Hello everyone 👋,
In this post, I’ll share with you one of the tricks I use to learn new things. Fasten your seat belts 😁.
Pick a reference
What I call a “reference” is any interesting material about the topic you want to learn. From my experience this material should be concise and easy to consume (read or watch) and it can be anything from a talk to an article/paper or a simple blog post. What matters the most, is that it should be relevant to the topic you want to learn, and challeging enough to be a reference (portrays challenging concepts).
In my case, the reference was Kelsey Hightower introduction about Kubernetes. The first time I watched it, I didn’t have a clue on what he was talking about, I didn’t even know what a container is. However it was a perfect entrypoint to my k8s learning journey.
Learn Learn Learn
The next step is to start learning everything related to the topic you want to learn. My own strategy is to flood my brain with information about the topic in separate short but continuous time intervals.
Stop! Take a break!
Go do something else! Stop learning! This will help your brain process the amount of information you were able to get from the learning phase.
Often you’ll feel like you didn’t learn much, and that’s very Okey ! Be patient !
Evaluate
After taking some time off, return to the reference, re-watch(re-read) it and evaluate yourself based on how much you managed to understand this time.
Side note: If you managed to get the jokes, then you are ready to go look for another reference 😆.
Iterate
Since this is an iterative approach, there is no final step. After the auto-evaluation, you’ll have to choose between going through the same process again, or picking up another ressource as a reference.
That’s it! How about you, how do learn new things?
See you next time 👋.. and Don’t stop learning 😉