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Vitor
Vitor

Posted on

Stop thinking about learning curve

Why? Because it doesn't care.

You don't need to prepare to learn something. You need more practice and less overthinking. Learning is not linear, and you will not get expected results when you start something.

Read "Study Backwards". You should not start with the technology.

What does Learning Curve mean?

Is a term to define a curve of learning based on what you know and don't know. Example: I want to learn ReactJS, but I don't have ANY knowledge about JS. My curve will be high.

But people lose more time than needed thinking about that. And I will explain why.

What does "learning is not linear" mean?

At school, we learn how to learn wrongly. The system made you think that to know something you need to follow a step-by-step and that this is linear, like a movie or game. And this is not true.

In real life, you probably will need to learn something faster than you can and learn by demand. You won't know the "dependencies" of learning when getting some tasks at your work and don't have a teacher to guide you. At school, you know in advance the content that will be in your test, but this happens only at school.

Example: want to code smart contracts in Rust? Ok, try to start coding. If you slice, probably will think "to code a smart contract in Rust, first I need to learn and know a lot about Rust." And NO, this is wrong. This line of thought creates a snowball and makes you give up. Want to learn about smart contracts in Rust? Ok, code your smart contract, and you will know what you need of Rust to code your project.

In the real world, you shouldn't ever wait for linear things. Is chaotic.

Top comments (2)

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pengeszikra profile image
Peter Vivo

Vitor you absolute right. We have too less time to afraid abut learning somthing new. For example I need to learn Nextjs under really short timeframe ... so I jump to the middle and start refact may old react code to nextjs ... it don't so complicated, but few days later I realized also need to practice some cloud database ... jump for mongodb. ... final result will be exciting.

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elias89 profile image
Elias

I agree with the fact about not thinking on the learning curve. The decision to learn or not about something should be made based on our likes and interests, not a technique to measure how difficult something is. Otherwise we would always be on the easy road.

I also think that the "learning curve" turned into something people use to sound "smart", not really a thing to measure difficulty.