, your experiences and abilities are affected by who you are, how your brain works, etc. However:

You are not only made up of an essential set of qualities that determines what you can and cannot do. Your interests can be a large part of what defines what you are able to do, instead of your self-perception of your lack of skill. The qualities that affect your ability to learn can surely get in the way of your learning, however that doesn’t mean that your attempts to learn things are in vain. You may learn at a slower pace, but ultimately with time spent learning, you can surprise yourself with how well you can progress at what you’re practicing.

You might argue that some people seem God-like in their ability to do something. Yes, some people are savants, but they are very rare. If you see someone who is very good at something, then in all likelihood, they have simply practiced a lot, and had many many revelations along their journey of learning their craft.

You never failed, you just stopped

Have you ever tried to persue some skill or activity, hobby, etc. and then almost immediately got burned out?

You were in a stage of not knowing what you don’t know, of being lost in a forest of new ideas. No matter how many leaves you sliced, there were more leaves popping into your face. So, you turned around and got back in your car, drove the opposite direction and declared your exploration of the idea a failure. You managed to learn some stuff, but it’s not coherent in your mind yet, the ideas are disconnected and un-useful.

In a forest, the leaves grow back, but with your skills, your brain internalises the ideas you learned. Your brain makes unconscious connections while you sleep.

Once you come back to the hobby, project, idea, etc. (with full gusto), the internalised ideas your brain has stored makes it easier to learn the next set of ideas.

You might go through this process of visiting an idea, burning out quickly, and quitting over and over, many times; but one day, you will have an epiphany. You’ve now chopped so many leaves blindly, and when you look around, you see a beautiful forest. Suddenly, everything looks easier to manage. The epiphany comes from the consolidation of all the ideas from all the attempts you’ve made in the past, and the attempt you made at the time of the epiphany.

From here, every time you go back to the hobby, idea, project, etc. you won’t burn out as easily as you did the previous times you visited the project/idea/whatever.

It just takes time

You can’t learn to code in a day, a week, or a month. Programming is a skill you develop through solving difficult problems, through reading bad and good code, through being frustrated all day and night for weeks and then finally coming to a solution. Over time, as your portfolio of problems solved, of issues merged, of codebases read, the types of problems that you were frustrated for weeks about before, suddenly are problems you solve in seconds. You’ve been there before, so you know what needs to be done.

Conclusion

Go out and learn something! Your learning journey never ends (but do take breaks). Learn Rust, Vim, Linux, or whatever