Read this before you choke from the next slice of ‘improving your skill-set’ pizza.
A word of hope. This post highlights learning tidbits. You will be able to finish reading it within 3 mins.
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Self-education is one of the most valuable skills to learn. People who master the art of self-education have a whole new world of possibilities open up to them. There’s almost nothing you can’t do in life if you have the ability to teach yourself. You teach yourself better every time you teach others simply because it comes with responsibility/ownership, the expectation of quality/value, and accountability of the content that you deliver to your audience. It is also worth noting that its a demanding and difficult endeavor.
You can always get better if you choose to. So, how do you learn to LEARN?
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- The Big picture!
Answer these questions – What is that this new skill helps you achieve? What’s its scope?
Understand the big picture and also narrow down to a smaller scope so that you can wrap your head around it and tackle it in a realistic amount of time. - Eliminate unknown “unknowns”.
It’s not wrong to believe Google can solve most of your problems, but how can it solve when you can’t say what your problem is? After getting the big picture, eliminate the unknown-unknowns to the maximum.
It’s far better to say,
“I know X can do that, but I just need to figure out how it does. I can always learn when the need arises.”
Instead of,
“Oh, I didn’t know X could do that!“ - The anxiety – “know-it-all | am i missing something?”
The anxiety to be prepared for everything is so common that many make the mistake of wasting their time in learning anything that is even remotely related to their area of interest. Say, a developer learns a new technology AR, which is his domain of interest but plans to study ML and AI because speech-to-speech and image-to-text recognition is now the coolest hype in town after the Build and the I/O events.
Isn’t it essential to learn something with a solid reason to learn it? - Where’s the need?
Develop a reliable system to go about anything that you want to learn. “Want” doesn’t satisfy biological learning so, convert the “want” into “need”. In other words, it shouldn’t be a conscious effort, it must be a necessity.
When you come up with a plan for doing things effectively, natural patterns in learning develop to help you learn rapidly. If there’s isn’t a need, it has less reason to stay in your head for a long time. So, do you have a real need to stick with this new skill? Take real action by utilizing what you learn in a real environment – creating requirement is the first step to learn by doing. Manufacture a reason to use the skill you’re planning to learn & acquire.
Learn something only if it can be “demo”-ed. Do not learn anything if it’s not going to help you accomplish something in the real world. - Learn by doing.
Do not learn too much upfront, instead, utilize your natural curiosity to drive your learning. Start each module as you play around & tweak it. And then go back and consume more content related to it with questions in your head. Your hands-on-experience will naturally guide you to seek out what is truly important.
Unless you use/apply/solve problems with what you learn, the knowledge gained is mostly at the surface level and never matures into understanding. - Do what?
Cannot stress more how critical it is to work on side-projects for your career in the long run. Get your hands dirty; build side-projects. - Pareto’s 20-80 Rule.
You Figure most of the important things to learn by doing. i.e 20% of what you need to learn to be 80% effective. Unlike most tutorials and textbooks which are written like reference manuals that give equal weightage to all topics, your side project is going to bite you right away if you’re missing a piece and makes you learn it providing real application and therefore deeper understanding; because it will be extremely painful to not know it. - Plan; schedule; and measure.
Far too many people set out to learn something, but have no objective way to measure if they have succeeded in learning or knowing how much is left. Gather multiple resources → read books, blogs, and magazines. Subscribe to podcasts and newsletters. Watch tutorials and debate experts opinion’s with like-minded people. - Bring order into chaos.
Figure out which order you need to learn about a topic from all your resource materials. Learn what will be of immediate value to you. The more you do it, the faster you cover the ground and you can always do just-in-time learning to go deep on a particular topic later. - Follow experts.
You can shadow an expert, observe them applying the skills (which you currently learn), or even try reaching out to them and assist them in their research work. Watching an expert handle problems at work, debating on technical implementations, etc., will quickly highlight what the 20% is at the industry level and you will have the opportunity to learn it during this on-the-job-training.
Read what experts write. Become an avid reader of their blogs, conference presentations, and journals. Oftentimes, listening to an expert’s opinion on the subject can give you deep insights you couldn’t gather on your own.
It’s one thing to understand the theory, while it’s another to understand the idiomatic usage of the acquired skill. - Practice.
Try not to get frustrated by how long it may seem to take especially when you feel like you aren’t making progress. Put in the time, the skills will come as long as you have a clear plan and busy schedule to reach your goal. Just keep at it and trust the process. - Teach. But why?
Teaching demands you to look at a mirror and reorganize your thoughts so that it can be communicated to the outside world and the complex be taught in the simplest way possible. - Stay in the “challenging” zone to stay abliss and to keep growing!
Stay away from boring work and less-interested people, and also keep away from anxious work and work environment. Always try to stay at the sweet-spot. Your work and people you surround yourself with should always be challenging enough just the right amount so that you don’t fret, nor get bored.
- The Big picture!
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