My Proven Learning Philosophy I’ve Applied for Years
Today, I’m sharing my learning strategy, which I’ve used for the last decade, and the mistakes I’ve made along the way.
I decided to share my entire learning philosophy I’ve built as part of my personal constitution.
By reading the following, you will have the ability to clone my exact learning philosophy that helped me to be a better, organised and more proactive software engineer as well as a greater thinker. When you use a routine, you don’t rely on your mood and motivation when it comes to applied learning.
Curiosity first! Curiosity is a driven tool
Value curiosity as your superpower! If you aren’t consistently thinking like a beginner and thinking outside the box, it will be hard to develop new skills. Leave your ego behind, and don’t be shy! Learning is for everybody, regardless of your age, your title, your field, or your professional situation. Everybody should be eager to challenge themselves and learn something new! Life is exciting, challenging, and every day should be a new opportunity for something new! Being intellectually curious isn’t a gift but is acquired through practice.
Rigorously practice the ‘just-in-time minimalism learning’
I love minimalism! If you haven’t gotten the chance to see it yet, I’ve actually shared my entire life philosophy in a Medium blog post, here.
In this post, I emphasise the importance of practising rigorous just-in-time learning, also known as learning as you go. Learn only when you actually need the information, and apply it immediately to your life to get real leverage. Retrieve knowledge only at the moment it becomes relevant. Never learn “just in case,” only to forget it later. Follow this rule religiously, and don’t let yourself break it. Exceptions are merely loopholes.
Teaching what you learn
Teaching back what you have learned is an essential practice. Teaching back reinforces, clarifies, and schematises, and pays it forwards to the community. I can’t recommend this enough. And icing on the cake, because teaching is a meta-skill, it will effectively improve your speaking skills along the way! You read me well! This simple practice, called a meta-skill, will not only package your learning projects into an understandable and accessible form of any abstract and vague knowledge, but will also make you a high-performing instructor who can master extremely well and create a movement from there. That’s right, if you truly master a subject, you can turn it into a movement and inspire others around your expertise!
Virtual accountability partner
I’ve been using Focusmate since November 2022. And so far, it’s the best service I’ve found that ensures you do something without postponing it while being motivated, since you will do it with another person achieving another task during the same time block. And so far, I haven’t found any other alternatives that work as well as Focusmate, explaining why I’ve been using it since fall 2022.
