Tips for Beginner Machine Learning/Data Scientists Feeling Overwhelmed

I think that having a so much great resources available can sometimes be both a blessing and a curse. It's great that we have so many tools and sources of information to choose from, but to make best use of it -- and our time -- it is really important to actually "choose" and keep "focused." I don't want to say that many resources are "redundant," since "redundant" has a somewhat negative ring to it. However, there are many different books, tools, and courses that cover essentially the same thing, although, the scope and style may be a bit different. So, instead of adding everything that we stumble upon to our reading lists, I'd say that it makes more sense to be absolutely clear about personal goals first ("What skills do I need to learn to solve problem X?," "Do I really to learn this new, shiny tool X instead of Y?").