Tag Archives: Learning

When It Comes to Personal Development, There’s No Magic Pill

Let’s face it, personal development is a niche in the lucrative information marketing sector. There’s great value in this niche, but there are also a lot of unjustified prices charged with false claims.

Let’s break down the products in this niche and analyze them from the customer’s perspective.

You’ll find a lot of value for free in blogs, free e-books, podcasts, and videos. Then, there are audiobooks from audible and e-books from Kindle. These are pretty affordable. On the top layer of the market, there are premium priced information products.

When it comes to personal development, I can hardly imagine a premium product that provides more value than the content freely available on the Internet or for a small price in an audible audiobook or a Kindle e-book.

Having said that, once in a while, I buy one of these premium products. My main incentive to do so is to reward the producer for the free content they already provided us. Paying a premium price for a product also creates a higher engagement from my side.

When you pay a premium price, you get more involved with the content. You tend to consume the content thoroughly and do the exercises. When you come across a free or cheap program, you might tend to toss it aside after working on it for a few hours.

There are great programs for very low prices on audible. If you have the discipline to study them and do the exercises, you’ll get great value out of them.

At the end of the day, it comes down to how hard you study those programs and how often you apply them in your life.

Good Bye to Shy by Leil Lowndes is a standard paperback book. But if you truly want to overcome your shyness and commit to complete all the exercises in that book, it will take you a couple of years to do so. Yet, your life will change if you do that.

The Magic of Self-Direction by Brian Tracy is a standard priced audio program available from audible. You can complete it in an hour or so, and it will give you a direction in your life. You have to ignore the references to outdated technology though, but honestly, those references don’t have any relevance to the core of this program anyway.

Another one of my favorites is The Psychology of Higher Self-Esteem by Nathaniel Branden, which is also available from audible for a standard price. Yet, this program requires a lot of work on your side.

The chances are slim that you’ll find a piece of information in a premium price personal development product that you can’t already find freely or for a standard price. And the information you find or the price you pay for it doesn’t matter either.

What matters is what you do with that information. Do you learn that information? Do you add it to your functional knowledge? Do you apply it in your life? Do you do the exercises? Do you use the information to change who you are? Those are the questions that matter.

If you want to create higher engagement or reward the producer for their contribution by paying premium prices, go ahead and do that, but don’t forget that paying a premium price to an information product by itself won’t change your life.

Three Steps to Transform Your Life with Personal Development

There are 300+ posts in my blog. Reading one of those posts and applying it in your life is much more beneficial than reading all of them just to forget them the next month.

The writer in me would prefer you reading all of my posts, but at the end of the day, those posts were written to make a difference in your life.

There are so many personal development content and workshops out there, ranging from free to ultra-premium. You can’t consume all of them even if you devoted your whole life to it.

You might be consuming a good deal of personal development content and following workshops, but do you apply what you consume in your life?

That’s the question we have to ask ourselves. Here’s a follow-up question.

Which difference does consuming all the personal development content make in your life?

Sure, reading a book is better than watching TV, but does reading a book make any difference in your life?

Make no mistake, I’m not arguing that personal development content and workshops are useless. My argument is they are what you make of them.

If you see personal development content as entertainment and workshops as social activities, you won’t make much progress in that area of your life.

Sure, that’s much better than wasting your time online or hanging out in a random bar, but you can get much more out of those activities.

What Keeps Us from Making the Most of Our Personal Development Efforts?

Several obstacles keep us from making the most of our personal development efforts. The first one is that we don’t know how our minds work.

We believe that we’ll learn a concept just by a single exposure. We read a book once. Then, move on to the next one, then to the next one, and so on.

We might end up having read ten books, but our retention rate is so low that it doesn’t even add up to a single book.

The solution to that problem is called the spaced repetition method. When you complete a book, schedule periodic reviews in your calendar.

A sample schedule is to review a book one week later, one month later, one quarter later, and one year later. That makes four reviews.

There are some books that I reread and listen again on audible, but a review doesn’t necessarily mean rereading the entire book or going through the workshop once more. It means reminding yourself of the key ideas.

An effective way to process a book is to underline the passages that resonate with you and to take notes. Then, you can go over those highlighted passages and notes during your review. Kindle makes this really easy.

You don’t need to review all the books of course. If a book doesn’t resonate with you, you can skip the review process.

