[blowski]

It's a bit aphoristic for my liking - up there with 'work smarter, not harder' and 'never give up'.

How do I prioritise learning against using what I've already learned? Is it better to learn things I already know in more detail, or completely new things but only to a shallow level? Is it OK to learn from YouTube videos or should I register with a proper education establishment? And how do I balance learning against other demands on my time like networking and spending time with my family?

I doubt anybody wakes up one day and says "OK, I've learned enough now, I'm not going to bother learning anything new." so advising against that seems a bit pointless.

[SatvikBeri]

The point of posts like this is not to provide specific suggestions, it's to shift values and provide validation.

Many of us live in a culture which is decidedly anti-intellectual, e.g. where showing genuine interest in learning will get you derided as "weird" or "nerdy" and lower your overall social status. Humans tend to respond pretty strongly to social incentives, so this causes people to study less than they otherwise would. Conversely, positively reinforcing learning really does cause people to spend more time on it.

pg's "Cities and Ambition" covers this topic pretty well: http://paulgraham.com/cities.html

[k__]

Well, I had the experience that only some of the new stuff I learned required to forget about old stuff I already knew.

[Declanomous]

That is a salient point. Learning requires a lot of humility. You need to admit you don't know something, you will probably do poorly when you first start out, and, as you've pointed out, you might need to admit what you already know is wrong.

I realized a while back that I tended to get defensive when someone presented information that I was wrong. Initially I felt that this was because people tend to disagree with other people in a way that can be considered, at best, a little dickish. However, I also felt attacked even when the information was presented in a fairly neutral manner. This was a bit of a shock to me, because I like to think of myself as open-minded.

After some self-reflection, I found the reason I felt attacked was because I felt that any time someone presented me with information that conflicted with my worldview, it attacked my self-identity as a reasonable and observant person. When someone told me something that didn't seem possible based on my worldview, I almost took it as if they were attacking my worldview itself.

This defensive behavior would present itself in how I told my stories to other people as well. So, while I felt attacked when other people presented information that conflicted with my worldview, I'm sure they felt equally attacked when I shared my worldview with them, even if I didn't outright say they were wrong at any point.

It took me a while to figure out how to avoid this behavior, since I was effectively putting up emotional barriers against what felt deep down like an attack. (Perhaps this step is easier for people who are in tune with their emotional side, rather than their analytical side.) I just started thinking about everyone as having their own world (myself included), and their stories being true in their world. In a sense, sharing knowledge was a bit like they were taking me inside a bit of their world.

It freed me from having to immediately evaluate whether what they said was true or false. I could keep their ideas in their world and evaluate them there, and compare them to how things worked in my world. Sometime other people's ideas explain what is going on in my world better than my own ideas. At that point, I ditch my old ideas and accept their ideas as the new truth in my world.

It sounds kind of weird, and it probably is a bit. I've kind of created a analytical system for empathy, which allows me to evaluate world views in a scientific manner. Regardless, I've learned so much more since I stopped worrying about whether I was right in any given situation, and instead worried about listening instead. There's always time to evaluate later.