Learning stuff the right way, while looking all wrong doing it

Please all board the hype train

Learning stuff… It is something that we all know, something that we all do - learn, and especially learn by doing. Perfect, so you are done, you know all about it, go get some angular, ES6 or react courses, create Docker container for your next app or teach someone how to touch type.

The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias wherein relatively unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability to be much higher than is accurate. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to accurately evaluate their own ability level.

So, I hope that you are happy with how much you know… Or, maybe not happy at all, depending on where you are at with learning. It is all about skill perception.

You know how all new getting started articles about all the different fresh out of the oven tech are titled “Best practices in…”? You all watched Youtube tutorials and read blog posts by young developers who learned new tech and are burning in desire to share their knowledge with you… Yeah…

We all complain about young, inexperienced tutorial makers, some of us even mock it and we, kind of, have problem with it, because… well, that guy learned it yesterday, and today he is trying to teach it to someone… where is the experience with the tech? where is the grit? There is no real life knowledge there… right?

Learning by doing

No matter how it looks - we are completely wrong about it - that is perfect way to learn, and not just that - that is the perfect way to boost other people’s learning - by learning it and getting delusional about how much you know. We need real life use cases, an lots of people who start learning new stuff, so what better serves this need then lots of people learning this today, getting hyped and applying it on production of their projects tomorrow?

Disclaimer: Production part is hyperbole, do not do that, but, what better use case for what you have learned, then application you are working on for the last several months.

Everyone should board the hype train

Before we start talking semantics, you have to understand that more people understand how tough it is to develop full stack web application from ground up (or do architecture for it), less people will be willing to learn. People are just like that - scared of high mountains and deep pits. That is why Dunning-Kruger effect is a blessing for man kind, and for all the computer programming trades and sciences especially. That is how we get people interested in technology - by tricking them into thinking it is easy to learn and apply.

Take it from someone that mentors, teaches and observes others do so for years now… like it or not, it is all statistics and game theory.

More people you got learning stuff, more people you are getting on the other end of the learning curve… It is lot less of your presentation skills, it is not quality of material (well… it is a little bit) - its motivation, learning ability and equilibrium between your expectations as a mentor and abilities of people that are learning from you.

So, everyone should build their trivial hello world example, then do a little tweaking by looking at another interesting video and push it somewhere -make it your firs production app in this new tech… Then repeat again, with some real use case, and push and learn and hit the wall and repeat and… At this moment hype train builds you big enough pool of people for enough of them to survive climb up the learning curve.

Most of them probably went the wrong way the first time and completely failed what they wanted to develop, understood their delusion and became desperate about it. Getting hyped about something and then messing up always takes you to really experience rich place - we should all get hyped about something we learned yesterday, try to apply it and then learn by correcting a failure.

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