This post is some thoughts on learning. It's about an 8-minute read, but if you follow the links, it might take you down a few rabbit holes. Let me know your thoughts using the feedback buttons or comments below.
'Learning is the only thing the mind never exhausts, never fears and never regrets.' — Leonardo da Vinci.
When I was first learning to code many years ago, my go-to approach was to read a bunch of coding books and go all in on building things and experimenting. It was this hands-on approach of practice, but also continuously improving. This "building things" part was the practice and involved creating sample projects to get familiar with the fundamentals. Over and over again. But I also kept reading after 'diving in' and never stopped learning. Looking back, it's quite easy to see that it's this combination of learning and taking action consistently that allows us to grow rapidly in any area.
Now, it took me another few years to realize that I actually knew what I needed to know and my skills were “good enough”. That's the tricky part. It’s quite easy for imposter syndrome to sneak its way in, especially if you compare yourself to others who are further along the journey than you. But looking back now, it's also quite easy to see that I had a pretty good grasp of "building useful things" within 1-2 years of highly focused effort.
As Steve Jobs said in his famous commencement speech:
"You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future."
Once you've connected the dots a few times. You'll start getting an intuitive grasp of when "good enough" is. This is a skill that itself takes practice and requires a bit of zooming out and asking the right questions.
There are two traps I've found myself falling into when learning new fields. Learning too much, or not learning enough. Neither one is ideal.
If we keep reading without applying what we learn, we will likely forget or not truly understand what we read. This is a bit like how school is set up. Not sure about you, but I barely remember much of anything. There weren't really any practical applications. This can generally lead to wasted effort.
But, if we keep applying what we already know without improving, we will likely stay at the same level or get frustrated by our lack of progress.
This can be any skill that might have become a habit. If you find yourself saying, "I'm just not that good at …" then that could be an area where you reached a baseline level and stopped improving. But you can always learn more. Speaking in public is a typical example for many people.
A pencil needs to be sharpened, or it gets dull from constant use.
For me, it's really the balance of learning and applying that makes an impact. Also, giving the brain time to process things and create connections is imperative. Writing and journaling help with this too.
"Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young." - Henry Ford.
You can see this balancing act play out more clearly in sports or anything with a more obvious feedback loop.
For example, if you spend a year reading or watching videos about tennis, which presents forth a certain level of unnatural motions for the body, you would probably understand the game intellectually but likely won't be able to apply everything you've learned in a real-world scenario. The first match would be… somewhat interesting. At some point during that year, it would have made more sense to actually hit the courts and smash the ball around.
On the flip side, if you just jump in and start playing matches without practicing the fundamentals, you might get a baseline level of good, but you won't know how to correct what's wrong, possibly even leading to injury. This is what happened to me the first time I just "dived right in." I got a good workout out of it, but that's only because I already knew how to run. The whole thing was a bit frustrating, needless to say. Now I always research a subject first and usually hire a coach when new physical skills are to be learned.
It's this combination of continuous learning, applying what we've learned, and practice, practice, practice, which gets us to reach the best of our abilities in areas that are hard to grasp or master. I'm a huge proponent of doing both. Always learning, but also diving in and experimenting hands-on. And also going back in and reviewing the fundamentals.
"I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times." — Bruce Lee.
The same applies to entrepreneurship or any other skill where measuring progress is not so obvious. Simply reading about the field can give us a good high-level understanding, but we eventually need to get our feet wet and apply what we learn to our own journey. This month's book pick (The Lean Startup) covers how to do this in detail for taking a product to market, so I'll leave it for the review to cover that.
But.. simply going head first into launching a product without first learning about things can cause some mistakes we might have otherwise seen coming, just like the injuries in sports.
So again, it's this balance of learn, apply, grow, repeat.
Not just learning for the sake of learning. Not just doing for the sake of doing. But a combination of both learning and doing and then leveling up from there. In my view, both go hand in hand.