Do the Work

Personal development books and workshops usually involve exercises. Some books are just a collection of exercises. Those are the most transformational content, but there’s a catch. You have to do those exercises.

If you just read the text and don’t do the exercises, the value you’ll get out of that activity will be marginal.

It’s human nature to seek novelty and avoid effort. And some personal development programs require effort, especially emotional labor to face yourself and your life entirely. It’s tempting to keep on reading, listening, or watching, without doing the exercises.

I read two books by Nathaniel Branden that resonated with me, which made me buy an audio program to listen to while doing manual work.

The audio program contained lots of exercises, which take much longer than just listening to the content. But doing those exercises was way more transformational than just reading the first two books.

Dive In

Our novelty seeking nature makes us jump from book to book and from author to author. That keeps us from getting the ideas of an author thoroughly.

I don’t argue to dedicate your life to a single author and consume only their content unless that’s what you want.

If a book resonates with you, dive deeper with other books of the same author. This will make the spaced repetition easier since there are usually overlaps in the books of an author. You’ll be reading similar ideas expressed in different ways.

There have been a few authors whose work I dove into. As a result, I understood and integrated the ideas of those authors more into my life.

Four Levels of Learning

There are four levels of learning.

  • In the first level, you aren’t aware that a certain skill exist.
  • In the second level, you’re aware of the skill, but you don’t have it.
  • In the third level, you have to make a conscious effort to use the skill.
  • In the fourth level, you can use the skill without any conscious effort.

Reading about a topic takes you from the first level to the second level. It’s those repetitions, doing the exercises, and dive-ins that will take you from the second level to the third and fourth levels. The third and fourth levels are where the magic happens.

Summary

Consuming personal development content and participating in workshops is better than just wasting your time online or hanging out in a bar. Yet, those activities provide you with marginal benefits if you don’t do the work.

To get significant value out of your personal development work, you need to do periodic reviews, do the exercises, and dive deep into the works of the authors that resonate with you.

Reading a book once will take you to the second level of learning, but periodic reviews, doing the exercises, and deep dives will take you to the third and fourth levels. That’s where real transformation happens.

You’re An Idiot. And That’s Great!

If you’re like the average person, you’ll be insulted by the title of this post. If you aren’t, that’s great because that means you’re open-minded and ready for improvement and growth.

Think about all the information available to us. How much of it do you know? If you’re realistic, your knowledge is negligible next to the information available to all of us. Doesn’t that make you an idiot?

“The only thing I know is that I know nothing.” Socrates

You might argue that most of that information isn’t useful for you or for your life. You’re probably right. Let’s take all the information that would be useful for you and for your life. How much of that information do you know? Most probably, still a minuscule, negligible fraction.

Add on top of that all the irrationalities and biases that you carry with yourself as a result of 4.5 billion years of evolution. Doesn’t that make you an idiot?

We’re All Idiots

Now, you might either reject that idea or embrace it. You might refuse it because you might think that it’s toxic to your self-esteem. If that’s your excuse to deny it, just realize that almost every human shares the same condition with you. And yes, that includes me.

Let the possibility of being an idiot sink in.

One Idea Can Turn Around Your Life

Maybe, you’re missing one simple idea to turn around your business, your finances, your relationships, or your life. If you accept being an idiot, you’ll be open to that possibility, look for that idea or ideas, and implement them in your life.

There have been multiple cases when a simple piece of information made a huge difference in my private and professional life.

In some cases, a single well-formulated Google query led me to the solution. In other cases, I had to spend more time studying to get results in a particular field. In either case, learning improved my results.

Most of us are idiots compared to our potentials, and that’s great news.

We have an enormous room for growth and improvement.

I don’t know about you but knowing that I’m an idiot makes me feel excited.

Imagine you learn only 1% of the information that is available to you and use it in your life. How would your life look like?

The problem isn’t that we are idiots. The challenge is to cultivate the humility to accept our ignorance, do our best to learn what we don’t know we don’t know, and to apply it in our lives.

You Can Overcome Your Challenges

If you’re experiencing challenges in your life, you might be one Google search away from the solution, or it might take a little more time to research and find the answers.

In either case, think about all the information and knowledge that’s available to all of us. There’s a good chance that the solutions to your problems are already available in that body of knowledge.

All you have to do is to formulate your problems and search for the answers. If you can’t find the solutions by yourself, ask others. You can hire a professional, or you can ask your question on an online forum like Quora.

