I don't know what's harder - dealing some days with a teenager and a toddler & their age related issues, running engineering in a startup on a daily basis, counting days that we will run our of business, going through the highs of successful demos and dealing with the lows of almost-there sales calls, wondering if it's time to get the resume in shape, planning to implement crazy ideas in your favorite language and then getting bogged down fixing inane production bugs; oh, it's a constant struggle - believe me.
But you just have to move that stone, an inch every day despite everything else going on. Sounds like such a cliche, but it works if you just keep at it.
If you are a hacker, you tend to be more driven towards learning techniques (ML, DL etc) to solve a problem at hand rather than just learning a technique and then hunting for a problem which can be solved with it. For example, my motivation for learning ML & any associated statistical methods went through the roof when confronted with a problem of figuring out a better way to identify & predict which devices (from a huge set) would go bust largely based on available indicators like power drain etc. I wouldn't have made the effort to read a bunch of papers & watch relevant videos if I didn't have a problem to solve. Maybe that happens if you've been a code-monkey for 20+ years.
I'm a historical fiction nut & as it just so happened the Sharpe series from Bernard Cornwell (21 books) had been too long on my wish list, waiting to be read. Finally, got around to finishing it this year.
Usually, I'm real bad at reading & finishing non-software non-fiction; but managed ~10 of those this year.
Enjoyed reading Shoe Dog by Phil Knight & I contain multitudes by Ed Yong. I keep going back to Learned Optimism by Martin Seligman quite a bit. Need to read more in 2017.
But you just have to move that stone, an inch every day despite everything else going on. Sounds like such a cliche, but it works if you just keep at it.