
Ask HN: how to develop deep and broad knowledge? - hellloiam
I quit my job to do some self study on various topics. I started timing how long different things take me. Textbook, book, excersises etc. some textbooks for example might easily take upwards of 100 hours. Just learning elastic search, playing around with it and reading most of the definitive guide took me like 30 hours. I just can’t see how this can be done along with a 40 hour work week, and now I’m wondering how much other people really know? Having been in a job and seeing my friends at these jobs. I would say less than 1 percent of the people might be putting in an extra 10 hours a week even.and there are so many new developments out there, ai, crypto currencies etc I’m partly resetting my expectations on how much I can learn in my career, what’s the right way to think about this if one is I interested in having broad and deep knowledge.
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nostrademons
Once you've got an "in" into knowledge work (particularly finance or
engineering), you can use large portions of your day job for learning things.
Basically 100% of my job (startup founder) consists of learning new things, as
did about 80% of my previous job (Google search engineer), as did nearly 100%
of the job before that (startup founder). I did have to do some grunt work at
my first couple of junior software engineering positions, but still managed to
save 40-50% of my time on the job for learning new stuff.

I learned ElasticSearch for my current startup, for example, but I didn't
deliberately set out to learn ElasticSearch. Rather, I set out to index all
the forum sites on the Internet, and it was the best tool available for that,
so I just learned enough of it to go build my index. How much time did it
take? Probably a lot more than 30 hours, and I still wouldn't say I really
"know" ElasticSearch, but I know enough that I can run load a big corpus in,
run search queries, and get useful data back out. That's pretty much all you
can expect given that ElasticSearch is a moving target - hell, 5.0 had barely
come out when I started learning it and it's on 6.5 now.

There are 2000 hours in a typical work-year, and 8760 in a calendar year.
That's a lot of time. 30 hours is a drop in the bucket for it - 10 hours over
3 weeks will get you there. I'd just give up on learning _everything_ (you
will never succeed in that, new knowledge is being generated faster than you
can learn it) and focus on _continually learning_ within domains that you care
about.

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auslegung
Your definition of broad and of deep need to be reasonable. Once they are, you
can study meta learning, then tackle the things you’re interested in or need
to know. I’m assuming you’re a software engineer, in which case it’s uncommon
to do more than 6 hours a day of quality work. Use the other two in a way that
lets your mind relax and yet still learn. Balance study and life outside work.
Beyond this advice there is nothing else to reasonably do. Sure you can
experiment with polyphasic sleep schedules but that’s completely unreasonable
for almost everyone almost always.