The answers will come to you if you’re open to them and if you have the humility to admit your ignorance. When they come, your life will be transformed.

The Most Valuable Pursuit in the 21st Century

I was going through my Evernote this morning. I went through my old notes and realized how much I learned about blogging in the last few months.

When I looked at those notes, I realized how little I knew about blogging. I had no idea how to come up with compelling titles, how to format my posts, and how to promote them.

I learned all of that and more in the last six months. I learned some of that from blog posts and email newsletters, and others through trial and error.

That knowledge got me from the novice level to the beginner level at blogging. There is still a lot to learn to get to the intermediate and mastery level.

I wish someone handed me that knowledge so that all I had to do was to follow the instructions in a book. Unfortunately, life doesn’t work like that.

You have to find out what works for you. No one’s going to do that for you.

We have to go through all the information ourselves, try it out, and find out what works and what doesn’t. Discerning the truth is a core skill for success, if not the only skill. Yet, it might be the hardest one to develop.

The Age of Abundant Information

We live in the age of abundance. A wealth of information is freely and cheaply available. That has its advantages as well as its disadvantages.

A mass of information is useless unless it’s organized into knowledge. That’s why Google is one of the most valuable companies today.

That’s also why data science is such a hot topic. Even results of elections can be influenced using data science.

The Biggest Challenge in the Age of Abundant Information

Our biggest challenge in the age of abundant information is to separate the signal from noise. Which information is the most valuable among all the information available on the Internet?

I’m sure there’s some life-changing information out there for all of us. How do we find out that information? That’s the biggest challenge of our times.

We aren’t looking for a gold mine anymore. Knowledge is the new gold in the 21st century. We are looking for life-changing knowledge.

Finding Life-Changing Knowledge

I honestly believe that there’s life-changing knowledge for each of us out there. I experienced it in the first hand. Our task is to go out there and find it.

There’s a lot of free content out there, and some of it is useful and valuable. I learned a lot from blog posts, podcasts, and YouTube videos.

There’s also a lot of premium content that is cheaply available. I like Kindle and Audible books. I receive a lot of value from them for a low price.

The primary value of paid content for me is that it is in a condensed form. I can’t listen to every podcast of Gary Vaynerchuk or read every blog post of Seth Godin. But I can purchase their books and audiobooks and learn their most valuable ideas.

Converting Information to Knowledge

When we come across valuable information, we must make it a part of our functional knowledge. The first step to do that is to decide how often we’re going to use it.

If we’re going to use it on a daily basis, we need to learn and internalize it. If we’re going to use it occasionally, we need to add it to our knowledge base. Let me explain each option with an example.

Learning for Every Day Use

Let’s say I have a distraction problem. I distract myself often with my smartphone. My solution to that challenge is to visualize the consequences of my self-distraction habit.

When I get into the feeling of those adverse consequences, checking my smartphone isn’t that fun anymore.

This is a habit I need to learn and apply every day, every time I feel like checking my phone. I need to go through the four levels of learning with this new practice.

The Four Levels of Learning

On the level of unconscious incompetence, I’m unaware that I can cure my distraction habit with a visualization practice.

On the level of conscious incompetence, I’m aware of the visualization practice, but I don’t succeed at using it to overcome my distraction habit.

On the level of conscious competence, I make conscious effort to use the visualization practice to overcome my distraction habit.

On the level of unconscious competence, the visualization practice happens automatically. I get into the feeling of adverse consequences every time I feel the urge of distracting myself. I don’t need to make any conscious effort to carry out the visualization practice.

The Path to the Highest Level of Learning

Getting from the first level to the fourth level takes time and effort. On the first level, you need to become aware that you have a problem. Then, you need to find a solution.

Most of the time, that solution is in the domain of what you don’t know you don’t know. You find it either by reading a blog post, listening to a podcast, or from another source.

Now, you’re on the level of conscious incompetence. You have the knowledge, but you can’t use it in your daily life.

It takes repetition until you internalize that knowledge. Don’t expect your life to change just because you read a blog post. Sometimes, it does, but most of the time, it doesn’t.

The Spaced Repetition Method

You need to repeat what you learned over and over with some time in between until you make it a part of your functional knowledge.

You need to practice what you learn. Only then, it adds any value to your life. But when it does, it makes a huge difference in your life.

Build a Knowledge Base

The second type of knowledge is the one that you use occasionally. That doesn’t mean that this type of knowledge is less important. It can be as important as the knowledge that you use it on a daily basis.

I recommend that you maintain a knowledge base to save and organize such knowledge. I use Evernote for that purpose.

There are some procedures that I have to carry out once in a while. For example, I have to collect a bunch of documents for income tax return once a year.

There’s no way I can keep all the steps of those procedures in my mind. I can’t risk missing a step. I write all those steps in an Evernote note and tag them.

When the time comes to execute those steps, I search that note and carry those steps out. I don’t need to think hard to remember all the steps. I’m also confident that I haven’t forgotten a step in between.

In essence, the idea is to either internalize a piece of knowledge if you’ll use it frequently, or record it somewhere if you’ll use it occasionally. That approach saves me a lot of time and headache.

The Sad State of Formal Education

Unfortunately, the majority of the information taught me during my K-12 education is not only useless, but it can easily be googled.

Sadly, some college curricula are just a continuation of that type of education. That’s why college education has such a bad rep nowadays.

The Significance of Theoretical Knowledge

Theoretical knowledge is misunderstood nowadays. As a software programmer, I’m a practitioner. Yet, I guarantee you that you’ll fail miserably without a theoretical foundation. You’ll hit a wall and be squashed like a mosquito. In my 15 years of experience, I witnessed it over and over.

Value practice, but never underestimate theory. Keep a balance between both.

What Does Theory Actually Mean?

Theory isn’t a collection of information in some books in a library. Theory is the essential knowledge that you have internalized over years of deliberate practice. This is precisely what Robert Greene explains in his book Mastery.

An estimated 10,000 hours of intentional practice is required to reach that kind of mastery. Sure, that number varies among different domains, but it gives a good idea of what it takes to reach the level of proficiency.

That’s why time management crucial. You have to invest most of your time and energy into learning.

The good news is that knowledge is non-taxable. No one can come and tax all the knowledge you have accumulated over the years. It’s all yours, and you can use it to create the life you want.

Conclusion

Accumulating theoretical and practical knowledge is the most valuable pursuit in the 21st Century. You need to learn how to learn.

In some cases, you need to record information in a knowledge base and be able to find it quickly. In other cases, you need to internalize the knowledge by repetition and practice.

If you do that, your knowledge will pay its dividends in return.

How to Learn Something for Life and Make It a Part of Your Functional Knowledge

Do you remember the last time you had an aha moment when you read a blog post? You probably do. We all have those moments, when we come across exceptional, insightful content. Sometimes, it’s a blog post. Sometimes, it’s a book. Sometimes, it’s a video.

However, do you remember what it was that gave you that aha moment? You probably don’t, because it’s normal to forget something after a while if we are exposed to it only once.

I’m sure, you don’t want to forget all the insights that you come across. You probably want to learn them for life and make it a part of your functional knowledge. The question is how are you going to do it?

The Secret to Long Term Learning

We don’t need to reinvent the wheel in this discussion. The answer is hidden in the challenge and the solution is already figured out by experts. However, in this post, I’ll share a modern tool to apply that solution efficiently.

The answer is hidden in the challenge. What is our challenge? We forget information that we are exposed to only once. What is the solution? In order to learn something for the long term, we need to get exposed to it more than once.

That sounds easy, right? “Just read the same blog post ten times and you have learned the information for life.” Not so fast! Consuming the same information repetitively is required, but there has to be some time in between each repetition.

The Spaced Repetition Method

You need to reread that blog post after a week, after a month, after a quarter, and after a year. These intervals are just examples. Different intervals are necessary for different people, for different information, and for different purposes.

For example, if you’re a college student, you might want to review the material after the first day, after the second day, after the first week, after the third week, and before the exam. So, you have to come up with your own repetition schedule, according to the topic, the purpose, and your learning patterns.

This method is called the spaced repetition method. I first came across it when learning a foreign language as an adult. The language learning version is developed by Paul Pimsleur and it is called the Pimsleur Method.

The Spaced Repetition Method in the 21st Century

Now, that we have the theoretical background, let’s think about how we can apply the spaced repetition method efficiently in the 21st Century. You can find some tools online for this purpose, but I like to use Evernote for this purpose.

Evernote is a free note taking software. I have been using it for five years, in my private life as well as in my professional life, with two separate accounts. I use it for multiple purposes, including the following.

