On learning

[00:00:00] You are listening to the Daily Five, an experimental podcast by Aurooba, where I talk about something for five minutes. So let's get to it, shall we? I've been thinking a little bit about the different ways I have learned various things and skills over the last maybe 10 years. The two primary ways that I have found myself learning is one: being thrown into the middle of a situation and having to just deal with it one way or another.

[00:00:42] And two: making a concerted effort to rise to the occasion or put myself in situations where I have to rise to the situation, and one is, I think they're both very impactful ways to learn and grow if you let them be impactful. But when you're thrown into the middle of something, there's always the danger that it will become too much or it will become too overwhelming. When all you do is put out fires and go from crisis to crisis,

[00:01:24] you will also run the risk of burning out and then of course, getting overwhelmed, and then of course, losing your edge and not being able to learn or even handle the situation anymore because you are so stressed and losing motivation. This is a common thing. In fact, I've gone through it myself a few times.

[00:01:50] Some of my favorite times in my own career have been when I was able to very intentionally craft a season with projects that were very interesting and you know, allowed me to do the things I knew really, really well. But still had maybe about 20% that was new to me, and there was enough room, enough buffer for me to be able to experiment and learn those things too.

[00:02:25] A couple years ago, I was in one of these projects where I was learning a new skill, but you know, I had a good idea of how I would achieve it, but I had never done it before. and I ended up doing my very first livestream where I just walked through the problem, talked out loud, and then slowly started to figure out what, what I, what I was doing.

[00:02:52] And a few people joined, not a lot, it was my first time doing it, but they joined in the chat and they kinda gave hints sometimes or some ideas that they had, and it was kind of this collaborative learn in public moment that I still think about sometimes. And I don't know what it is, but this week, the concept of learning in public and collaborating in public and you know, the collaborative loop of you working with the audience you wanna serve to create something better has been on my mind and has come up in every conversation I've had recently.

[00:03:39] And I think when we find ourselves in a situation where we're not learning, like at all, in any area that we wanna focus on, that's when we really get frustrated. And of course it's dangerous because you might find yourself getting stagnant and that can really suck as well – not immediately – but if you have any kind of digital work life, if you're a digital worker or a knowledge worker, you know, one of the things that you constantly have to grapple with is that things are constantly changing, improving, and throwing out the old in favor of something completely new, constantly.

[00:04:25] This happens all the time, especially in my industry, which is web development. So if you can't come to terms with or figure out a system to learn constantly, you can find yourself in very tight situations. So yeah, that's kind of what's been on my mind today. Thanks for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.