I really like learning new skills. There’s just something so magical about not knowing how to do something and then watching a video or reading an article and suddenly things fall in place. But of course it’s not just that simple. Sometimes information is hard to find or you’re having a bad day and everything you do is just trash. That’s the part I struggle with. I want to do all the things and know all the things and I want that now.
Sounds a bit unreasonable right? Sometimes I need to reign in that passion a bit and focus on why I actually want to learn something new. And sometimes there needs to be no reason at all.
About a month ago I spent a morning folding paper planes and flying them in my apartment.
- Did this help my professional career? Hell no!
- Am I going to spend time trying to improve their designs? No
- Can I appreciate the aerodynamics of a paper plane? Yes
- Did I perhaps watch a bunch of YouTube videos explaining the physics of paper planes? Maybe
I enjoyed this process. And maybe one day I will teach my future children or my nephew how to make a cool paper plane thereby winning the cool dad/uncle award.
When it comes to learning more “useful” things(I’m not diminishing the usefulness of paper planes at all. It’s really cool and I wish I could spend time on it.) I usually just focus on small projects that try and prove that something can be useful to me. So if it’s a new JavaScript framework for example. I’ll setup a small(usually silly) project that serves no purpose and just play around with the framework. When I needed to learn some docker I signed up for a udemy course. When I wanted to know more about AWS CDK I went straight for the docs.
To me it’s just exciting to learn new things and that’s enough of a reason to do something. Right now I’m learning to write. And today I learnt how to read surf reports because I wanted to go surf but I can’t because it’s flat so I’m writing.
