Nobody Tells This to Beginners ~ Ira Glass

Learning & Reflection

I consider myself a fairly curious person. In this age of the internet, it’s easy to satiate curiosity of any kind — whether it’s learning a new instrument, a coding language, or making a new Arduino project. But as a person who likes to continually tinker and learn new things, there are two mental patterns that I’m wary of:

1. Being intimidated by the challenge of learning something hard
2. Getting into this loop of:
   Inspiration -> Organizing -> False Satisfaction -> No Progress -> Inspiration
   Or as this Quora question rightly puts it: I am a self help junkie. I get high on reading books and obsessively organising my goals, priorities and principles. But I have achieved nothing and keep going back to the books to get my fix.

To avoid these mental patterns, it is important to periodically reflect on past learnings. For example, say I spend six months learning a new programming language — this is what the process through those six months look like

• I navigate the web, googling for the right starting resource
• I then get busy learning and understanding this new language
• I write a lot of code
• Read more and then code some more

What I’m not paying attention to is the actual process of learning and the decisions I’m making (and why I’m making them) as I get better at this programming language.

Reflection precisely fills this hole. It forces you to look at things from another important perspective — it makes you analyze and understand the process and the meta-thoughts that went into learning this new thing. By repeated and periodic reflection you are deliberately and purposefully refining your learning process, making you better at “learning”. Applying this to my example, through the six month learning, I should spend some time at the end of each month reflecting on how I learnt what I learnt. This is no different from refining a supply chain or manufacturing process.

-> Make something
-> Deeply analyze how you made it
-> Refine
-> Make it better next time around

Repetition & Creativity

While learning something new, I sometimes hit a spell of mental fatigue, discouragement and reduced productivity. And when that happens, a visit to these words from Ira Glass helps put things into perspective and reminds me to periodically reflect.

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this.

And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of WORK.

Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile.

You’ve just gotta fight your way through.

Ira Glass

Originally published at subbdue.com.