A time when I was motivated to learn
A few years ago, my Windows laptop was getting very slow and, as told, old (though only 3.5 years old). I didn’t had any money to buy a new one and anyway didn’t wanted to as I was expecting a longer life from this laptop. I searched on the net what was the problem and what I could do. That’s when I heard about linux and decided to jump and install it. I had absolutely no background in computing and even, dare I say now, no real understanding on how a computer was working. Trying to make the wi-fi, printer, etc. working was a pain. But it forced me to search how things were working and I got hooked on computing, reading a lot, trying things by myself, learning the command line etc. It’s a learning I never regret.
From personal experience to motivate people
I got a very large database for my PhD. Most variables were numeric but some very important ones were made of text, comments written by the population under study. But these variables were of prime importance to clean and validate this database, made of 10 years of data and several million lines of observations. Using shell scripts helped me save a huge amount of time exploring, parsing and processing the text in this database. You could do it in SAS or other statistical software, certainly with other languages like awk or perl, but having more than one tool at hand to do a job is a big plus.