There’s never been more great content available for free (or at very low cost) to teach yourself anything you’d ever want to know (the MVC JS framework of the week, Mandarin, string theory, string instruments, juggling) BUT the fact is we don’t learn everything we’d want to know.
Why is that?
Sean (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=SnootyMonkey) and I are passionate self-learners, and we struggle with this too. We have ideas (and prototypes) for a couple solutions that might go a long way towards helping self-learners overcome their obstacles, but we want to validate that we’re on the right track.
If you regularly try to learn stuff on your own we’d love to learn about your learning routine and obstacles. What makes it hard to start learning something new? What slows you down? What makes it harder than it should be? What makes you give up when you do?
If you only have a moment for us, leave a comment here.
If you have up to 5 minutes, please take our very short survey here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1UXZygDbvjSyDhWpUxYPMUN-_7F01svwRuHU3bKMNAKc/viewform
If you have more than 5 minutes, we’d love to chat with you over Skype / Google Hangout / phone call / smoke signals / face-to-face (you can tell us you’re willing at the end of the survey).
Thanks! Happy learning.
that's a big one for me. I am in the process of trying this out, and it seems to be working: Practice, every day, for any amount of time, even if it is just for 30 seconds.
beginning French, advanced Javascript, beginning piano, advanced rails, and Im also working my way through the harvard classics.
I made a schedule of daily reading/doing, I shoot for 30 minutes for every subject (not daily, but pretty close), but I will at LEAST put in 1 minute.
One of the pain points was learning, what to learn first. Ie, a resource that said, here is the "must reads" to learn french, or piano would have saved me a bunch of time.