One useful approach to studying any field is to mindlessly consume related content until you are able to criticize, and rationalize its basic concepts, then dig deeper. Sounds absurd? Here’s how it works.
When talking about learning new concepts, we often use the metaphor ‘connecting the dots,’ which I’ll be abusing here. This mindless approach to learning focuses on collecting dots to connect when starting to study a field. You collect dots by reading articles, or watching videos with little to no deep thought. You then connect the dots when you know more about each dot, or where it fits in the graph of dots.
Let’s take software engineering as an example, since it’s one of the fields where I’ve seen this approach in effect. When starting out, maybe after taking a university course in programming basics, you have no idea how to get from what you’ve learned (the seemingly trivial ‘if’ statements and ‘for’ loop) to building complex, useful software. An introductory programming course will not introduce you to any ways of building interactive graphical interfaces, or HTTP servers.
First, we identify the content to mindlessly consume. There exist many YouTube channels that regularly upload technical conference talks and tutorials. Follow them. Watch every video they upload. While having lunch, taking a break, or on the bus, watch them without much thought.
There also exist many technical articles posted on websites such as news.ycombinator.com every day. Read them mindlessly as well. With time, you’ll be able to tell which articles are relevant to your bag of software engineering dots.
After mindlessly watching videos and reading articles for a while, you start finding yourself using words you’ve heard or read in the content you’ve consumed. You find yourself curious about a few particular words that you often search for, and learn more about. You start to build an index of solutions to technical problems, except the index takes you to a web page or a video, and you’ll have to dig deeper from there in order to actually solve the problem.
When you’ve used your problem index a few times, you’ll find you’ve added a few technical tools to your belt. You now can solve problems A, B and C with the tools X, Y, and Z.
In many fields, you hear experts saying ‘an expert is a practitioner with many tools on his belt.’ So congratulations, you’re on the path to becoming an expert. You just need to find more efficient methods of learning, now that you have a sufficiently large bag of connected dots.