Developing a learning habit — Tips part 1
Kim Dryden is the Senior Managing Producer of Udacity’s video team.
It’s late. I’m exhausted. I should’ve gone to bed hours ago, but I have a problem. A big one.
I’m building a web page and my hero image isn’t resizing correctly when I resize my browser window. I’ve been trying to fix it for hours. Read a post on stackoverflow, make some changes to my CSS. Drag Chrome smaller, image stays huge. Curse loudly. Rinse and repeat.
And then, when I’m almost ready to admit defeat, it works. I literally jump for joy, shouting loudly enough that my partner tells me to be quiet, that I’m probably scaring the neighbors. I show him proudly — resize the window, the image resizes. I make him try it. He does, it works. I beam. He’s happy for me, though slightly less enthusiastic about this breakthrough than I am. I don’t care. I won.
I’ve been learning front end web design for a couple of months now and have faced countless of these all-out battles to make something relatively simple work properly, like responsive images.
Those who are just getting started, or remember what the beginning was like, will know this feeling well. So these small moments of joy, the sheer bliss you feel when you overcome these hurdles, help keep me going. And you’ve got to hold on to those, because learning is hard, often frustrating, and makes you fall flat on your face pretty regularly. But it’s worth it. In 2017, learning is not a one-and-done kind of thing; to stay competitive, you have to make learning a habit, which isn’t an easy thing to do in and of itself.
I’ve experienced the same ups and downs with learning at work. I’m the Senior Managing Producer of Udacity’s video department, and the amazing, creative people on my team are all lifelong learners, too. Most have their own passion projects that drive them to learn new film and storytelling techniques, and we are constantly pushing ourselves to keep up with the latest gear, software, and workflows in order to produce better and better content for our students.
About a year ago, I brought an idea to my team — let’s transform this drive to learn into a formal process. Let’s organize in small groups around specific learning goals, meet regularly, and hold each other accountable in order to get better in a particular area. Today we have Camera Collective, focused on bringing more camera motion into our shoots; MoGraph Club, whose members work on a series of ambitious motion graphics projects for a specific course; and Study Squad, which is a more open-ended group of people pursuing different learning paths.
Recently, people in Study Squad have been working through tutorials like using 3D Maya to create data visualizations. We’ve also been dogfooding our own products; two people are taking Udacity’s Virtual Reality Nanodegree program, and I’m working on our Front End Nanodegree program. We’ve also taken time to experience our competitors’ products — I’m currently learning JavaScript through Treehouse.
And what we’ve found is that even working at an education company who values and promotes learning, and even with a support structure like we’ve created on the video team, learning is STILL hard. Both at work and with the things I learn independently, I struggle to find time, get myself unstuck, and find the drive to carry on. The good news, though, is that through this frustration and frequent failure, I’ve stumbled upon some tips and tricks that help make learning a bit easier for me. Some of these strategies I figured out myself through trial and error, but most have come from people on my team. I’m sharing them with you here in hopes that some of them will work for you, too. They’re not one size fits all, so try them on and keep what works for your own learning journey, and please share your own tips and tricks in the comments.
Make a deliberate decision
Think hard about committing to something new, including taking on a new area of learning or study. Time is our most valuable resource, and if you don’t feel fully committed to your goal, you’ll end up resenting it and eventually giving up.
So, consciously weigh your options — is learning front end web development really what I want to be doing? Why?
If you decide it is, in fact, worth the effort, then decide deliberately. Make a commitment, and hold yourself accountable. This can mean telling your friends or family. I find it useful to write it down, something physical and visible that I can return to when I’m feeling burnt out, a reminder of why I’m doing this.
Recognize that it’s not all sunshine and roses
Have I mentioned that learning is hard? Not only is your brain stretching in new and often uncomfortable ways, you often have to sacrifice other parts of your life to make time for it. And you’re going to get stuck, and if you’re at all like me, you’re going to get frustrated. A lot. But that’s all part of what you signed up for, and you’ve already decided this is worth it. When you embrace the fact that the sacrifice, frustration, and headaches are inevitable hurdles you’ll face on your learning journey, you’ll be more prepared to overcome them when you run into them face first.
Set goals, then tell people about them
If your learning is centered around a fixed length project or course, break it down into manageable bits and set goals for how much you’ll accomplish in a given time period. For example, as I work through our Front End Nanodegree Program, I try to accomplish a minimum of a lesson a week. This is a really manageable goal and usually takes between one and three hours depending on how much outside of classroom work I need to do. Having a concrete goal that’s measurable helps me schedule accordingly, and lets me gauge my progress.
For one of the political media projects I’m working on outside of Udacity, I set incremental goals for the editing I need to get through, then communicate those out to the rest of the team. I care about my image as a responsible professional, so I get it done. This kind of engineered social pressure works wonders for me.
So, back to work for me. More tips coming soon, and I’d love to hear what works for you, too.
