Jul 3

・3 min read

I grew up with low self esteem and afraid of asking questions to other people. But not until I've found out that I am passionate about programming and development.
My perspective on everything started to change, not in a bad way but rather, in a practical way.
I immediately realized that anything can be learned and everyone was once a beginner at something.

The Power of Internet & Google

"Everything's on the internet" that's what they say, and that is true to us developers. Every resources that you need, to learn a technology and a skill is at your fingertips. All you have to do is type in the right keywords to get what you need. But that is not as simple as it sounds. That's why "Googling" is considered as a skill to learn for developers

Realizing that finding resources to learn something is very easy nowadays, is the first step to master the art of self-teaching. This step is very simple, but what about the next?

Developing Curiosity

Have you ever dive into something you're curious about? Remember what does it feel like? You see, when you're learning something that you're curious about, it never feels like a chore. That's the magic of curiosity, it will never stop bugging you until you filled the gaps of your understanding.

After developing your curiosity, the next step is probably the hardest technique to cultivate and is where people struggle when approaching a new topic

Seeing How Things are Connected To Each Other

It's always frustrating when you feel like you're just wasting time learning something, "Like how is this relevant to what I want to achieve?". When it feels like that, things get hard to learn.

I'm going to be technical for a bit

Last week, I've struggled with learning Ruby on Rails because I felt like it was not relevant anymore when it comes to building modern web apps. But I was wrong, I immediately saw its full potential after I integrate it with GraphQL and start building API services. After that, everything started to makes sense, the syntax, the patterns. Everything went smoothly.

So, when learning something new, try to look for "the connection". Remember, everything is connected. Sometimes you just have to wait for weeks, months, or even years to see it.

The last technique will be the missing puzzle piece to master self-teaching skill

Planning What, When, and How to Study

Planning is what separates learner from effective learner. If you're enrolled in a school or university, there's no need to worry about study plan, as schools provide it already. You get your course outline, your daily schedule, and everything.

But when you're self-teaching, it's all up to you. Without a proper study plan, you need to have a strong self-discipline and determination to learn something and be good at it. The problem with using self-discipline is, it's very hard to rely on it.

But don't worry, a study plan could be simple as, knowing your most productive time in a day and studying at that time. But of course, that's not enough if you really want to maximize your self-teaching capability.

So here's some helpful tips you want to consider:

1. Create a course outline
2. Identify and stick to your best schedule
3. Remember to take a break
4. Test your skills weekly or every after you study

Final Thoughts

Self-teaching or formal education, none of those matter. In the end, we all still have to teach ourselves. History already showed us a lot of successful self-taughts. With the power of internet, where all information are travelling around so fast. There's clearly no reason not to learn things you're interested at.