Comment by itamarst | Hacker News Reader

Comment by itamarst | Hacker News Reader

1. You need to recognize when you're not learning, for one thing. If it's easy, you're not learning. You need to push yourself into the zone of discomfort, where you feel clumsy and have a hard time. Now you're learning.

2. Find a mentor. Lacking that, find e.g. talk of someone explaining some hard techniques and then try to follow the advice. Even and especially if it feels clumsy at first.

(More on those two here: https://codewithoutrules.com/2017/04/17/learning-without-a-m...).

3. Switch to a new job where you'll be exposed to new things. try to find a job where people do code review, feedback is how we learn faster.

4. Learn how to learn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKTxC9pl-WM

5. Reflect on your mistakes, try to find what cues you missed and what you should look for next time. I've been doing this on weekly basis (you can read the results at https://softwareclown.com) and I've learned a huge amount from figuring out underlying cause of what I did wrong.

I agree with everything you said. What needs to be feared is complacency. If you ever feel that things are going too easily - that's when to be afraid.

I will be the first to admit I let many _months_ of complacency pass me by before I identified the signs. All the above advice - forcing yourself into the haze of discomfort, breaks this away and forces you to learn new skills. Learning is often glamorized, but in reality, the actual _learning_ phase is painful and uncomfortably hard. I still don't enjoy it, even though afterword, I appreciate the knowledge and extra skills. Instead, it's important to build habits that lead to continuous learning, rather than one-off improvements. Paradoxically, it's easier to become normalized to regular discomfort than rare, unusual discomfort. It has never stopped being uncomfortable to learn for me, but I also have built it my psyche.

I remember back before I knew about variables, when I started learning programming, thinking about a programming problem for whole days, and figured out how to store intermediate computed values in MacOSX text fields and retrieve them later (the values was state for the adventure game I was trying to make), and that allowed me to make a lot more interesting things before, I thought I was so clever; and then I remember the epiphany I got when I finally understood that web page talking about variables; I had been reading it daily for months and had no idea what they were and how they could be applied to my programming, then finally it clicked! What a high! Being able to store values without placing hidden text fields everywhere! I don't think I've been more excited ever again since those summer afternoons, even trying to figure out stuff in shower and in bed... I was 11 or 12 stuck with a Mac at home. I didn't have money to buy my own games and back then it was Apple's dark ages so there were hardly any games anyway; I tried to make my own. Was learning difficult? For sure. Was it uncomfortable? In a way. Was it the best and most exciting experiences in my life? Oh you have no idea. (Ok my marriage to my wife comes a close second; in case she reads this one day.)

Something about childhood experiences makes them a lot more intense...

If you have time, side projects for research can be a really helpful venue. In a work environment, there are always areas of the product/business you don't work on, and having your own project forces you to learn how the entire process works - I'm thinking of software - so things like web app deployment, design, taking credit cards, etc are often done by different teams.

A project that is visible gives you material for talks at meetups/conferences or articles for bigger blogs, which is a good way to meet people and get better at soft skills.

For people who have a experience / existing knowledge, watching conference talks can be a good way to add on new knowledge (e.g. my machine learning knowledge from school is getting dated, but seeing new tools / techniques in a talk is enough to figure out what to research).

Here's a big list of conference talks that I've been working on as a project - http://findlectures.com/?p=1&class1=Technology

One of my favorite quotes "I never got that comfortable being comfortable."

Number two is very important. A good place to find some informal mentorship is in irc chats.

Shout out to Aria from #node.js. What an amazing developer. The best example of a self taught/homeschooled success story. Aria taught me a lot of stuff related to Node and is also active on the channel.

Upvoted for "Learn how to learn", awesome talk.

Kathy Sierra also has a book with some overlap; it's about product creation but also teaching (and learning).

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