It’s always a great experience when serendipity strikes when you start learning something new. I often find myself learning or trying new things but at the same time have no place to apply those new skills and they atrophy quickly. Since I have a massive amount of curiosity and interest in a ton of different things I have a tendency to just always be consuming knowledge. I enjoy it and it makes me a more well rounded person. Recently I’ve talked about learning Ruby on Rails as an entry point into learning Ruby. Basically I’m hacking my learning to learn Ruby in not a traditional way. More ass backwards than what a course would teach you. Since I’ve picked up this task and wanted to start learning RoR I’ve been presented either by coincidence, serendipity or just because now that I’m focused and noticing more things that are Ruby related. I’ve got a direction and real world applications that I can build because they make sense now to me. Hell yeah for actual projects.
At any given time I can have a handful of projects in queue, most the time they fizzle out other times I see them to the end but I always have a project going. Since I started learning rails it has opened up 3 projects I’m planning. They’re all web applications that I can build to serve a purpose: startup business application, highly personalized and unique resume/job application, and a location mapping service to serve a geo location mapped niche photos. While some of these may not make any sense to you the point is that when we start learning something new it is important to jump right in and start applying the things that you learn. If you are lucky and watch closely enough things will start presenting themselves to you allowing you to build upon the knowledge you have learned.
I’ve been having a blast taking up a new challenge but that’s who I am and taking up something that in the long run will benefit me for longer than just 30 days is a massive motivator to stick to it. Whenever we attempt to learn something new we need to immediately start to apply that knowledge to something useful and beneficial, it reduces the atrophy of knowledge. Knowledge is just like muscles, if you don’t use it and build it, it’ll turn to wasteful fat and no one wants more useless fat. So when you take on your new challenge and your new knowledge make sure you’re applying that muscle to keep the retention that is beneficial to our personal development. Have fun and enjoy the pursuit of knowledge and development.