  • Maintaining a knowledge base,
  • As a forum to discuss technical issues with colleagues,
  • Personal calendar,
  • To-do list,
  • Writing down ideas,
  • Organizing ideas.

I have already written posts about how I use Evernote in detail and how it helps me publish a blog post every day. So, why not use it as a tool for spaced repetition method?

How to Use Evernote as a Tool for the Spaced Repetition Method

The first step is to create a note for everything you want to learn for the long term. This is really easy if you have the Evernote app installed on your smartphone. You can easily send a webpage to Evernote with the shortcut. If it’s an idea that you came up with, simply write it down as a note in the app.

Once you have created the note, tag it. You can use the topic of the note, such as “blogging,” and/or you can use general terms, such as “insight” or “to learn.”

Schedule Weekly Reviews

Now, you need to schedule an hour or two every week to review the notes you created last week, one month ago, a quarter ago, and a year or multiple years ago. In order to find those notes, you can use queries like the following: created:20180101 -created:20180108 tag:insight in the search box.

That query will give you the notes created between 2018, January 1 and January 7, tagged with “insight.” Now, you can go through those notes and review the content. This will help you commit that information to the long term memory.

Moreover, you can use the keywords, day, week, month, and year. For example, you can use created:week-1 -created:week, to find the notes that were created between two weeks ago and a week ago.

You can save those queries as saved search and you can access them easily in your weekly review hour. If you aren’t that enthusiastic about a note anymore, you can remove that note.

Consuming New Content or Reviewing Old Content

Curiosity is a strong motivator for us, humans. Therefore, we tend to consume new content all the time. The problem with that approach is that we don’t learn something by consuming it once unless it reinforces what we have already consumed before.

Therefore, consuming new content is not enough in itself to improve our functional knowledge. We have to save insightful content in a knowledge base and review that knowledge base periodically. Otherwise, consuming new content has a little more value than pure entertainment.

Building knowledge is similar to developing new skills. Learning a new skill has four levels. You climb those levels by repetition. It’s the same with building knowledge, but in this case, those repetitions need to have some space in between them.

Conclusion

It’s human nature to forget new information after a while. Experts have found a solution to this problem. The solution is called the spaced repetition method. It is based on repeating the material after certain intervals, such as a day, a week, a month, and a year.

Modern tools such as Evernote make it easy to build a knowledge base with all the insights that you come across. You can use the same tool to review the material periodically with its search functionality.

In order to make sure that you review your knowledge base periodically, schedule at least an hour or more every week in your calendar.

Now, that I’m thinking about it, you can do the same with a blog and search for the posts between certain dates and tagged with certain terms.

Do you have other tools or tips to improve the learning process? Let us know in the comments.

What We Can Learn from a Program that Reprograms Itself

Imagine a self-sufficient robot. This robot is initially constructed and programmed by its producer. Every morning, it goes out, works in a job, and makes money. Every evening it comes to its storage unit and plugs itself to the charging station.

The hardware of this robot is fairly sturdy. Once in a while, it goes to maintenance. Its hardware is tweaked here and there and some parts are changed.

Since the robot works and makes money, it pays its own bills, such as its storage unit, electricity, and maintenance. It’s neither owned by someone, nor reliant on someone.

As you can imagine, all actions of this robot is determined by its program. The days, weeks, and months of this robot is determined by its actions. The life of this robot is a collection of its days, weeks, and months. In summary, the reality of this robot is determined by its program.

The reality of this robot is determined by its program.

You might think that the robot couldn’t do anything about its reality, because its program was determined by its producer. However, this is not 100% accurate, because the program includes modules that can modify itself.

Whenever the self-modifying module gets triggered, it compares the results it gets, to the results that it wants to get. Then it makes the changes that would produce better results. This way the robot improves its own programming and as a result, its own reality.

It’s Not About the Robot

As you would have guessed by now, I’m talking about humans. Our reality is determined by our programs. Our programs are produced by our upbringing, our family, our environment, and so on. That means our reality is produced by our upbringing, family, and environment, right? Not necessarily!

Luckily, we all have that module that can change its own programming. Most of us don’t use it. The majority of us aren’t aware that we have that module. The secret of improving our reality is to use that module to improve our programming.

The Challenge of Changing Our Programming

The problem with changing our programming is it’s hard. In order to change our programming, we first need to admit that we were wrong. People don’t want to admit they were wrong in the first place. It’s painful. People like to be right.

