3-6 years? Sounds like someone who is in love with preparing for the actual work. I know this situation - whether it is setting up your development environment, getting the proper running gear if you want to get in shape or researching the best controller for your DAW (I used to work in audio production)...or reading books on how to get things done. These are tasks that easily provide a feeling of accomplishment, without ever tackling the actual work, the hard problems.
Don't get me wrong - it's good to prepare and I appreciate being organized, but it's very easy to fall into the trap of an endless preparing cycle. At some point there aren't any remaining benefits and all that is left to do, is the actual doing.
> it's good to prepare and I appreciate being organized, but it's very easy to fall into the trap of an endless preparing cycle.
I fall into that trap very often. If I'm learning a new programming language, I'll read every book and article I can find about it, try to learn best practices an architecture approaches, before even thinking about starting to write an experimental program in it. Sometimes I think I should just dig in, and research things on the fly. The worst is that I tend to repeat that mistake :-) It seams hard to change person's nature/mindset.
Don't get me wrong - it's good to prepare and I appreciate being organized, but it's very easy to fall into the trap of an endless preparing cycle. At some point there aren't any remaining benefits and all that is left to do, is the actual doing.