The Most Important Thing You Must Do When Learning
It's not going to a coffee shop, reading 7 books a week or memorizing strangely specific details. Part 1 of 4.
Summary
🥳⛔ Excitement isn’t enough: being overly excited is a hindrance to learning.
🧐🧐 Survey your interest: you can create an idea of relevant concepts to prepare a plan.
🤓🤓 Plan your learning: planning makes your learning intentional, ensuring results.
When I was a teenager I listened to a lot of metal music (and still do). Many songs include a monstrous guitar solo—a section of the song where the guitar player goes absolutely crazy, playing at the speed of sound, pulling out all the stops to floor the listener.
I swear some of those nerds must have 20 fingers.
Of course, that shit was the coolest thing ever. I could just close my eyes, and imagine myself on stage, axe in hand, shredding until the guitar would catch fire, long hair blown back by a strong gust of wind, EVERYONE enraptured, fixated by me, like the goddamn legend I was destined to be.
At the same time, one of my internet friends with the same tastes had just started uploading covers of some of our favorite songs to YouTube. He was actually good. I watched his stuff, inspired, with just one thought in my mind: Why can’t I do that?
So I bought a guitar, chasing the dream.
Well, guess what, I had no plan, no experience, and no intention of getting a teacher. All I had was an idiot, myself—but how hard could it be? And then, reality hit.
It never amounted to much.
While I was persistent, I had many questions without an outlet. I didn’t want to ask my friend, cause that’d be embarrassing, obviously. My progress was lethargic.
So, I bought a book.
A book by an accomplished guitar player. Who better to teach, right? I was a fast reader, so I’d just get right into it!
I was quickly jammed. Long words, concepts, techniques. So many new things I didn’t understand. Turns out: reading fiction and reading with the intent to learn a specific skill is different.
And yet, I kept reading.
It got exhausting. I wasn’t considering what I read—I just kept going mindlessly. Eventually I got discouraged. I put the book down. I put the guitar down.
Maybe it wasn’t meant to be.
I’d bet this sounds familiar to many.
What I needed was a framework. A method of learning, pragmatic and directed. I had jumped in, excited, thinking too highly of my initial abilities, when I should have found material targeted at complete beginners.
I was arrogant and bad at learning by myself.
I should have taken a systematic approach, following a sequence. Steps to ensure consistent, reliable, efficient learning and reflection. Any good project starts with one thing:
Planning.
But when you’re learning something by yourself—how do you know what to plan? Isn’t it obvious? You don’t know. So where should one start?
By surveying material.
To create the plan, you must get a general overview of what you’ll be studying. Before you start anything, create an understanding of where you are about to go. Imagine you’re just starting going to the gym—do you get an idea about routines, machines and compound lifts, or do you go break your back trying to deadlift 200kg because you have no clue what’s going on?
Let’s say you’re interested in programming. You’ve bought a book. Don’t just open it and start reading. Look at the structure of the book.
What are the chapters? What are the titles, what’s in the introduction? Even better, get a second book and do the same.
What similarities do you see? Which concepts repeat?
You might notice concepts like primitive types, control structures, dynamic polymorphism, interfaces. Let your curiosity be piqued. Take those concepts to the internet, for a quick preliminary scan.
This way you’re gonna get an idea of where you start—and where you’re gonna go. Consider what you want to become knowledgeable about. By familiarizing yourself with the concepts you can start tracing a path towards that goal.
Now, you can start planning. I can read this chapter, and then practice, review and apply the concepts afterward. And this naturally leads into this concept, so maybe I’ll continue there.
You’ve surveyed and created an initial plan. You have an idea of what you’re getting into, and why. It’s time to dive deep. Put in the reps, add the volume. But don’t be misled—some people like to shout about how you just have to put in the time!
That’s false.
You have to be intentional. You have to plan. Otherwise, I’d be standing on a stage right now blasting the solo to our new hit single Alien Apocalypse. But I’m not.
I guess I should have been more intentional.
Here’s one note I want to highlight, one quote to make you ponder and one post/note from another creator I enjoyed this week.
The Note
The Quote
By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail - Benjamin Franklin
The Promote
This week I enjoyed reading
of discussing trade-offs in life and their opportunity costs: