Learning Process: 1. Reason

Last Update: 04.02.2019. By Jens in Newsletter

One thing I overlooked for a long time was having a compelling reason to learn something. So, for example, decades ago I went out to learn some Perl. Yeah seemed nice at that time, you could do web dev with it and so I started. Build some cgi scripts for integrating a site with an IRC bot for whatever reason. I don’t know, was a thing back then. Shortly after, I noticed that my interest in pursuing Perl was going downhills. And guess what, it eventually stopped altogether…

It turned out that learning Perl was never my reason. My true reason to get started was to do that IRC bot/website thingie back than. That was my reason and as soon as I accomplished that, any motivation for Perl just left. I rinsed and repeated that many times even in the Perl space. Sure, in the end, I could code proficiently in Perl and did so for a couple of month for an agency.

However, it was a long and curvy road for learning. And sometimes those roads just ended in a dead end. Many times right behind the first corner. The dead end of losing interest. It can even go so far that people quit their education path, switching majors or more.

A problem here is that there often is a lack of a compelling reason to do the thing in the first place. The reason can be anything or even multiple. They just need to be compelling for you. For some, it is just toying around with tech, for others its because they hope to improve their job situation, others just want to build their game, Saas or whatever. It’s highly personal. What works for you, might not work for another one.

Sometimes, you don’t even like the reason, maybe you even hate it. Yet, it can still be compelling. It drives you through the learning phases. Man, I had many of those in the corp world like preparing for compliance shit or working with EJBs pre-v1-specs… I did not love that, I did not like that, man, it was stupid. Yet. there still was a compelling reason to continue with that stuff. Like honing my skills for getting better at my craft to get better projects.

Remember your reason and make them compelling enough for you to learn that new thing.

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