Nice post, yes, but… something’s missing. In summary, I think the question here is, “How should you go about learning a big skill?” The answer this post gives seems to be “find a bunch of small skills that are contained within the big skill, and learn each one; then your small skills will gradually build up to the big skill.”
But that method, without a bit of clarification, just won’t do. How do you know which small skills are necessary for the big skill? Suppose you want to learn how to drive (and let’s assume you’re in a country that drives on the right). You might not realize that the rules for a traffic light are more complicated than “green means go, red means stop”, and so you might forget to learn those rules. You might get to a traffic light and think that since the light is green, it’s okay to turn left, and you might get in an accident. (Or you might enter the intersection while it’s green, and the light might turn red, and you might think that it’s not okay to turn left.)
Likewise, you might waste time learning small skills that turn out to be completely useless. Left-side parallel parking may seem like a good thing to practice, but there’s really no use in practicing it, because it’s illegal.
So, how can you learn which small skills you need to learn? As far as I know, the only way of doing this is to try exercising the big skill every once in a while. And by “the big skill”, I don’t mean things like playing Rachmaninov, or climbing a Class 5.10; those are hard, small skills. I mean things like actually driving, actually interacting with people, and actually writing research papers. At best, you’ll bring yourself up to speed much more quickly than if you tried to learn the small skills first. At worst, you’ll learn that you still have some small skills to learn, and you’ll gain some insight into which ones.
Nice post, yes, but… something’s missing. In summary, I think the question here is, “How should you go about learning a big skill?” The answer this post gives seems to be “find a bunch of small skills that are contained within the big skill, and learn each one; then your small skills will gradually build up to the big skill.”
But that method, without a bit of clarification, just won’t do. How do you know which small skills are necessary for the big skill? Suppose you want to learn how to drive (and let’s assume you’re in a country that drives on the right). You might not realize that the rules for a traffic light are more complicated than “green means go, red means stop”, and so you might forget to learn those rules. You might get to a traffic light and think that since the light is green, it’s okay to turn left, and you might get in an accident. (Or you might enter the intersection while it’s green, and the light might turn red, and you might think that it’s not okay to turn left.)
Likewise, you might waste time learning small skills that turn out to be completely useless. Left-side parallel parking may seem like a good thing to practice, but there’s really no use in practicing it, because it’s illegal.
So, how can you learn which small skills you need to learn? As far as I know, the only way of doing this is to try exercising the big skill every once in a while. And by “the big skill”, I don’t mean things like playing Rachmaninov, or climbing a Class 5.10; those are hard, small skills. I mean things like actually driving, actually interacting with people, and actually writing research papers. At best, you’ll bring yourself up to speed much more quickly than if you tried to learn the small skills first. At worst, you’ll learn that you still have some small skills to learn, and you’ll gain some insight into which ones.