

Please, Learn All the Things - Meiscooldude

“Learn everything you can, anytime you can, from anyone you can - there will always come a time when you will be grateful you did.” - Sarah Caldwell<p>I am a specialist (programmer), and a jack of all trades. In the last two month my garbage disposal broke, my mailbox was ran over by a car, and my lawn welcomed its new dandelion overlords. I have managed to replace my garbage disposal without being a plumber, replace my mailbox without reading the manual, and overthrow those fascist dandelions without being a professional landscaper.<p>I remember once received about 25 'broken' monitors from a hospital. I was able to fix everyone (with the exception of the broken screens) by simply knowing how to identify and replace broken capacitors, something I was taught a while back with every intention of becoming the best electrical engineer I could be.<p>Programming is my primary passion and profession. My secondary profession is cooking Thai food. My secondary passion, learning.<p>I am a professional programmer, who just recently turned 21, with no degree. I can say I am no professional landscaper, no plumber, and definitely no electrical engineer. I can say though, that at each opportunity I was given to learn something about plumbing, programming, or electrical engineering, I have taken and benefited.<p>To the argument that is currently going on on whether or not everyone should learn to program, I say that neither side is right, and even the argument itself is wrong.<p>Strive to be the best programmer/electrical engineer/cook/plumber/landscaper/you name it you can be, and you will benefit... always.<p>So to anyone anywhere, I say learn everything everywhere. Not just programming or plumbing, but everything at every opportunity.
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DanielStraight
There's a difference though between taking opportunities to learn and going
out of your way to learn something.

You don't mention anything about learning to speak Polish, though you
certainly could learn if you wanted to.

I agree that you shouldn't pass up opportunities for learning, but you also
can't learn everything. And there's opportunity cost involved in anything you
decide to do with your time. For example, time spent dealing with dandelions
could have been spent learning Polish if you had paid someone to take care of
the dandelion problem.

I think almost anyone (myself most definitely included) can benefit from a
renewed emphasis on learning, but you can't forget that while you can learn
anything, you can't learn everything.

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Meiscooldude
This is true, there always is an opportunity cost. But people have a lot more
time in their day than they believe, and there definitely is time to go out of
your way to learn something new.

I may not be trying to learn polish right now, but I am attempting to learn
Italian. (Due to the fact that learning a language is no small undertaking,
I'm attempting to learn using the "pimsleur approach")

