Hello 🙂
This time I want to talk about a little bit about the process of learning in generell, instead of my progress with learning code. As many of you know, learning new skills is easier as a kid and not as easy as an adult. I’m almost 32 years old and to learn anything new requires a lot of time and effort for me. Also I decided to learn programming more or less for fun and like many other people I get easily distracted by the nice things in life, so I wanted to share some things about my process of learning and some ways I want to try out to make it more efficient. But at first a little tangent in this tangent: the reason why I’m almost at the same point where I were the week before is that I became obsessed with a musician, Jacob Collier. I got so caught up in his music that I spent almost my entire free time listening to everything he released so far and I think he is a genius and everyone should give his music a try because it’s really interesting and beautiful and very musical and I love it. Now that this is out of the way let’s start with my process.
Most times I try to learn something new I start with watching tutorials on YouTube. I don’t think it’s the best way to learn things but I’m way better at getting a broad overview by listening to someone than by reading through Wikipedia or something like this because I’m not a fast reader. But while I get an overview over the topic I look for good books or other resources I can read and gather more information from. One book recommendation I came across on programming was „Code – The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software“ by Charles Petzold. I haven’t read the book yet but it sounded very interesting. What I normally not do is researching in forums because I don’t know wich are good and in my experience people are often fighting over topics and I find it difficult to extract the good information in these forums. What I do most of the time besides reading and listening is trying out things that I saw anywhere to get a better understanding of them. The part where I struggle the most is to structure my learning process into digestible parts with small goals that keep me on track. The best example is the last week when I got so distracted that I barely got anything new to show in this blog. This is why I wanted to share with you my new ideas on how to structure my learning process. To be totally clear here, nothing I tell you from now on is my original idea. It’s a collection of thoughts on habit forming and learning from different podcasts I listened to over the last months. I’ll put the links as always under the post, but only the links to the shows and not the specific episodes because I don’t know anymore from wich ones the ideas were.
The way to learn I will try to implement looks like this:
First I search for my motivation by asking why I want to learn this and who can I support with it. Then I set a main goal wich I then simplify into much smaller goals on the way. I also will schedule learning sessions in my calendar because I need a structured plan in order to do the things I want to do. When it comes to the learning sessions I try to remove all distractions like my phone and try really to focus for about an hour or so. After the learning session I meditate or rest for about twenty minutes and I try to get good sleep every night after learning because while we sleep the things one focused on will sink in so to say. The only other thing I will try is to enjoy the hard part of concentration with all the failures I make as much as I can because it’s more likely to form a habit of something one can enjoy and one want’s to form the habit on the hard learning part, not on the pleasure of reaching a goal. And that’s all. Hopefully this plan will help me a little bit to focus on my learning process.
Next week I will tell you how successful I were with my new approach on learning and will show you some new features of my header project. Here is screenshot to end this week’s blog.
That’s all for now. Thanks for reading till the end and have a nice time until next week.
Goodbye,
Rupert
Links:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwAWbIQiqJ0D2gn5UJBPSOzvLROyqSl7f
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPNW_gerXa4Pc8S2qoUQc5e8Ir97RLuVW
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMG5w22POeeykqONbfGi00m4AqxhnzmWc
