How to Actually Get Good at Your Job the Hard Way
Two months ago before I left a company, one of my teammates asked me, “How do you know so many things and learn new things so quickly?”
I told her that I don’t really think I’m a particularly smart person but there are a few habits I’ve picked up about 10 years ago that I kept practicing and the results have compounded over time.
I mentioned that most people only perform their job from the perspective of completing a task.
While this is good for producing quick, visible results specially in the fast-paced world of tech deadlines, it doesn’t result in any understanding of why and how the solution works. In fact, sometimes people do not really even understand the core problem associated with the task to begin with. They were just told to do something, and they trial and errored their way through a solution somehow.
(Something I’ve heard referred to as “solving by coincidence”)
If they have do the same thing a few months from now, the lack of understanding resulted in low retention of information and they have to relearn it all over again.
If they have to do something similar, but different enough, the lack of understanding results in them not recognizing the patterns between the similar tasks. They are unable to apply their existing, related knowledge.
When you take the time to understand the fundamentals of what you’re doing, you start to see patterns and are able to connect knowledge together from what at first seemed to be different universes. You start to get faster at learning new things, troubleshooting, and solving problems over time.
There’s an initial overhead to this, of course. In the beginning, you may not seem to have time in the 8 hours of your day to both complete the task and study it for understanding. However, it is well worth it to go above and beyond for yourself because the same/similar task that used to take you 8 hours might eventually be reduced to just 4 hours.
As you get faster and better at your job due to time spent understanding the how and why, you start getting time back in the day and you can reinvest that again in learning for more understanding to compound the results.
What about you? Do you have any advice on how to actually get good at your the hard way? Leave a comment below and start the new year with a bang! Oh, and speaking of, Happy New Year!
