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.
![](https://www.lotsofstuff.de/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Bildschirmfoto-2021-07-19-um-16.52.56-1024x612.png)
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