Learning By Doing

Reid Hoffman once said "I believe starting a company is like jumping off a cliff and assembling a plane on the way down". I believe that doesn't stand only for entrepreneurship, but for starting any new endeavor in life. It's how I have been unconsciously operating since a couple of years in my career. It's only since navigating the deep waters of ambiguity and scale daily at AWS that I have started to learn more about the psychology of learning. I wanted to share what, I believe, applies to all beginners diving into a vast field and not knowing where to start. 

What a lot of us do when trying to learn new skills is that we try to start by opening a book, going through a 12 hour course or banging our heads against dry industry white-papers. I don't know about you, but that doesn't work for me at all! Most often after going through the material, I am left even more confused about the topic than when I started. What does the trick for me, is trying to understand what the topic is about at a high level without going to much into the details. After that, I try to get my hands dirty with the topic, to further cement my knowledge, then return to the source material with some practical understanding.

The way I learn the best is by picking up a project at work that I have no idea how to deliver but that require the skills I want to learn to do so (assuming there is no tight deadline and you have the space to learn on the way). That way, that you are kind of forced to learn whatever is required in order to complete that task. Things always make more sense after getting a practical feel of them, it's like reading a book about push-ups before even trying to do one, you won't be able to make sense of the theory if you never did a real push-up! In my opinion, the same applies to technical domains (Though I can't talk for people in fields like medical studies where it must be much harder to get hands on practice before ingesting a certain amount of theory). For my fellow network engineers, remember the first time you read about ARP or TCP/IP during CCNA studies ? That wasn't fun at all, right ? But after seeing it in practice in a packet tracer lab, then everything made more sense. 

All this to say that, at any point in your career, when you encounter a new topic, or new field of knowledge don't get lost in what people like to call the "Analysis Paralysis" phase and just get going, pick up a project, get some gear, spin up a lab, open your CLI or IDE, whatever works for you, but just get started and do something (not in production please ☺). 

Thanks for taking the time to read. Let me know your thoughts, whether you agree or not and let's engage on Linkedin to continue the discussion.