I love learning, I enjoy consuming knowledge, trying things I previously didn’t know, and building things that I never knew how to build. There’s a lot to be said about the struggle of learning something new, it can strengthen the learning process and give you an ability to retain the information for a little bit longer and a bit stronger. It’s traditionally been how I have learned the majority of the things that I know, I very seldom ever actually throw money at a problem and I rarely ever pay to learn something new. However, sometimes the best solution is to spend that money when you are learning something new. A paid teacher can get you to a specific point faster than trying to wing it on our own. One place that I have always struggled with when trying to learn something on my own is programming or coding. It’s very conceptual and abstract and for me it is a difficult topic to learn without being shown and actually explained why things are happening the way in which they are. I need that visual and auditory explanation. Which brings me to the inevitable conclusion, sometimes the best solution is throwing money at it.
The last few days I’ve been pondering over what project and which direction I want to go with kicking off my learning/building something new every month. I decided to finally dedicate time to learning Ruby on Rails. I’ve been wanting to learn rails for a VERY long time, however, any time that I tried to learn it I was overwhelmed and confused about what the hell was going on. I’ve probably tried at least 6 or 7 times to learn on my own with varying degrees of success, if you can even call it that, but I didn’t retain any of it. I’m not going to go into too much details about what RoR is, if you want to know google it, but I’ve got a ton of ideas for web services and applications and rails is the best solution for the majority of them. There are a ton of web services we use everyday that is built on the back of rails. I figured if I was going to jump start my first month of learning and/or building something new I might as well dive in with something that can give me a great foundation for future months and projects.
Back to the struggle, coding and programming concepts fly straight over my head when I try to learn them myself or at the very best it takes me weeks to understand certain concepts and even then I’m not 100% confident in the knowledge I’ve learned. This is a prime example of throwing money at a problem where it is actually beneficial. I’ve been doing a one month writing challenge for my morning entries lately by a company appropriately named “One Month”, each day they deliver a writing topic to boost creativity and build writing habits, it’s been fun. While actually looking into the company I had noticed that they offer reasonably priced online classes for certain coding languages, growth hacking, and web security. After the initial struggle with being a tight ass when it comes to spending my hard earned money and my own pride when it comes to admitting that I need help, I researched the company and decided that I would take a chance and purchase the “One Month Rails” course. I’ve got to say I’m not disappointed and so far I have learned more about rails, git, and GitHub than I had in all of my previous attempts at learning RoR.
For me, and probably you too, it takes a bit of faith and confidence to throw money with little certainty of what kind of return I will experience. I have a fear of buyers remorse whenever I impulse buy something thus the reason why I do my damndest to learn or do everything myself, at least if it doesn’t work out I didn’t lose money, just time. However, somethings are worth it and my time is certainly precious. With taking a bit of a risk in learning something new and spending a relatively low amount of money I have created an entry into a very solid foundation that can help me build much more in the future. We can never truly know what taking a risk can have in store for us but sometimes we just need to take that jump. And sometimes the best solution is throwing money at the problem.