The first step to a better reality is to admit that you were wrong in the first place.

Right now, there are a lot of beliefs in your programming that are creating the results that you don’t want. First, you need to find them, acknowledge their role in your reality, and let them go.

Second, you need to find the beliefs that would create the results that you do want. Then, you need to install those beliefs into your programming.

I know this sounds much easier than it is, but I just want you to realize this truth. This isn’t some new age woo woo. Once you accept this truth, you can work with it. It’s not easy, but it’s possible.

It is a topic that I can go much deeper, but I’ll leave it there for today. I’ll write more about this in the future. For now, let this idea sink in.

You are a program that can reprogram itself. What are you going to do with that?

College Education, Irrelevant in the 21st Century?

Why should you not listen to your favorite social media guru when it comes to college education?

There are a lot of posts about skipping the college circulating in social media. I don’t see many counterarguments. In order to give a balanced view to the people who are about to make this decision, I wrote a post about why you should reconsider skipping the college.

My post about college education received some counterarguments on Medium. I can imagine that those counterarguments are shared by others as well. For that reason, I’m going to discuss those arguments in this post.

Some of the arguments against the college education have some merit to some extent, but they still don’t justify skipping the college 100%. I’ll discuss the arguments and counterarguments in this post and I hope that they help you in making your decision. If you have further arguments or counterarguments, please let me know in the comments and who knows maybe we will have a second follow-up.

No Advantage in the Job Market

One of the arguments against the college education is that the diploma of some majors don’t provide any advantage in the job market at all. As a result, the graduates of those majors end up having lost four years of their lives and student debts to pay.

I can’t disagree with the argument above. I wrote the initial post with computer science in mind. However, there are some majors that don’t provide any added value in the job market at all. So, before committing to a college degree, make sure that the major you are studying provides some added value in the job market.

Google is Your Best Friend Professor

Everything they teach you in the college can be found on Google.

Yes, everything that is taught in the college and more can be found on Google. The problem is most people use Google to find answers to practical problems. In our case, a programmer would only turn to Google when they come across a practical roadblock and search Google only for that practical roadblock.

In other words, we turn to Google to learn what we know that we don’t know. What I expect from a good academic education, from a good book, even from a good blog post, podcast, or YouTube video is to teach me what I don’t know that I don’t know.

I can’t Google what I don’t know I don’t know, because I’m not even aware of the existence of that knowledge in the first place. As a consequence, I don’t know which keywords to search for on Google.

College Courses Are Available Online

You don’t need to pay a college $60K a year and spend four years studying. College courses are available online.

College courses are available online, but I don’t see many dropouts dive into those courses and study them. People who want to skip the college usually have other motives than just college tuition. They think that all of that theory is a waste of time, it will be outdated soon anyway, and they are better off starting with hands-on experience right away.

In either case, let’s assume we have an ideal student who decides to study at home. They google the curricula and syllabi of the Ivy League colleges, come up with a self-study program, and study those courses by themselves.

It’s really rare that a college dropout would take the path of a proper self-study program, but for this example, let say they do. There are still disadvantages to such a path.

Lack of Assessment and Evaluation in Self-Study

Assessment and evaluation is an essential part of college education. You turn in your homework, term projects, and exam papers, and you see them shredded to pieces by the teaching staff. And that’s good for you. That feedback contributes to your education.

Then there is all kinds of interactions with the academic staff and your peers. That includes working in teams to implement term projects. That’s a great way to prepare for your career, where you have to work in teams most of the time.

You learn a lot as a result of interactions with your peers and professors. People learn from each other by discussing ideas. None of us is perfect and we all have our irrationalities.

By discussing our ideas, we open our ideas to criticism. In an academic environment, you can receive a lot of valuable feedback about your ideas. I know that this type of brainstorming is not popular with IT people, but it’s a great way to make progress fast.

People who skip the college lose the opportunity to discuss their ideas with their peers and professors. They lose the opportunity to be corrected if they misunderstood a subject. Unfortunately, that misunderstanding will stay with them until they bump into a real world problem, which will turn out to be costlier.

How Much Is Your Career Worth?

A lot of people complain about the high tuition fees. Who am I to object that? But think about it from another angle. How much is your career worth?

Let’s assume that an average computer programmer makes $80K USD a year and works for 40 years. That would make a whopping $3.2 million USD in their whole career. If we assume that a college degree would cost $60K a year and takes four years to complete, that would make $240K USD in total.

