1095 things I learnt in 365 days!
One of my new year resolutions for 2015 was — learn 3 new things each day.
Why? Because resolutions make sense if you set your goals so big that you can’t achieve it until you grow into a person who can. In 2014, I was a fresh college pass-out taking up my first job and shifting to a new city. I was curious, willing to learn and eager to make an impact. But, I was overwhelmed by how much there was to learn and I realized it had to be a continuous effort.
It is not enough to be content with what you already know.
I decided to make list of these learnings each day. I also made a list of things I wished to learn (solving rubik’s cube was at the top). On a lazy afternoon, I would dig up this list and shift items from ‘to-learn’ list to ‘learnt’ list. Gradually, this list became a measure of how productive my day was and which were the relatively lousy days.
I diligently maintained this list for the whole year and here is the word cloud of all my learnings. (As you can guess, the complete list is too long for a blog-post):
The most prominent words are
- Swift
- Parse
- AngularJs
- Javascript
- Ionic
- Android
- CSS, Notification, iOS, Xcode, Intellij, CEO, Business, iBeacon, database, Cook etc are sprinkled around
Ask a developer and he/she will immediately connect these dots to conclude it has been a busy year learning to develop mobile and web applications. I also learnt how to cook a few dishes and read books about businesses and founders. I attended meetups, meeting people with common interests and travelled to explore new places. Learning and reading about such diverse things not only helped me effectively complete projects at hand but also brought about a sense of confidence and positive energy.
Learning continuously has many benefits:
- A broad knowledge of unfamiliar situations feeds innovation.
- It makes you more confident around people and gives us a range of perspectives.
If you are yet to decide upon a resolution for 2016, I would strongly recommend giving this a shot and grow as you go!
Having witnessed first-hand the benefits of noting my learnings, I developed Graspr . The idea is simple — you track what you learn everyday. You can follow friends and see what they are learning and also get a timeline view of all your grasps.
Graspr is available to download for Android and iOS. For those surfing web, here is a cool chrome-extension to help you highlight text and save grasps!
Find more about graspr at graspr.in
Happy Grasping!
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