Last years, I’ve been under immense pressure to learn new technologies, programming languages frameworks, and other competencies very quickly. Often, this pressure has been my own fault, due to me jumping into things and getting in way over my head, but regrdless of the source, it has forced me to develop a repeatable system for self-learning.

I discovered that there were three main things I needed to know to be able to learn a technology:

• How to get started–What were the basic things I needed to know to get started using whatever I was learning?
• The breath of the subject–How big was the thing I was learning and what could I do with it? I didn’t need to know every detail to start, but if I had a decent overview of what I could do and what was possible, I could always find more details later.
• The basics–Beyond just getting started, what were the basic use cases and the most common things I’d need to know to use a particular technology? What was the 20% I could learn that would cover 80% of my daily usage?

10 Steps System

Step 1: Get the big picture

Step 2: Determine scope

Step 3: Define success

Step 4: Find resources

Step 5: Create a learning plan

Step 6:

Think of it this way: for step 6, you’re the basketball coach making cuts for the varsity team. Sure, you’d like to let everyone play, but it just isn’t possible. You’ve got to cut down your resources to a number that you can manage. For this step, go through all the resources you’ve gathered in step 4 and figure out which ones have content that will help you to best cover the content in your learning plan. Also take a look at reviews and try to determine which resources are of the highest quality. I usually will look at the Amazon reviews for the books I’m considering purchasing and narrow it down to the best one or two books that I think will provide me the best bang for my buck.

STEPS 7–10: REPEAT THESE

Step 7: Learn enough to get started

Step 8: Play around

Step 9: Learn enough to do something useful

Step 10: Teach

Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember.Involve me and I learn. —Benjamin Franklin