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by aronowb14 1776 days ago
I built a process for myself when self teaching coding that generalizes pretty well (have used for it for coding, basketball, 3D art, and most recently cooking).

Revolves around Dr. Strange quote: “mastery comes from theory and practice”.

I start by finding books/resources for absolute beginners. Examples: (Salt fat acid heat [cooking] blenderguru [3d art] Murachs intro to Java [coding].

Next I go through the entire resource cover to cover, and as I learn I add interesting projects to an ongoing list. I find the more I learn, the more interesting the subject gets and the more I want to learn.

The key to getting this cover to cover completion to work though is habit building. I force myself to do the activity every day for at least ten minutes. It sucks in the beginning, but after 2-3 days it becomes super duper easy and I find myself working for hours over that ten minutes.

Once I finish the intro resource: I find the next resource that suits my level… rinse and repeat after that :).

Other stuff that helps/optimizes the process:

Focus on meta learning. Figure out what works for you as you learn. Reflect often.

Surround yourself with experts on the topic if you can.