In the past few years, I’ve learned a lot of new things. The software industry changes very quickly, and I need to stay up to date on the current trends and practices to be effective at my job. To make things more difficult for myself, I’ve made an effort to work in as many different fields of technology as I can. I’ve done frontend, databases, embedded systems, graphics, DevOps, and management in tens of programming languages, and along the way I’ve established myself as a capable generalist problem solver in several domains.
If you need to learn a lot of new things quickly, it pays dividends to be mindful of your learning process. Going from a cold start in a new field can be intimidating and stagnating in a field you already know can be a frustrating experience. To help me overcome these challenges, I’ve developed a system for learning to help me make decisions for how to spend my time in the most effective way possible, which I’ll present here. It’s written with software in mind, but I believe it can be applicable to any kind of learning. This system is a work in progress, so feedback is appreciated in the comments.
The three vital activities for learning are reading, thinking, and doing. These activities should be balanced to create a positive feedback loop. Each activity is a force multiplier for the next. The better you read, the better the quality of your thoughts become. Better thoughts will lead to more effective action. And more effective action will lead to better reading.
Learn for a Purpose
Learning for its own sake is a beautiful endeavor that everyone should engage in from time to time. Everyone should know a little bit about things like history, chemistry, or the classics. You don’t need a system like this for that kind of learning. An important part of this system is having some sort of purpose to work towards. If you want to be a novelist, you should be working towards writing a book. If you want to be a well respected software engineer, you should be working towards creating great software. At the end of the day, we are judged by the results we achieve and not our capabilities.
Don’t take results too seriously though. Learning is a long process and not everything you do will have a direct impact on what will ultimately become your greatest achievements. Plan to throw one away. Take risks and expect to produce some really bad stuff while you are learning. Use these experiences to refine your purpose.
The Three Activities
Now I’ll explain the role of the three activities and most importantly how to find a balance between them.
Reading
When asked about his genius, Isaac Newton famously said “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” How to read well is an art unto itself that deserves another article. In this context, reading has an important relationship with the other two activities.
Any piece of writing on its own is simply some arrangement of symbols on a page. What brings the writing to life is the experience a person has while reading it. Every person who reads a passage in a novel gets a different mental image of the setting and the characters because we bring our own experiences to the scene. If the passage takes place in a port, I’ll imagine it’s like a port I’ve been to. If one of the characters acts like one of my friends, I’ll relate to the character like I relate to my friend.
Reading nonfiction is the same way. If I’m trying to build microservices, I’ll have a completely different experience with a book on microservice architecture if I’ve actually tried to build one. If I’ve thought deeply about microservices, I may find the author has put into words exactly what I was thinking but in a more eloquent way. Use the other two activities to provide context and purpose for your reading. Experience on the subject you are reading about deepens your reading experience so you can spend your reading time more efficiently.
Reading Too Much
To be well read in itself is rarely the purpose we are trying to achieve with learning. Read too much and you risk becoming the stereotypical academic locked away in an ivory tower and disconnected from the real world. The character who comes to mind is Chidi from The Good Place. Chidi is a college professor who is an “expert” on the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Chidi is very well read, but is characteristically adverse to making actual moral decisions. Without the context of being a moral person, we see through the course of the show that Chidi actually has not gained any understanding of morality despite being well read on the subject, and ultimately ends up in Hell because of it.
Reading Too Little
Reading too little is a missed opportunity to learn from the experiences of those who have come before you in the field. As a beginner, I sometimes find myself averse to reading because I believe it will stifle my creativity or I just want the experience of figuring things out for myself for fun. As I learn more and become an expert, I tend to think I already know everything there is to know and my mind closes to new ideas. It’s important to fight these tendencies and keep reading on a subject no matter what your skill level is. Reading too little leads to stagnation of your thoughts.
Thinking
The philosopher René Descartes was famous for locking himself in his room, laying in bed all day and thinking deeply about things. During these bouts of meditation, he came up with the Cartesian coordinate system that we all learn about in high school, and a lot of other influential ideas in philosophy like “I think therefore I am”. Similarly, Immanuel Kant would take very long walks every day where he would think about the great ideas of his moral philosophy. Aristotle even went so far as to say that the unexamined life is not worth living.
The purpose of high quality reading is high quality thinking. High quality thinking leads to high quality actions, like in the examples above.
Thinking Too Much
“A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts. So he loses touch with reality, and lives in a world of illusion.” – Alan Watts
Low quality thinking spins around in a circle. At its worst, it becomes existential despair, like the famous opening line from the play Waiting For Godot – nothing to be done. Low quality thoughts simply lead to more thinking ad infinitum.
The most important skill to develop with your thinking is knowing when to stop. When you have something that looks like a good idea, it’s time to go to the next step and start implementing it. You don’t need to have all the details worked out in advance. Things will become much more clear once you have at least part of your vision out of your head and into the real world. The only way to have your thoughts build on top of each other is having something in front of you to give you different things to think about.
Thinking Too Little
The risk of thinking too little is doing the wrong thing. Without taking the time to absorb what you read, you may develop a sense of false confidence where you believe you are an expert in a field you really don’t know much about. No matter how much work you put into creating your work, if you start with a bad idea you will not be successful. In business, this may lead to the very common mistake of creating the wrong product for the market. If you feel like you are just spinning your wheels without really going anywhere, you probably need to spend some more time thinking about what you’re doing.
Doing
Real artists ship. – Steve Jobs
The purpose of going through this process is to actually create something valuable and that happens in this stage. Now that you’ve thought about what to do and read enough to know how to do it, it’s time to get to work.
Doing Too Much
It may seem counterintuitive, but spending too much time on action directed towards your goal can be unproductive if you aren’t mindful of what you are doing. When playing the piano, there is a big difference between practice and performance. When I learned how to play the piano, I started with scales and exercises. I found these exercises to be tedius because what I really wanted to play was Mozart. As I got better and learned a few songs, I found that improving at these scales and exercises was the only way I could improve at playing songs. The key insight I learned form this experience is that you don’t get better at playing Mozart by playing Mozart. If you spend too much time on your performance without practicing, you will learn bad habits and it will be harder to get better.
Software is exactly the same way. You have to practice at it to get better, and this practice is a completely different sort of exercise than what you will do at your job. When you practice, spend your time pouring over the code rewriting it until you get everything perfect. Go very slowly and strive for perfection, like a pianist who slowly plays a passage of Mozart over and over until it is perfect. Then when it is time to write code under the pressure of a deadline, you’ll get a better result much faster. Both practice and performance are essential for effectively getting the most out of what you do.
Doing Too Little
Without having actual experience, you won’t have context to absorb what you read to the fullest extent. Without getting your thoughts out into the real world, you’ll need to keep so much in your head that there won’t be room for anything else. Taking too little action can cause your learning to stagnate just as much as too little reading or thinking. And at the end of the day, it’s time to start performing and working towards what will become your greatest achievements, because that is after all the point of going through all this work.
Conclusion
This system has come about from years of observing my own process of learning and it seems to work for me pretty well. However, I don’t consider it complete and this is my first time writing it down so let me know what you think. There’s a lot here that I’d like to refine in further articles.