Escaping Learning Purgatory
What do I mean by “Learning Purgatory”?
When I originally wrote this article, I called it “Tutorial Purgatory” but that isn’t really fitting as we really end up in a constant loop of learning and not doing.
So, what is it?
“Learning Purgatory” is when you end up watching video course, tutorial or reading up on a subject and putting off the “doing” part of it because you don’t feel you know enough. It’s very easy to get stuck telling yourself “I’ll start after I finish this course — I’m still learning”
I’ve been there and it’s a hard situation to escape but it is possible and here are a couple of pointers to help you escape it.
Udemy is a great perpetuator of learning purgatory with many courses being 10+ hours long, you end up feeling compelled to watch it before starting the project you want to work on.
I’ve seen many Udemy courses hitting the 30+ hour mark. Can you imagine watching and working your way through 30+ hours of course content in your spare time after work? How long that would take you? And this is before you even begin working on the project or product you want to create!
What can I do about it?
My advice is to find the shortest (time-wise) course. That way you learn your material quickly and can jump into your project.
We often use the term “MVP” or “Minimum Viable Product”, we should treat learning the same way with “MVN” or “Minimum Viable Knowledge” to start doing.
A real-world example was when I needed to learn React Native. On Udemy there were courses ranging from 8 to 50+ hours! Then I found a few tutorials on YouTube and Udemy under an hour and picked one and went with it. After an hour I knew enough and was ready to go and starting developing a React Native application and learnt the rest along the way.
If you have a goal in mind, this can be a project, product or a certification to work on. Find the minimum you need to know to get started and producing.
The best way to learn is to actually do it. As someone once put it: “would you rather have a heart surgeon who has read books for 10 years or a surgeon who’s done the operation for the last 5 years?”. We learn more throughout mistakes and issues we run in to. Going back to my React Native situation, I could have still been watching the forty-six-hour long course before writing a single line of code, instead I had written and published my app.
Another thing I had found myself doing in the past stuck in tutorial purgatory is watching courses and ONLY doing that. In the end, I wouldn’t remember much and would feel good about all the “learning” I had done.
Going off the script, look at the picture at the beginning of the blog, do you find yourself looking like the gentleman in the picture? Sat there, just watching the video course but not doing anything or taking any notes.
My advice: follow along the course with the instructor. If they type, so do you. If you’re watching a course on building a website then you should be building the same one as the instructor. Yes, this will take longer to finish the course however, if you’ve picked a short course you will be learning, retaining and doing more.
By watching shorter courses and following them along, you can swap your mentality from a “thinker” to a “do-er”. Gary Vaynerchuk made a fantastic point that stuck with me by calling people “Students”. They were learning, watching and consuming content but not actually producing or doing anything. Don’t stay stuck as a student.
Don’t let your ideas stays as ideas, learn what you need and get stuck right in!
