Be Curious #
Being curious means being open to new information and actively seeking it out. It means embracing facts that don’t fit your worldview and trying to understand their implications. It means letting your mistakes trigger curiosity instead of embarrassment.
Factfulness
If there ever was a way to not get stuck in the mundane and live your life with excitement, it would be to be curious. In the knowledge industry and specifically the information industry where technologies are outdated in six months, it is disadvantageous to not stay updated with current trends. Curiosity helps in staying up-to-date.
Learning Strategies #
There are two types of skill profiles you can develop for your learning strategy: deep and wide.
Deep learning enables you to specialize in a topic while you dig layer-by-layer below what you’re working on. You can start with a problem of displaying a list block using views in middle of a node and dig into theme hooks, render pipeline, views hooks, handling caching metadata, and so on. With each layer, you are building a deeper understanding of how technology works and thereby able to decide when a technology is a right fit. You will be on your way to be an expert in whatever technology you pick.
Wide learning, on the other hand, enables you to learn more about an ecosystem. You start with writing a front-end in React but move on to Vue and even Flutter to write a mobile application. You learn that there are multiple ways to solve any business problem and decide, based on the problem context, which of the solutions is most appropriate. You also understand tradeoffs between various solutions and can communicate that with the various stakeholders.
You have to decide your balance in picking the learning strategy. No one is purely deep or wide, but a mixture of both in varying proportions. Further, each team needs a mix of people who are more deep and those who are more wide. Real-world is messy and strategies where you always go deep or always go wide are not enough to solve real-world problems.
Fear of Missing Out #
Fear of missing out (FOMO) is a common problem in the current age of information overload. We are often frustrated in not being able to catch up with every technology that’s out there and doing “cool things” with it. You are not alone in this.
It is important to balance the behavior of being curious with knowing what is good enough. I like this quote from a book that speaks to me about this topic.
The exhilaration that sometimes arises when you grasp this truth about finitude has been called the “joy of missing out,” by way of a deliberate contrast with the idea of the “fear of missing out.” It is the thrilling recognition that you wouldn’t even really want to be able to do everything, since if you didn’t have to decide what to miss out on, your choices couldn’t truly mean anything
Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
Be mindful of going into rabbit holes too often. It is great to dig into a problem layer-by-layer but it is very easy to lose your way back to the surface. Choose your problems wisely and decide if it’s worth your investment.