Relearning How to Learn with Tim Ferriss

Idea of the Day #79

How I blew up my prof dev plans in hopes of doing more with less

I have spent the last 4 months grinding my way through a Typescript course in the vain hope that downloading it all onto my brain will supercharge my coding skills.

My goal for the course started as a one-month sprint. When I was barely halfway through in the first month, my sprint turned into a 5k. By month 3 things were shaping up to be a marathon. It wasn’t until I started bullet journaling that the end looked possible once again.

Tim Ferriss breaks his formula for learning into a digestible one-pager with 4 principles:

To give myself some credit, I did at least attempt to deconstruct how to learn to be a good software engineer. In the end, my limited scope hindered me. It wasn’t until last week when I brought my manager into the process that I got a clear idea of the scope of the problem.

It was this deconstruction that gave clarity to the next steps. Deconstruction further lent me a motivation I’d been missing. By breaking down what I needed to learn, the process felt attainable and bounded. Without my clear-eyed look at all there was to learn, the process of learning the basics of software seemed an endless task.

Selection is the step I most neglected. My first mistake was choosing a video-based course. Unlike a textbook, which can quickly be scanned and broken into smaller pieces, videos are time consuming to “skim” (even on 2X speed).

Going forward, I’m using exclusively textbooks to allow for more fine grained selection. In addition to paying closer attention to my medium, I’m paying…

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