How to study less and learn more

Jan 12, 2023 by Efim

Hello!

For those in a hurry, here's a short answer to the question above - practice, dig through the bugs yourself, and read the documentation. For the curious, I'll tell you more.

I have wanted to write this article for a very long time, but for this I needed to dig a little into myself.

By nature, I am a very lazy, but reasonable person. I will never do something superfluous, something useless. To be honest, sometimes it drives me crazy. Especially when I spend my twenty minutes in a coffee shop and argue whether it is necessary to buy a large latte, because I can drink free coffee in the office.

I'm a little strange, but today is not about that. Today I want to share my way of how I approach the learning process, how I learn something new to me. And I'm constantly learning something new, it's almost my hobby.

I do not insist that what I say is true, and I recommend that everyone do the same. No. This is just my position, which, perhaps, will be close to someone and someone will take advantage of it.

10% of theory 90% of practice

In my opinion, this is the golden rule. It doesn't matter what you're learning, because based on theory alone, you're literally missing out on all the fun. Practice is not only fun, but also the key to success. Only by doing something with your own hands, this knowledge or skill will remain with you for life.

A very good friend of mine was studying to be a journalist. Journalists read a lot, but they write even more. They literally write several tens of thousands of words a day, and rightly so, because only by reading journalism, they will not learn how to correctly compose news articles, they will not be able to connect two words.

A novice programmer who watched the entire 34-hour video course will not be able to make a website in a day. Something in his head may remain, but what's the point if he can't put it into practice.

Hence, my first piece of advice - practice, practice, practice, practice (very easy to remember).

Don't memorize what you can google

We live in a world where all you need to remember is the names of people you know. I'm serious! For example, I don't understand what is the point of memorizing the syntax of bootstrap classes when I can open the documentation and search there. I don't understand why you need to know this by heart. So you can go crazy.

The Internet is a giant garbage dump with a huge pile of resources, experts and pseudo-experts. I do not advise blindly google something, so the best option would be to always rely on the documentation and Stack Overflow. It's hard to believe, but it's enough to learn what you want.

Solve problems yourself

Sounds like a bore from parents, I understand. Let me explain. In the learning process, it is very important to delve into the material yourself, especially if you feel that you are clearly missing or misunderstanding some points.

For example, when I was studying web development, in particular the bootstrap framework, instead of waiting for a ready-made solution from the course leader or looking in the comments where some smart people have already written a ready-made answer, I go to read the documentation.

After looking at the ready-made solution, you may say - well, everything seems to be clear, in general I wanted to do it. It's not worth thinking like that. Writing code (in the case of my example) on your own from scratch and rewriting someone else's ready-made solution are completely different things. Even if you have analyzed someone else's code, understood its logic and structure, it does not mean that you can write all the same things yourself.

And if you have such thoughts, immediately remember the first point.

Conclusion

I shared my thoughts on learning something new myself. These three simple steps save me a lot of time, knowledge and skills remain with me for many years, and the learning process itself is painless and interesting for me. Practice, dig into the bugs yourself and read the documentation.

Good luck!