Learning to Learn
So after a year from now I will be a graduate and I did my graduation in Engineering. Yeah, I’ll become an Engineer after a year now woohoo ✨🎉!! So now as a last step before my graduation there is something really important that I must do to prove that my degree is worth it and that is …. *drum rolls please 🥁🥁* Make some great projects??❌ No….. Find a job!✔
So as a part of finding a job, you need some technical skills and based on which engineering field you want to go to, your technical requirements change. For instance if you want to be a software engineer then you go to algoexpert….. nah I am just kidding, you need good programming skills, if you want to become an Electrical engineer then you need to be good with all those circuit analysis and stuff. Now I wanted to be a software engineer because I can at least work from my home and also because I love this field. But, I didn’t know coding. So I had to learn how to code which is a skill in itself, so during the lockdown I decided that this is high time that I start. So I made a plan with a few steps and I wish to share these steps with you. You can apply these steps to learn any skill that you want to learn and master.
I am currently reading a book called Atomic Habits. Reading this book I realized that some of these steps are already discussed in the book along with a lot of other great stuff. So if you are someone who has read this book, you will feel that the ideas here are a bit similar.
1. Finding The Right Resources
Now when it comes to the first step I feel it is important to find the right resources or the right teacher/instructor. Now there are two schools of thought here, I will refer to them as Bootcamp and Self-taught.
The Bootcamp approach says that find the right resources, the right offline/online bootcamp where you have an instructor guiding you each step, building your skills right from the ground up. For the Bootcamp approach, you have a curriculum that will be followed, the next lessons will build upon the previous lessons and you will slowly and steadily reach a certain level. You have an instructor that you can get in touch with when you have some doubts and get your doubts resolved in seconds.
The Self-taught approach says that you make a curriculum for yourself and try to follow that curriculum on your own. There are a lot of resources that you need to segregate from and when you start you don’t understand which one you should start with. You try to spend some time with the thing that you want to learn and eventually you might reach a certain level. You don’t have an instructor here so you yourself need to figure out the answers for all your doubts.
Now the reason why I said, “you will slowly and steadily reach a certain level” for bootcamp route and, “you might reach a certain level” for self-taught route is because the self-taught route is tough. You are just starting to learn this new skill not knowing where to start and the internet does not know your experience, so it gets difficult to learn on your own. No doubt that there are people who have learned and mastered different skills using the self-taught route, but there are only a handful of them. So I recommend the bootcamp route where the instructor knows where you come from and has curated the course for you in such a way that you take incremental steps and eventually master the skill.
2. Watch At Least One Video Per Day
In this book Atomic Habits, the author Jame Clear, mentions that, whenever we try to inculcate a new habit in our lives, initially the motivation to pursue the habit is really high and as time passes the motivation to pursue the habit goes downhill.
Now as you can see from the image the motivation to pursue the habit declines. Now what James suggests is something really simple and that is 1% improvement. We only need small incremental steps and our desire to pursue the habit stays with us.
I would suggest something really similar. Now that you have decided a bootcamp / online course, you have access to all of their videos and what I have seen is and even I did this, is that we are really enthusiastic about buying the course, but we either procrastinate to start the course or we watch 50 videos on the first day and then as the course gets older our excitement dies and 50 becomes 20, 20 becomes 5, 5 becomes 0 and 0 becomes 0 and we stop our learning, learning just the basics and nothing more.
So make a practice to at least watch 1 video, that’s it. If you feel like watching 10 more go ahead no one’s stopping you. But, no matter what try to complete at least 1 video each day. What happens is, through the process you revise the previous stuff and you are in touch with the skill on a daily basis.
3. Practice The Stuff Learned
Now as you are learning new skills, now is the time to bring some practice on the table. Now there are a few ways to practice, now I’ll share the practice I did to pursue coding and you can use something similar.
Now for programming, you can build a few projects to practice or there are websites like LeetCode and Hackerrank that let’s you practice these ideas. Also if I am not in the mood to write the code I used to read my previous code and I used to read some articles or github codes to keep myself in touch with coding.
You can also do something really similar, for instance, consider you want to learn the guitar. You can practice the E chord multiple times but if you get bored you can take a day off and just listen to someone else play the E chord, so you are in touch with the things you need to play the E chord.
Final Thoughts
I know it is a long way, but we need to be tough enough to come out from the other side as a totally new / better person. Someone who didn’t know a skill before but now knows the same.
Just connect to the internet and start learning😃! Happy Learning 😎!
