Recently, I’ve been on a lot of night shifts at the hospital. The hours are long but sometimes the nights aren’t as busy and lend themselves to me being able to work on side projects and things I want to learn. Most recently (for a while now) that has been getting back into coding.
I’ve written about this before but I’ve always had an inconsistent relationship with side projects. I get super interested in something and then do a bunch of tutorials or basic exercises and then seem to drop off. Part of this is that learning is hard and hype cycles are real. But the other part is that we live in a society filled with distraction. Not only is there distraction to work on the next shiny thing - be that a new coding language, interest in filmmaking and storytelling, or even focusing on writing consistently (whoops) - there is also a lot of distraction in how we go about learning new things to begin with.
A quick YouTube search for learning Javascript will show that the top results aren’t just about learning the language but learning Javascript FAST (all caps for that CTA of course). No one wants to wait to learn something because time is money. We don’t really care about the process, we just care about the outcome. I want to get past all the basic stuff so that I can start building the cool stuff that’s in my mind.
I’m not sure when I became such an urgency monkey. Maybe it’s only have a few hours to dedicate to these other projects and wanting to make sure I use my time in the most efficient way possible. Maybe it’s actually society pushing me to think I always have to be hyper efficient and anything else is not good enough. Maybe it’s forgetting how I used to be as a kid when my goals were to go to school, do some homework, play basketball for an hour outside, watch some TV, and go to bed. Sure the responsibilities were less back then but the mindset was also much different. When you’re stuck in a world where everyone is trying to wring out ultimate productivity from every second, you find yourself trying to “LEARN JAVASCRIPT in 20 MINUTES FAST!” on YouTube. Spoiler alert: you won’t learn in 20 minutes and you won’t get those 20 minutes back.
So I’m back on nights at the hospital, and in the spirit of moving slower I’ve decided to attempt to go deeper into topics rather than jumping from one thing to the next. Going deeper means having more focus and more concentration and learning about the boring parts of something. It means understanding the foundations before doing all of the “cool” stuff.
And that’s where hour long YouTube tutorials come in. Because you can’t learn Javascript in 20 minutes. But you can learn about neural networks from an expert via multi-hour videos where he walks you through a basic problem building a neural network from scratch.
Multi-hour tutorial videos probably don’t have great retention curves. I don’t know that for sure but I can take a wild guess. They aren’t fast paced and don’t keep users engaged the same way that quick cuts, fancy graphics, and in-your-face thumbnails do. But multi-hour tutorial videos is where the real learning happens. It’s how you take the first step into actually understanding something you’re interested in. Experts make multi-hour tutorial videos because they understand that learning the skill that they are teaching takes multiple hours!
So the next time you’re trying to learn something, like really trying to learn and understand it - look for a multi-hour YouTube tutorial. It’ll be hard to sit through and you’ll find yourself reaching for your phone to look at Twitter or switching to different tabs because the lecture is so slow. But if you put in the time and pay attention - if you understand that learning takes time - you’ll walk away with some real knowledge.