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It took me a bit to digest what you were saying, but I think I agree. To my mind, though, the thing that separates successful learners from unsuccessful is per
by evincarofautumn 14y ago
It took me a bit to digest what you were saying, but I think I agree.
To my mind, though, the thing that separates successful learners from unsuccessful is persistent constructive dissatisfaction. If you have some difficulty finding contentment—and are never happy to rest on your laurels for too long—then you will be determined to achieve more and more, and learning will happen as a by-product. The longer a plateau becomes, the more likely it is to stay a plateau; and the shorter you can make a plateau, the better for your progress.
Perhaps, as you say, this comes from not keeping track of learning progress. However, I think there is an important other side of it: you do want to keep track of progress toward some other goal, such as making a game. Then it becomes a matter of “I need to learn about networking in order to add multiplayer to my awesome game”. When learning stands between you and your dreams, you quickly learn to learn quickly.
- dshipper 14y agoThanks for the feedback Evin! I like your point about persistent constructive dissatisfaction. I think the distinction that I'm making is that when people get to wrapped up in their progress they get persistent destructive dissatisfaction. That produces frustration, which leads people to stop trying.
- evincarofautumn 14y agoYeah, that’s a nice succinct way of putting it. Unfortunately, nice succinct ways of putting things don’t seem to make for very compelling writing. So we blog. If another person calls me “Evin”, I may have to stop using the name “evincar of autumn”. The reference is so easily lost.
- dshipper 14y agoSorry about that Jon!
- eric-hu 14y agoI would add onto this: there is a grey area between persistent constructive dissatisfaction and persistent destructive dissatisfaction. You can't really know when you're pushing yourself so hard that you'll burn out.
- evincarofautumn 14y agoOther than through trial and error. A messy process, but effective.