<story><title>How to Learn Stuff Quickly</title><url>https://www.joshwcomeau.com/blog/how-to-learn-stuff-quickly/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>nickjj</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve never found anything that worked as well as:&lt;p&gt;1. Become aware that something I&amp;#x27;m interested in learning exists&lt;p&gt;2. Watch and skim a bunch of videos at 2x speed around the idea of the thing (usually keynotes or videos created by the author) to get hyped up&lt;p&gt;3. Go through the documentation&amp;#x27;s getting started guide while following along&lt;p&gt;4. Immediately start building something with the new thing&lt;p&gt;Treat everything beyond this as question driven development[0] or basically JIT (just in time) learning.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;For context the first 3 steps are usually no more than a weekend or a few days.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I do this loop all the time and it hasn&amp;#x27;t really failed yet for learning all sorts of things (5+ programming languages, a bunch of stuff about Linux, Ansible, Docker, Vim, Terraform, Kubernetes, video production, and the list goes on). These are learning things very quickly at a level where you can comfortably bill out freelance work or get employed.&lt;p&gt;[0]: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;nickjanetakis.com&amp;#x2F;blog&amp;#x2F;learning-a-new-web-framework-with-question-driven-development&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;nickjanetakis.com&amp;#x2F;blog&amp;#x2F;learning-a-new-web-framework-...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>How to Learn Stuff Quickly</title><url>https://www.joshwcomeau.com/blog/how-to-learn-stuff-quickly/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>6gvONxR4sf7o</author><text>&amp;gt; If you only follow guided resources, you&amp;#x27;ll wind up in tutorial hell.&lt;p&gt;I disagree very strongly here. You can wind up in tutorial hell if you only read surface level small to medium sized posts.&lt;p&gt;My &amp;quot;career superpower&amp;quot; is that I&amp;#x27;m always working my way through one textbook or another. You get serious depth this way and avoid getting stuck with a surface level understanding. Plus, with depth you can end up with really strong fundamentals, which make learning the next thing that much easier.&lt;p&gt;I know a lot of people who read tons of blog posts on topics but never crack open a textbook, or people who watch youtubers explain academic papers yet never open up the actual paper.&lt;p&gt;Maybe my &amp;quot;learn stuff quickly&amp;quot; trick is... don&amp;#x27;t. Spend a decade accumulating deep knowledge slowly, and it&amp;#x27;ll add up. The road to &amp;quot;tutorial hell&amp;quot; is paved with blogposts and missing fundamentals.&lt;p&gt;(I like the rest of the post)</text></comment>