Enjoy Learning

I’m learning, teaching myself something new every day.

I think this was always the case, but it certainly (and understandably) intensified since I switched careers. Every day, I go to bed knowing more than I did when I woke up. I like it, too; I think it’s one of the big treats of the software development trade.

All my life, I enjoyed acquiring new knowledge for the power it gave me. With it, I could do things more efficiently and also could do things I couldn’t do before. But precisely because of that, sometimes learning a new thing made me feel desperate: oh, how much time and effort would have been saved had I only known this before! It’s like spending two days disassembling and reassembling your engine to finally discover that the reason it refused to start was the empty fuel tank. All the precious time that could be spent fulfillingly, all the projects that would be possible, all the mistakes that could have been avoided; such a waste! I used to get really upset about it.

Of course, it’s impossible to acquire all the knowledge you need. There’s always something new and useful to learn; in software engineering that’s especially the case, but this is also true in other trades. No matter how hard you try, at no point in your life will you be able to say, “There, I’ve learned everything I need to know.” Well, not if you’re honest. And, as we know from the ancient Greeks, “the more you know, the more you know you don’t know.” Chasing knowledge for the sake of knowledge becomes increasingly futile as you go, so much so that I at some point became acutely aware of the prospects of emotional burnout.

That’s the thing when you do something for the result: you spend most of your time in anticipation (and frustration with the obstacles). When the result is finally achieved, there’s only a brief period of enjoyment, followed by the new cycle of working and waiting for the new result. Not a way to live a happy life.

Last summer it finally dawned on me: the key to live a happy life learning is to enjoy the very process of learning. From start to finish, from encountering a new and intimidating unknown to gradually working your way to understand its intricacies to finally having a solid grasp of the new knowledge that becomes a part of yourself, taking pleasure in every little step of it.

This works for other things besides learning, too. Having your mind firmly fixed solely on the destination is not a good way to enjoy the ride and a sure way to miss out on a whole lot of exciting things along the way.

Had I only known this before…