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Comment by j_baker | Hacker News Reader

The assumption is that learning things increases your execution time. In the very short term this is true. However, if you'd spent all the time learning the things that you wanted to learn, how much more productive would you be?

It's like Jeff Bezos said:

"I always tell people, if we have a good quarter it's because of the work we did three, four, and five years ago. It's not because we did a good job this quarter."

This is a pattern that I've (anecdotally) noticed in successful entrepreneurs and programmers... the ability to focus on the long term at the expense of the short term (but without sacrificing the short-term).

Long story short, if you are in an employment situation where your employer will not let you spend any more time learning new things, you should consider employment elsewhere.

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In consulting, it's usually not your employer that pushes you. It's your clients. In a startup, it's either your investors or your customer (hopefully). Either way, there's always forces that want you to execute instead of learn. There's no direct visible gain from you learning. It's like climate change. It's important, but noone in power cares.

I totally agree with your long term statement. And I do also agree with you on the fact that just learning without execution renders your learning useless.

The thing is, how do you juggle between these two extremes? @imp notes below:

"I let my own ambitions determine which zone I'm in, and they last from a couple weeks to months."

The cycle seems to come naturally to him. For others like @Ixiaus it takes more conscious effort (I assume, since he quit his job to be able to learn the things which matter to him).

Part of it is that you need to find ways to justify learning things. It's really easy to learn things that have a direct impact on your job. You may be different, but I know programmers who won't even learn things that directly impact their jobs. And unless it will take a very significant chunk of time, it's usually pretty easy to make this kind of learning transparent to clients and managers. You might be surprised at how much you can learn just by spending the extra couple of hours learning to do something the "right way" rather than just sticking to what you know.

Of course, if that's something you're already doing, kudos. Now, if we're talking about things that don't apply to anything at all, your choices are either going to have to be:

1. Find a way to "sneak in" an hour or two a week if it doesn't interfere with your tasks. 2. Learn it on your own time.

If your management/clients aren't going to allow option 1, you may just have to decide whether you want to learn on your own time or if you want to find a job where you can spend a bit of time learning.

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