There’s much to be said for just rolling up your sleeves and getting your hands dirty.
It seems to work both for learning something new (eg like a technical project) and for getting started on something you already know (eg reading a new book)
An example on my mind is building a simple GPT-wrapper chatbot for a favorite podcast. I was really excited about the idea, but it took me a while t go et going. The excuse I was making was wanting to have enough free time in a row to pull it off. But I think that was just an excuse.
After getting stuck and unstuck a couple times, once the project was in a place to share I felt quite a sense of agency.
My mental model shifted from “wow there’s so much going on that I don’t understand” to “wow this is exciting and I can learn & contribute.”
Maybe this is totally obvious from the social science literature. But I was surprised how much agency I felt from just getting started and getting a bit messy with the early stage of learning.