Since entrepreneurship is my area of active learning right now, I try to read a book a week on stuff like business, marketing, self-growth, as well as domain-specific areas for my projects. I also try applying these teachings as soon as possible. I don't always hit that reading goal, but I found it a good target to have. This is one thing I wish I had started doing earlier in life. The dividends pay off for the rest of your life.
"An investment in knowledge pays the best interest." - Benjamin Franklin.
Derek Sivers, in his keynote speech to incoming music students, had the same advice on how to be valuable to society after mastering their core skills (great speech, by the way, highly recommend it) —
"… when you leave here, head to the business aisle of the bookstore and start reading a book a week about entrepreneurial things like marketing. "
I have the same view. Entrepreneurship is really the foundation for everything else. Even if you are in a creative field (such as art, music, or writing), these skills will always be a huge plus. Many creatives tend to sell themselves short simply because they never honed these skills. But you can always start now.
I'd add you don't always need to read a new book a week. I often go back and read the ones I've found valuable over and over again, depending on where I'm at. You can find some of my top book lists here. You can also take longer than a week sometimes if you find something super valuable. This can include taking notes, applying the teachings in real-time, or going back and rereading things. There's really no race. It's just about continuously improving at whatever speed you want. But I found the goal of a book a week a good one to have and something I can sustain now. How about you, are you reading a book a week?
I often have 2-3 different books open on any given day or week. Especially when researching a new topic. This practice of reading multiple books on a subject and comparing and contrasting the ideas is known as Syntopical Reading. It's obviously the most challenging way to read but also the best way to understand a complex subject, especially when paired with note-taking and asking questions. It's meant to be done by reading different books on a single subject; for example, if you want to learn a technical field like coding or even marketing, then read a bunch of marketing books and form your own thesis from those.
But I'm trying this out on diverse subjects as well to see how it goes. It's interesting how there are always connections to be made, even across fields. But you can only see them if you actively apply the knowledge.
Something I didn't truly appreciate before, however, is the value of reading biographies. I recently started doing this and realized how valuable they are. They give you an insane outlook of a person's entire journey. It's a bit like reading fiction, but the story is real. You also get a bird's eye view of how everything played out in the end. That, to me, is quite fascinating. So, I thought I'd do something interesting with this.
Introducing… Flyby Biographies!
In circle(s) of influence, we discussed how your circle of influence can have a huge impact on the direction of your life. But if you are still working to elevate your circle, books and biographies can play a huge part in doing so. Reading a book can be a big investment. Doing so over a bunch of hours, days, and weeks as you apply and reflect upon the knowledge can alter your thinking and form several new connections. As I mentioned back then - "If you want to move the world forward, study the greats; most of them have biographies." I'm studying them actively myself now.
Now the point is not to read a biography and emulate the person it is about, nobody is perfect, and even the greats have flaws. The idea is simply to pick out the best characteristics and ideas from the people whose contribution you admire, dissect the insights and apply them to our own lives as we see fit while avoiding the mistakes.
"It's said that a wise person learns from his mistakes. A wiser one learns from others' mistakes. But the wisest person of all learns from others's successes." ― John C. Maxwell
Unlike the monthly entrepreneurship book club, I won't announce the book pick before. I'll just write up my notes of whatever I'm reading and post them here whenever they are ready. If you enjoy it, you can buy and read the book in your own time. So it'll be like a bonus to the book club, but I didn't want to make it two books per month as that might get a bit much. Or would it? Let me know what you think in the poll below:
Till then, happy learning, and stay tuned for the review of The Lean Startup next week or so. It's coming in HOT! Let's set the deadline at 10 days from now.
If you haven't already read it, you can start now. That’s the best time to build a new habit. As I mentioned, you just need to read 35 pages per day to be done in 10 days. That's about 35 minutes of focused reading per day for someone with an average reading speed. If you have a few more minutes, I'd also suggest taking some notes and summarizing the lessons in your own words. The simpler, the better. You'll get more value out of it. And then, of course, the best way to learn is to apply what you read (fast) and think about it… slowly.
That is how you build… confidence!
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