## Mental Preparation Mental preparation is key when learning a new skill. Before we start coding, let�s think about why we want to learn, what we want to accomplish and what steps we will take to get there. The first question we should ask ourselves is: Why am I learning Vyper and Python? We should be honest with ourselves. Maybe we want to be part of the blockchain movement and make a lot of money, or maybe we want to learn a new skill and build our own projects. Whatever our rationale is, write it down and be honest with ourselves, don't placate ourselves. The next question is: What do I want to do/be when I finish this course? If we want to be a software engineer, security researcher, technical CEO or technical BD, write it down. What do we want to do? What do we want to feel like when we're finished with this course? Finally, what are the steps we are going to take to get there? This is a long course, so we need to figure out a learning cadence that works for us and stick to it. Maybe 30 minutes a day for 4 days a week, 1 hour a day, or 2 hours on Saturday and Sunday. Whatever our schedule is, write it down so that we can come back to it when things get tough. We should keep these goals private and be honest with ourselves. We're going to start by making a README.md file in our terminal. This will be our manifesto that we can come back to when things get hard. In our terminal, we're going to create a new file named README.md ```bash touch README.md ``` We can open this file in our VS code, by using a command in our terminal. ```bash code README.md ``` This should open up our new file in our VS Code. Now, let's go back to our terminal and make sure we're in the correct directory. ```bash pwd ``` Now that our setup is complete, we are ready to start coding!