Item — HN Reader

For me it has always been having a project to apply it to. In college that was always my problem. All thought/review/quizzing, never 'building a thing'. Figure out WHY you want to learn what you think you want to learn and contemplate until you have something you could build (even if its a 'pointless' toy application or library) and do it.

An example: I wanted to learn more about the innards of git. So I built Gkv (http://www.github.com/ybur-yug/gkv). It helped a ton. And it ended up even getting me some imaginary internet ego points. Heh.

edit: Upon looking over my repos. It appears just about every one in the top 5 was inspired by "I wanna learn about this. I shall document the process and make a thing". So, I guess this has worked really well for me.

2 comments

Yes! Having something to apply knowledge to is magnitudes more effective than learning for sake of learning. Start with something simple like "I want to make a website in this language" or "I want to be able to have a conversation in Japanese" or "I want to be able to build my own cabin in the West."

The path you take for learning is shaped by what you want to do. So your question might then take the next logical step: what are things I should apply myself to?

Ideally, whatever you do benefits more than just yourself. If you search for needs that people have, you can find very effective ways of helping people and alleviating stress in the world.

Elon Musk basically had a vision: I wanna colonize space, I wanna make rockets. He had no prior understanding of how rockets were made, but he had the beautiful vision, the happy goal, and everything else fell into place. Strive for a beautiful vision that helps many achieve prosperity and you can't go wrong with how the journey shapes itself.

This is completely OT but just FYI, the "Contributor Covenant" link at the end of your README.md is broken.

Woopsy. Thanks! I switched it off the code of conduct stuff to just be all DWTFYWPL. Will fix today.