By Poornima Vijayashanker
One of the talks I did there was on First Steps for Startup Founders. I started by talking about how I envy first time founders, because every new experience presents you with a challenge and an opportunity to learn, which will inevitably leave you wiser!
As I boarded my flight from Heathrow back to Durham, I took a moment to realize that I’ve been doing a fair amount of teaching this year, but I haven’t taken the time to learn something new myself. I thought about skills I could learn that would benefit me in my businesses. One of the skills I’ve wanted to learn for awhile is mobile development. Nearly 5 years ago I told myself I’d take the time to build a mobile app, but my focus and time has been spent learning and honing other skills.
While on my 8-hour flight back home, I opened up Balsamiq, and began wireframing a mobile app idea, knowing well that one of the next steps to bringing this idea to life would be to learn mobile app development.
Making a Commitment
Being enthusiastic about learning a new skill is easy. We spend hours glamorizing what life will be like once we have it, and how cool people will think we are when we can show it off! But then something terrible happens. We take one look at the steep learning curve ahead of us, and think, “Oh I just don’t have the time right now,” or if we’re a little more honest with ourselves, “I’m just not cut out for this.”
What unfortunately holds us back, is that we think of learning in terms of a deadline, and it’s not our fault, we’ve been conditioned to: we have to be potty trained by 2, we have to graduate college in 4 years, you get the idea… Part of this is of course social pressure and convention. However, when we time box our learning we create ultimatums for ourselves, and when we cannot learn under such time constraints we are left feeling like failures and giving up!
What if you need more time? What if you couldn’t spend half a day learning, but you could spend 20 or 30 minutes instead?
It’s also not about having time, it’s about making time.
Finding the time interval you can spare daily, weekly, or monthly. Then make a commitment to that interval and a frequency. The key though isn’t to squeeze it into an already crammed schedule. It’s to find the time where you can focus on learning away from all other distractions, consistently!
For myself, I only have time to learn mobile development on the weekends, so I’ve made a commitment to spend at least 1-2 hours on Saturdays and Sundays.
One Step At a Time
In the beginning, you won’t feel like you’re making any progress! In fact you’ll spend most of your time getting setup and understanding how to use tools.
It took me 30 minutes just to download and install the latest version of XCode on my machine, which is the tool you use for developing an iOS app. Then I had to spend another hour familiarizing myself with XCode. By this point I had spent my first few sessions purely getting my bearings with nothing to show.
Then after 8 hours of lecture and setup, things had sunk in, and I was able to build the first screen of my app! This was my first breakthrough moment.
Keep going one step at a time, until you have your first breakthrough!
You don’t know when you’ll have your breakthrough, and sometimes you need to go back and review material, or take a break to let it sink in. However, if you keep learning the subject as the goal it will happen.
Find the Methods that Work for You
Sometimes the approach we take to learning can make a big difference. The good news is that there is a wealth of resources and approaches that are available. Gone are the days of having to sit in a classroom and pay attention for hours on end!
While I enjoy learning from someone in person in a classroom setting, I just don’t have the time to commute, and since I spend the bulk of my time learning on the weekend, there aren’t a lot of options available then.
I am someone who is usually glued to every word a lecturer says for the first 30 minutes. As the lecture gets closer to the 45 minute mark, it is agonizing for me to parse through any more technical knowledge no matter how charismatic a lecturer is.
So I like to watch just 30 minutes, take a break, review the material, and practice what I’ve learned. I enjoy learning from videos where I can pause and rewind to sections that were confusing. For mobile development, I heard a lot of great things about the Stanford Lecture series, so I’ve been watching those. The professor is pretty fast, but because it’s all recorded I can find a pace that works for me.
Figure out what is and isn’t going to work for you and your style of learning.
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