I'd love to be someone who could sit in a state of trance and consume 500 pages of boring reference manual and immediately put all of that into action. But I'm not.

I have to have something practical, something that I want to use either personally or at work. And at first it has to be pretty simple. If there is no low-hanging fruit to explore I'll probably get bored and move on (i.e., fail).

I like to learn about the right way to do things in my given environment and am terribly afraid of people with more experience than me seeing my code and mocking it.