Learning is a Skill | blog<br>Skip to content

Introduction

You’ve probably encountered someone in your life that was better than you at<br>everything. That topic that you’ve been learning for years? They know more. This skill that<br>you’ve been developing for a while? They do it better. That super-niche thing that you’re<br>extremely sure there is no way on planet Earth that they'd even know about? Yep, you<br>guessed it: they perfected it years ago.

You might attribute this to talent or intelligence, but you'd be wrong. Learning is in itself a<br>skill. What might’ve taken you months or years to learn, they probably did it in much less<br>time and then went on to learn something else. Stacking their saved time and investing it<br>exponentially.

I don’t envy these people. I look up to them.

Just to name one of them, I'll use Gawx as an example:

Art, storytelling, color grading, composition, graphic design, pacing, cinematography,<br>marketing, fashion, creativity, interior design, cameras, lenses, and so on.

I have only mentioned the ones off the top of my head, and the ones that I even know<br>have a name (and that I have generalized into broader topics. For example: cameras<br>would branch out to stuff like lenses, depth of field, filming techniques, different uses of<br>equipment for different scenarios…). If I went in-depth into his full catalogue of skills, it<br>would probably be in the hundreds if not thousands.

It might look seriously overwhelming, because it is. You might get discouraged.

That’s why learning isn’t only a skill you can develop, but a mindset you need to adopt.

Learning phase radar profileRadar chart comparing five learning phases across knowledge, discoverability, signal quality, social skill, barrier, and value.KnowledgeDiscoverabilitySignal qualitySocial skillBarrierValue<br>Phase 1Phase 2Phase 3Phase 4Phase 5<br>Knowledge92<br>Discoverability12<br>Signal quality88<br>Social skill88<br>Barrier88<br>Value95

Schrodinger’s Specialness

Throughout your life, I'm sure you’ve heard a lot of people say either one of the following<br>two statements:

You are special

You are not special

I'd love to tell you that one of them is correct, and the other is incorrect. But I can't. That’s<br>too binary. So I will start with the latter group and how I interpret it myself.

You Are Not Special

Let's take these words as in you, specifically, are not special. But there are people in<br>the world that are. What makes them special? Meh, who knows, it might be talent,<br>giftedness, destiny; but you're not part of them. All animals are equal but some animals<br>are more equal than others.

You can never reach them because they were predestined to be special. Putting any<br>effort into anything is worthless, since you will never achieve what these people obtained<br>naturally.

Or

Let's take these words as in no one is special. We are all equal (ignoring how flawed<br>that statement is). Then, what stops you from learning what they know? Absolutely<br>nothing. They're not special, and I'm not special; so if they can do it, why couldn’t I?

We turn the statement from something nihilisticA view that life, effort, or values have no inherent meaning. and hopeless to some sort of delusional<br>optimism. We are removing the excuses (giftedness, talent, destiny). The only barrier<br>between those people and you is the amount of time that they have dedicated to their<br>craft.

You Are Special

I can't be bothered to entertain this one, neither in favor of it nor against it. If you think you're<br>special, you probably don’t need me to anyways.

Phase 1: Unknowledgement

Where everyone starts. You might’ve heard of the topic loosely, or might be completely<br>unaware that it exists. In short, you don’t know what you don’t know.

This phase lasts until you know what you want to learn, which might seem short-lived but<br>for most topics you'll be at this phase for your whole life.

Example

Each phase from now will have an example. I would like for everyone to be<br>able to understand them (although that goes slightly against the philosophy of what is<br>explained in this blog) as much as possible, so I will use Minecraft as an example. More<br>specifically, technical MinecraftA Minecraft subcommunity focused on advanced mechanics and automation., or TMC for short. Everyone knows or has played<br>Minecraft, so I think it’s a good baseline to expand from.

Phase 2: Dunning-Kruger’s Catastrophe

Once you have decided what you want to learn, here comes the hardest part: learning<br>the basics. Not only will you have a lot of information at your disposal, but you will have<br>a lot of bad information at your disposal. You need to learn how to filter that bad<br>information to the best of your ability while being bombarded with an overwhelming<br>amount of it.

Worry not, you'll 100% of the time learn bad and incorrect information at this stage,<br>but the idea is to build a base to the best of your ability that you can build off of. The less<br>misinformation you ingest at this step, the less stuff you will have to re-learn<br>later...