Ask HN: What is the hardest part of self-learning?
I had to face many challenges as a self-learner. Finding the right things to learn, motivation, etc. What is for you the biggest challenge of being self-taught?
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- too many poorly-formed opinions providing hard and fast rules about what other people should do without any consideration of the spectrum of situations and abilities
- knowing what there is to learn within any topic and what order you should tackle things
- whether advice about what to learn in some topic, how, and in what order is any good or not
- when to quit or stick when a certain approach doesn't seem to work
- how to test your learning, and how to assess your efficiency
- how to sustain motivation while playing the 'teacher' (i.e. co-ordinator) role when you'd rather learn, and the 'learner' role when you'd rather teach.
- how not to make certain important things be associated with pain and boredom, when approaching them in a free, open, playful mode would make them stick much better
- how to avoid or undo damaging perfectionism about resources and approach and personal standards for outcome and ability
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Self-learning is extremely difficult and I don't advise it to anyone, although I wouldn't discourage trying it either.
The traditional didactic models you already know are the best. The problem is getting the right people to teach the right subjects, and ensuring free and open access for all people of all ages.
Ultimately effective self-teaching tends to mean you implement the classical methods but in non-traditional formats.
I find it's usually only those with top percentile proclivity or motivation for a given subject can sit down with a textbook and notebook/repl and absorb information as effectively as the rest of us would with a good teacher and engaged classmates.
If you're like me and you're unable to go to Uni but want to self-teach programming/CS, learn the minimum required to get into a related apprenticeship-style position and throw yourself into it.
80% of the things that can be learned by a mentor is invisible to the mentor. It doesn't show up in books, videos, tutorials, etc. It's in subtle unspoken habits.
A lot of my mentors are sloppy. They don't look for the best tools. When I ask them for the best site to train programming skills, they point me to Project Euler, not a more fancy new thing. Some will measure progress by lines of code. Some, when stressed out, move faster or choose to pass out on the keyboard, as opposed to relaxing. Many seem dismissive of planning and insist that you have to get lucky.
80% of people are in the bottom 80%. Communities like HN are likely well in the top 20%, in terms of success, and have to look at the top 10% to improve.
What this means is that advice you get from 80% of people will be bad. There might be some viral article on Forbes about how you need to wake up at 4 AM or have a solid breakfast to be successful. When most people you meet give you consistent advice, it seems like it's true.
But you have to pay attention to who's doing this. If none of the people in top 20% are following popular logic, it could well be misguided. e.g. maybe lines of code are an important metric after all.
Solitude. Then, I'd say acceptance from friends/family, followed by a good routine.
I've tried learning alone, but after 6 - 12 months it becomes really difficult. Being around a self-learning community daily makes a world of difference, I'm about to start my fourth year and I'm loving it.
Being part of a program also reduces societal pressure. Any program really, just to be able to give a simple answer when people ask you what you are doing. Otherwise, it's easy to be met with doubt and cynical questions.
Lastly routine, I see self-learning as a day job. You want to clock N hours per day and don't spend any time procrastinating. I've been building habits for 5-10 years, and I'm reaching a point where I can be productive, but it takes time and patience.
As few others have said, for me it is structuring my learning to get to the end goal. Say I want to build a website or any other idea, I need to destructure things I need to learn in order to build this idea.
Currently I use Trello for this: https://trello.com/b/cu32qF3q
In future I want to build a website ala Goodreads/Google/Roadmap that lets you craft optimized learning paths for creating any idea. Sad this doesn't exist yet.
https://docs.learn-anything.org/roadmap
https://roadmap.sh
i think there is too much information out there as far as im concerned. I dont even know where to begin sometimes because the advice pulls in every direction. There was an article about prisoners learning coding and some commenter said that they had come up with their own solutions to popular libraries just because those libraries were out of reach at the time of learning. The experience allowed them to learn intricate details and rely more on intuition rather than online advice exchanges. anyhow, i think i know my problem and what i need to do but im still stuck in that loop where im always looking for the BEST resource to learn something new.