Goal Met: 50 Hours of Learning

Learning is subjective. I learn from reading, from podcasts, from observing and listening but to actively seek out learning for its own sake is something that not a lot of people do. Throughout my life I’ve learned quite a few things simply because of my ADHD – I find something interesting, hyperfocus on it for a few months until I become somewhat knowledgeable/good at it then switch my focus to something else and start the process again. I am very aware of the learning loop needed to become proficient at something and it goes something like this:

This loop repeats until you hit an exit condition – usually when you have satisfied your curiosity, or it becomes too hard to penetrate further into a subject and the time needed to pass that hurdle doesn’t seem worth the trouble. 

Some things I put into the feedback loop I kept going with well after my hyperfocus period:  playing guitar, computer programming/administration (I once wrote a program freehand in a notebook because computers in the library had a time limit), cooking/baking (although I would argue that it broke off into smaller hyperfocus things like pizza, sourdough, grilling, sous vide, smoking, etc.), gardening, and now 3D printing. The list of things I’ve tried that didn’t pan out and are now littering my poor brain is too numerous to count but every now and then some bit of learning becomes relevant to what I’m doing so it’s good to know it isn’t all wasted!

I’ve set learning goals in the past but after a strong start they’ve always tailed off as other things fought for my already scattered focus – I did have a list of the things I wanted to learn that carried over year to year and for this project I was determined to hit that 50 hour mark (arbitrarily picked 50 for most goals because well, I turned 50 – as Thanos would say ‘ perfectly balanced as it should be’ )

I didn’t want to break out work related training vs. personal training since a few of the things I wanted to learn crossed both categories, so I lumped them both into the 50 hour category. I did tag each one with what I thought was the right category (work or personal) just for my own metrics but for the purpose of this post we’re just going to lump them all together. It was a varied bunch of training. I kicked it off with some guitar/music theory classes to better understand music and work on getting my solo skills refined.  There were quite a few pizza related videos as I explored different techniques to refine my pizzaolo skills. In the middle of the year there was a huge chunk of AI training which I found super interesting and as soon as that week of training was done, I was looking for ways to incorporate AI into this effort.  A nice percentage of the 50 hours was spent on application training to help me upskill at work (and at home since a lot of it carried over to home projects). Finally to prepare me to write the short story/novella that has been bouncing in my head for a few years I’m following Brandon Sanderson’s lectures on writing which are fascinating. 

The biggest thing I learned? You need to carve out time for learning. I picked the slowest day on my work calendar and blocked out an hour for work-related training. It didn’t always work as I was really busy this year but enough times it gave me the space to learn the things I needed to. I also blocked out an hour once a week at home to work on the personal stuff and again sometimes that didn’t work but it did enough times for me to hit the 50 hour mark and keep going. I won’t stop at 50 – there’s still some things I need to learn and there’s 4 months left so I’ll come back and update this at the end of the project.