0 Learn and Don't You Dare Stop
I’m learning what it takes to learn something and never turn away from it. I’m hitting massive walls with basic concepts of programming. So much so that I’m just losing interest altogether.
In any design field, we term this as “creative block”. It’s that place you reach when nothing flows, nothing generates and moving forward is nothing but a pipe dream. So how do I fix this?
The Danger of Knowing Enough
Taking up Django for a second time revealed some mistakes I make repeatedly when in the learning process. Now its time for a story (don’t worry, it’s related). My mother is a devout Christian and has been since my birth. She is often times zealous and passionate about the bible and Christ-related subjects in general. She said something to me one time that I never forgot. We’d been talking about something in the bible and she turns to me and says, “There are people who know just enough bible to be dangerous”. At the time it went right over my head, but the older I got the more it made sense.
When people learn a skill, they tend to learn just enough to accomplish a few important things, but not enough to innovate or be truly effective. We generally depend on experience to drive the remainder of our learning process. As a matter of fact, I do this all the time. I learn enough to get going and let experience burn the remaining knowledge into my skull. But what if there is no platform to build experience? What if its just you and a pile of tools around you with no place to use them? How are you to cultivate real experience?
Experience in Application
This blog runs on RadiantCMS which is a Ruby on Rails based content management system. I learned as much as I could about it because it had a relevant and immediate use.
Cultivating experience means having an immediate, relevant need with a bevy of tools around you to meet that need. Your depth or lack thereof in skilled use of the tools around you will always determine the quality of what’s produced. But that quality can’t be gained unless you drop to the floor on your hands and knees and get dirty. That means being meticulous about solving problems and completing stubbornly small succinct goals that form the bigger picture.
This is how we learn effectively
Everyone learns differently and that never really mattered. It’s how you’re using what you know. That is really the only thing that matters. Knowing enough will never actually be enough without doing and practicing what you know. That’s why higher education in the United States is failing. Accessibility to an environment and platform to apply said knowledge is either out of reasonable reach or just not there at all. I guess that’s why I didn’t stay in college. lol.