$240K USD and four years don’t seem to be a bad investment for a $3.2 million USD and 40 years career.

But Technology Changes Fast

The technology changes so fast, by the time you graduate, there’ll be new technologies used in the industry.

You don’t go to college to learn the latest technology. That would be a huge waste of time and money. You go to college to learn the fundamentals, the theoretical foundations that enable that technology.

In computer science, courses such as discrete mathematics, data structures, principles of programming languages, introduction to algorithms, operating systems, even networks, artificial intelligence, and neural networks are essential courses.

Some of the fundamentals won’t ever change and they will remain as the basis of upcoming technology, such as discrete mathematics, data structures, and complexity of algorithms. Some of these will slightly change over a long period of time, but still building on the existing foundations, such as the arrival of object oriented programming on top of procedural programming.

Conclusion

So far, the arguments I received in favor of skipping the college didn’t convince me when it comes to a field such as computer science that has decent employment prospects. In either case, I’m open for new counterarguments.

Quit College, Not So Fast

College education is frown upon nowadays by the so called social media influencers who have to say something other than your mom and dad in order to attract attention and advertisement dollars.

Having a PhD in informatics and a decade long experience in industrial software development, I can testify that theoretical computer science and the scientific method made my career.

There might be college degrees that might not be worth what you pay for them, but computer science is not one of them.

The “skip the college degree” logic is based on creating a quick revenue stream with your startup using the quick and dirty approach and then selling it to a big company or investors. One of two things will follow that acquisition.

Either the startup will implode, because the quick and dirty approach isn’t sustainable. Or you will invest that money to people with degrees that will rewrite the whole thing, but this time properly.

You might like the idea of selling your startup to a big company or investor, but be careful. This approach is not for everybody. It involves a lot of trial and error until you find and execute an idea to the point of market traction.

Startups are more like lottery tickets.

The chances of winning are slim. Losing is almost guaranteed. The price of the ticket is paid by hard work and your own hard earned cash. And there are occasional winners to keep the clueless public entering the game.

If that sounds like a good idea to you, go ahead and quit your computer science degree. If your college degree is in origami and you’re taking half a million in student loans to pay that, quitting that is probably a good idea too.

Well, seriously, there are some college degrees that don’t have any real world value to cover the time and tuition you invest in them, but computer science is not one of them.

Four Levels of Learning

Knowing the four levels of learning helps us adopting the growth mindset, keeping an open mind for new information, and developing new skills.

There are four levels of learning:

  • Unconscious Incompetence
  • Conscious Incompetence
  • Conscious Competence
  • Unconscious Competence

Unconscious Incompetence

Have you heard about the Njerep language? Me neither. Your level on Njerep was unconscious incompetence. You didn’t even know that you were incompetent in Njerep. Until you read this paragraph. Now, you know that you’re incompetent in Njerep. That moved you to the level of conscious incompetent.

The Njerep language might not make a huge difference in your life, but I guarantee you there are a lot things that you and I don’t know right now that could make a huge difference in our lives. What we don’t know we don’t know can make a huge difference in our lives. That’s why continuous learning is critical if you want to have a successful, satisfying life.

Conscious Incompetence

On this level, you already know that you’re incompetent on something. For example, you know that the Japanese language exists, but you probably can’t speak it. If you’re on that level, you’re on the level of conscious incompetence. You’re aware that you are incompetent on something.

Conscious Competence

On this level, you already learned the skill, but using it requires your conscious effort. This is what happens in the first few months of learning to drive a car. You needed to think what to do and what not to do in each situation. This is the level of conscious competence.

Unconscious Competence

After a few months of driving a car, you got to a point where you could drive without actually thinking about what to do next. In some cases, you might find yourself in an autopilot mode, almost unconscious, when driving a car. You might be thinking about an issue at work while driving and you might realize you’re already where you have to be without having paid any attention to the route. This is the level of unconscious competence.

 

Growth Mindset

Levels of learning help us incorporate the growth mindset. Growth mindset is the fundamental principle of personal development. It says that we can grow from our current skill level to a skill level that we aspire to. You can learn more about this topic from the book Mindset, by Dr. Carol Dweck.

Some of us look at a person who has already accomplished huge feats and get discouraged. This is fixed mindset. The fixed mindset is triggered by the huge gap between conscious incompetence and unconscious competence.

