Less Reading, More Doing == Mastery?

The Main Point

When you're learning a new thing, read the books and watch the videos. Doing this helps you know the concept and understand it. However, when it comes to mastering what you already know, the best thing is to do the thing a lot. Practice it.

The Build up

I was scrolling through my twitter feed sometime ago and I came across this tweet by Santiago.

Then I started to think about it. It actually makes sense.

When I was in high school, I used to read maths books that are beyond my level. When I read them, I got the concept, I got what they were trying to say.

But the thing is that, I was only reading it for fun. It wasn't for a test or anything. All I do is read and then move on. I didn't go back to it.

Even though I understood what I read, I don't believe that if I was given a question on it at that time, I'd have been able to answer it really well. And the reason is now clear: it's because I wasn't practicing what I read

Coming back to programming, the story is the same.

In order to learn a new programming language, we take a book or go to YouTube; buy a course on coursera, for example.

From my experience, this process of looking for materials; jumping from tutorial to tutorial, is only going to get us as far as knowing the concept and understanding it.

I think mastery really comes when we do the thing a lot and we know the innner workings of it.

Becoming the top programmer in the world really takes time and experience. Why? Because you need to have done the same programming a lot of times.

So I reiterate on my main point again: When you're learning a new thing, be it programming, maths or just anything, read the books and watch the videos. Doing this helps you know the concept and understand it. However, when it comes to mastering what you already know, the best thing is to do the thing a lot more. Practice it.

Python Beginner Project

If you're a python beginner and you'd like to follow up on the above issue, I'd like to introduce you to a recent series I finised on my YouTube channel.

It's a two-part tutorial series in which I went on to build a very basic terminal-based tic-tac-toe tutorial.

I approached everything as a beginner; not cutting out my errors and working through them one by one.

Check them out.

Part 1

Part 2

PS: I think I did better with the part 2 😅😅

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So that's it.

I hope this was helpful in any way.

You want to become my friend? Check out my twitter: trevenue44.

Do check out trevenue44 on YouTube as well.

//trevenue44