Daily Dispatch 24 - Learn on Demand

There’s this concept of not depending on books or courses that got my interest lately.

After I learned to love reading, I would get my hands on anything non-fictional that was readable, even say, anatomy books.

I grew up on my old auntie’s room.

So I had plenty of time and all her medical books.

I read a lot of those.

And I also lived on the second floor of a house, my first floor cousin had lots of books as well.

So I just followed my curiosity reading whatever books caught my attention.

It was weird to migrate from that to a Learn on Demand type of thing.

What is Learn on Demand?

Well how about some examples.

I’ve been trying to learn Vim, so instead of focusing on getting every command before opening up an editor, I just installed every Vim extension to every text editor/IDE I use. Including Obsidian, Android Studio and IntelliJ(with IdeaVim), and finally Visual Studio Code(with VimForVsCode)).

That way I learn because I NEED to in order to code and write.

Another example would be:

I got into a new company to code Kotlin, but all my previous experience has been coding in Javascript using NodeJS, React and React Native.

So I need to learn Kotlin to continue getting paid.

This happened about a year ago, before I joined Nelogica to join their Mobile team.

Here’s another one to cement the idea:

I need to do my taxes, so I’ll learn precisely what I need to declare depending on my investments, instead of waiting to read a whole book on the matter.

I think what helped me shift from a “Learn Everything there is to Know before starting” to “Learn on Demand” was finishing university and starting to work.

Because when I work, there are very tight deadlines and I gotta do the best I can with the time I have.

It rubbed perfectionism out of me for good.