How Developers Stop Learning: Rise of the Expert Beginner (2012)
On skill development: I mainly think of it as an exercise in emotional management, just like procrastination, or physical activities, and so forth.<p>It doesn&#x27;t seem to ever become easy for me. I am always running into challenges and difficult obstacles once I overcome the procrastination issue. I am bullhorned about it, so I&#x27;ll eventually get through. That, more than any particular strategy for learning, is the most important in skill acquisition.<p>Another component of skill acquisition is skill retention. You&#x27;ll get rusty when you don&#x27;t practice your skills, and in enough time, you&#x27;ll lose your progress. This is probably more than anything else, a lifetime commitment so that you don&#x27;t lose your progress in the knowledge or skills you picked up, so that in the long run you become better and better over time.<p>Think of it this way: You learned 10,000 useful &quot;stable&quot; facts about the world one year. Next year, you learned another 10K facts. But retention is exponential. Practice it long enough, the facts will last a lifetime.<p>Suppose a person have no strategy for retention. Let say he learned 10K facts, 75% decays away. Next year, he learned another 10K facts, but another 75% decays away. So he retained only 5,000 facts, but you retained 20,000 facts. Obviously, this is contrived, but it does illustrate why colleges and high schools aren&#x27;t very effective. It&#x27;s not that they don&#x27;t teach, it&#x27;s that the students forgot what they learned as soon as they finished a course.<p>I often get interested in a subject matter and then drop it some point. This often result in surface understanding of the subject. Just enough to sound smart. However the knowledge is retained. Should I ever return to a subject, I&#x27;ll retain the knowledge from scratch, as sometime I do.<p>Sometime I was able to keep at a subject long enough to acquire some amount of true mastery.