…is fucking hard.
Learning is difficult to measure, so it’s tricky to grasp where you stand in the midst of teaching yourself new skills until you can apply them.
This week, I began teaching myself principles of design, various video editing tasks, and chess endgames. Interestingly, I found many lessons which can be carried through all three of these.
The biggest takeaways from this week have been:
• Creating well-defined goals in learning is essential. “What gets measured gets managed.” The goal can’t be “learn more web design…” What do you want to be able to do at the end of today that you couldn’t do yesterday?
• Trying to juggle multiple learning/practice sessions in the span of a few hours is a recipe for chaos and unproductive sloppiness. There was one day where in two hours: I read an article on design theories, edited a section of a YouTube video, brainstormed for a podcast, and went through two online chess lessons…At the end of those two hours, I didn’t feel accomplished; I felt confused. Batching learning into hours of deep, undistracted (no phone) focus is the most effective and satisfying way to develop our knowledge.
• Despite the difficulty, teaching yourself things is incredibly rewarding; and once you sit down for about ten minutes, you get lost in the flow of adventure.
Learn good.