Horizontal vs Vertical Learning
So I’m a science and technology learner. I honestly don’t think there’s some other thing that gives me more joy, satisfaction and sense of achievement than learning something new and useful in science and technology world. And it’s always been like that for me. Nevertheless, I’ve always struggled with one thing in the learning process — the granularity.
In my opinion, there are two ways to learn something — horizontal and vertical. The horizontal one is to take it easy, relax and just explore a new field looking around without diving too deep into its details, to get a sense of what and how things are going on there, and when you start feeling a little bit more comfortable, you can start examining it in more detail. The vertical one is to dive deeper into every unknown concept that you bump into along the way and put a reasonable amount of effort to make sure you understand it well before going any further, because later concepts might be built on top of it, which is very often the case, and if you don’t have a good foundation, things can start falling apart very soon. I’ve never been sure which one of these two ways I should follow, but I want to share my thoughts on both of them with you.
As I’ve already made it very clear, learning is very important for me, because acquiring a new skill makes me happier and gives me a sense of achievement, which I value so much. So I’ve always had a serious attitude towards learning and taken the vertical approach most of the time. Whenever I’m learning something, I try to make sure that I understand every detail of it. I want to take as much knowledge as possible out of every new thing and develop a robust understanding of it that would allow me to feel comfortable when solving problems. I believe this is the part that contributes mostly to the sense of achievement that I get. Furthermore, I’ve learned early in school that if you miss some concept (for example, when you’re sick and can’t attend your classes for some time), then it becomes much harder to understand later concepts, because actually everything in the world is built on top or out of something else, usually finer and smaller. So, inevitably, you have to come back to those finer and smaller things that you’ve missed and make sure you understand them. Sometimes that may appear to be frustrating and time consuming. However, even I have to admit that the vertical approach is by far not the most pleasant way of learning.
Learning new things is fun. And that’s actually the main reason why vertical approach is not that pleasant. When you’re learning vertically, you spend a reasonable amount of time with every small detail, which means that you move slower and have to wait longer before moving to the next new thing to get that rush of joy again. The joy of finding something new fades away. It only comes later, when you have slowly walked through the big enough portion of the field grasping every detail along the way (though it comes in big quantities then). In this manner, the horizontal approach seems to be more fun. When learning horizontally, you move fast from one new thing to another. You don’t spend a lot of time with a single thing, you just get the basic understanding and intuition of it and move on. That gives you continuous rush of joy that never fades away. And it may even be useful and feel comfortable to get a broader understanding of a field in general before you want to put some serious effort in it. However, you miss a lot of the details this way, and when moving further, the lack of understanding may build up to such a level that later it becomes really hard to understand something even at a very abstract level. This may make it impossible to continue learning efficiently and force you to come back and take a deeper dive into some of the details that you’ve missed. It depends on the field that you’re learning, I guess, but it happens.
As you can see by now, there are both positive and negative aspects in each of the two learning approaches. Let’s make them clearer by listing them.
Positive aspects of the vertical approach:
- better and deeper understanding of the field,
- consistent learning path (learning things in the right order),
- less problems understanding later concepts,
- feeling more confident when solving problems of the field,
- stronger feeling of joy, satisfaction and sense of achievement in the end.
Negative aspects of the vertical approach:
- slower progress,
- not getting a good sense of the whole field in general,
- less joy related to learning new things,
- often it feels more like work than pleasure.
Positive aspects of the horizontal approach:
- moving faster,
- getting a better sense of the field in general,
- more joy related to learning new things,
- requires less commitment and obligation,
- you can often come back to the details later.
Negative aspects of the horizontal approach:
- missing a lot of the details,
- potential problems understanding even abstract concepts later,
- less confidence solving problems of the field,
- harder to master the field this way.
So in conclusion, there are many both positive and negative aspects to both the horizontal and the vertical approaches of learning. I guess which one to choose depends on your personality and the field that you’re learning. Maybe you’re like me and prefer to learn the hard way, by examining everything in fine detail, for the sake of mastery of the field, or maybe you’re just the opposite and don’t take it that seriously, for the sake of fun of learning. And maybe you’re even doing better with your technique than I am with mine. That’s why I would love to hear about the approach (or approaches) that you take when you’re learning something completely new and unfamiliar in the comments (in detail, please ;)).