What fixed mindset people missing is that there is another level between conscious incompetence and unconscious competence. This is the level of conscious competence. Most successful people have gone through the process of going from conscious incompetence to conscious competence and then to unconscious competence. That takes a lot of studying and practice. And if you want to achieve success, that effort is worth it.

David and Goliath in our Minds

I like to mention my favorite book Thinking Fast and Slow here. I see some parallels between the System 1 and 2 and conscious competence and unconscious competence. System 1 is our autopilot mode. It’s strong but not intelligent. I like to call this system our Goliath. Getting a skill to this level is a huge advantage. This is the level of unconscious competence.

System 2 is our conscious mode. It’s intelligent but at the same time weak, lazy, energy consuming, and slow. I like to call this system our David. We need System 2 to go from conscious incompetence to conscious competence, and then to unconscious competence. This is hard, because our System 2 is weak, lazy, energy consuming, and slow. This is why you need self-discipline to move higher in the levels of learning.

Summary

In order to be successful in life, you have to develop a broad set of skills. In order to develop those skills, first you need to recognize that those skills exists and you lack those skills. That moves you from the first level to the second level.

On the second level, you spend conscious effort to develop a skill to get to the third level. Once you are on the third level, you keep practicing the skill until you can perform it in an autopilot mode, which is the fourth level.

Once you can perform a skill on the fourth level, you can perform it effortlessly. You can get into flow performing it. This is where you get the most results with the least amount of effort.

What You Don’t Know You Don’t Know Can Change Your Life

Knowledge is power and there are two types of knowledge that you don’t know. The first type is the knowledge that you know that you don’t know. The second type is the knowledge that you don’t know you don’t know. In the age of the Internet, the first type of knowledge is easy to get.

Using Google to acquire knowledge is a core competency for every knowledge worker. If you want to compete successfully in your field, you need to use Google effectively. There’s no way around it. In order to find what you are looking for, you need to formulate effective search queries. Eventually, you might need to formulate good questions to ask people online, on Q&A sites such as Quora and Stack Overflow. Both skills depend on a good grasp of language and terminology.

The second type of knowledge you don’t know has a much bigger impact than the first type. Right at this moment, there is life-changing information out there and you don’t know what it is. You don’t even know that it exists. If you knew that it existed and you knew what it was, you would have googled it. This is the type of knowledge that gives you an a-ha moment when you come across it. We can call it an insight. So, the question is how are you going to acquire the knowledge that you don’t know you don’t know.

How to Learn What You Don’t Know You Don’t Know

There are two ways to acquire the knowledge that you don’t know you don’t know. The first one is to learn from other people. The way you do that is by consuming their content and following their classes. Nowadays, people in the IT community underestimate a college degree, let alone a masters or a PhD degree. I disagree. In several cases, theoretical knowledge at a college level computer science class saved me in my industrial experience. There’s no way you can discover that kind of theoretical knowledge by yourself going through the daily grind of industrial work, unless you are some kind of genius.

The second way to learn what you don’t know you don’t know is to experiment and research by yourself or with your team. However, don’t get too excited. This is not a replacement for the first method. Sure, instead of having a year of formal education you can have ten years of field experience and learn some of the stuff that is already covered. However, that is not a guarantee that you will learn all the essentials. You might still be missing some very critical information that would make a huge difference, or the lack of which could get you in trouble.

The best way to go is of course the combination of both. By consuming what others have produced you only know what others know, which can be more than enough to get very successful and rich, because not everybody is processing the same information in the same way and not everybody would have the same amount of knowledge.

By developing your own knowledge through experimentation, you create new knowledge that didn’t exist before. That is a competitive advantage that no one has at the moment. But solely relying on your own experience and not taking advantage of what other people have already discovered doesn’t make sense either. That’s why when you start a PhD program, you are required to take some classes and you start your research with an extensive literature survey in your field.

Conclusion

Knowledge is power and you need to learn continuously to stay ahead of the competition. Google and Q&A sites are indispensable sources of knowledge. Using them effectively is one of the core competencies of the knowledge workers of today. That’s required but not sufficient. You also need to learn what you don’t know you don’t know. There are two ways to do that, consuming other people’s content and experimenting by yourself. Both are necessary to improve your competitive advantage. Just because everything is available online today, it doesn’t mean everything is a Google search away. The good old books and courses are still an indispensable part of acquiring life-changing knowledge.