Thoughts About Learning Process

Introduction

A few days ago, a very interesting conversation unfolded on our company internal chat. It started as a book review but continued as a broader discussion about happiness, goals, learning, wisdom, the meaning of life, and whatnot.

Amid the discussion, what stood out to me the most was the part about learning. As usual, when I find a topic that I am very interested in, I cannot resist sharing my point of view. This triggered me to write an article I wanted to write a long time ago about how I see the learning process, especially in the context of mentoring. Along the way, I will include some clarifications as I touch on sensitive topics and share opinions that some people might find controversial.

When I first started as a mentor, I took time to reflect on my own experiences to understand what I struggled with most when learning skills I excel at today and why I failed to master areas where I am less capable or even completely unsuccessful. These reflections became the foundation for how I transfer knowledge to my students more effectively.

While humans are built from the same material, our psychology differs a lot. Everyone has a unique combination of factors that keep them focused and motivated, influence how information is stored in their brains, and determine whether they rely more on visual or auditory memory. Because of these factors, applying the same teaching approach to everyone is not effective. However, certain patterns and principles exist that should always be considered.

I am not a psychologist, and I don’t have any formal education in psychology. This is not scientific research but rather a collection of my thoughts and experiences.

Learning as a child vs. learning as an adult

First, I want to challenge the misconception that children learn faster than adults. Biologically, that is not necessarily true. Of course, there are exceptions, but in those cases, we’re not discussing the average person. Individuals born exceptionally intelligent are precisely that, the exceptions! The human brain is at its peak, typically between the ages of 18 and 30, give or take, depending on which parameters you measure.

As a child, there are only a few things that you need to research. For everything else, there is some sort of mentor in the form of a parent, babysitter, or teacher.

“Research is the systematic investigation to discover new information or validate existing knowledge.“

When researching, you are on your own, which is much more challenging than having somebody guide you in the right direction. Sometimes, this is the only way to figure out something if you are in uncharted territory. This usually happens when looking for innovation or adopting new technology with few sources or resources to learn from, so generally, it is not a bad thing but rather a part of the learning process.

To understand the difference between learning things as a child and learning as an adult, we must distinguish between researching and learning.

"The activity or process of gaining knowledge or skill by studying, practicing, being taught, or experiencing something.

You cannot just hand a child a sharp knife and expect them to cut meat or figure out how to cross the street on their own. Learning complex tasks requires mastering many foundational skills first. Later in life, the child will research and experiment further, building upon the foundation provided by their parents or another mentor.

While a child can learn to cross the road without anyone explaining it, this process would be longer and potentially dangerous. If they survive all the trials and errors, there will likely be many gaps and uncertainties, leading to improvisation in the future. Additional clarification will certainly be needed.

“A mentor should have knowledge or be able to point you in the direction where you can learn about the subject.”

On the other hand, children are ideal candidates for learning because their brains are not yet “polluted” with misinformation, incorrect assumptions, or bad habits. For adults, the hardest obstacle to efficient learning is often eliminating the bad habits they have adopted over time.

When learning new things, it is very important to start from the foundation and gradually build upon your knowledge. Learning things backward, an unfortunate widespread practice nowadays often backfires because there is no path forward when the first serious issue occurs.

For example, a simple blocking code issue in a JavaScript app can become a nightmare if you don’t understand what a single-threaded app means, what an event loop is, and how these affect your JavaScript app’s performance. It’s very common for people to learn HTML, CSS, and JavaScript without prior foundational knowledge, which creates many issues in the long term. You can only solve a problem if you know what the problem is.

How can anyone expect to develop web applications if they don’t know how the internet and browsers work? To understand how the internet functions, you must know how computer networks operate. Consequently, to comprehend networks, you need to learn about operating systems, which leads us to hardware components and how a computer works—down to the Von Neumann architecture. Finally, we arrive at the “big bang” level with the question: “What is informatics, and why do we need computers?”

This, in a nutshell, is how one part of the curriculum for my mentorship program looks. The previous paragraph provides a high-level overview of the introductory segment of the curriculum, regardless of the student’s level. If the student is a beginner, we spend as much time as necessary to understand and build a solid foundation before moving forward. If the student already has a solid understanding of these concepts, we engage in a conversation about them just to compare notes and even learn from each other. You would be surprised how many people lack some basic concepts, even though they have been working in the industry for years. That is the reason why, sometimes, even simple issues are hard to solve.

“The more you know, the more you realize you don't know.”

About the ability to ask the right questions

It always comes down to searching the web for the solution or asking that old grumpy colleague, “Who knows everything.” There is nothing wrong with that, as collaboration and research are part of everyday work. However, that small thing called the “ability to ask the right question” is a much more complex and important skill than you might think. If you know what the problem is but don’t know how to solve it, correctly describing the issue will help you narrow down your web search to find the relevant solution, and also you can be sure that your colleague will not be so grumpy after you bribe them with the coffee and then provide a detail explanation of your issue.

Unfortunately, this is not possible if the developer does not understand the underlying architecture, how the program is executed under the hood, and how data flows between components. Even if the developer is able to explain the problem, a lack of ability to evaluate suggested solutions can lead to a dead-end or, even worse, a solution that is not a solution at all. This especially becomes a problem when the developer is “consulting” the AI. AI can become a very powerful tool in the hands of a skilled developer and a person whose knowledge allows him to think critically, evaluate the given answer, and then adjust the prompt to get the desired result. Unfortunately, there is this other side of the coin, where the developer is just copy-pasting the answer without understanding it. This is a recipe for disaster.

Learning as a child

As a child, you are like a brand new computer purchased from the store with an operating system, a lot of memory, and compute power but no programs installed. This is where the importance of the skilled system engineer comes into place. Selecting the correct programs and installing them in the right order of dependencies can make the process smooth. It will enable a computer to do certain things when it is required. The upgrade will be much easier if it is planned and done gradually. If you leave the old version of a program running for a while without upgrading it periodically, you will be in trouble when it becomes obsolete. Similarly, a “well-architected education” (pun intended) lays the foundation for future learning.

In this context, the program is an analogy to learning a new skill instead of a human being programmed to respond to commands like a robot. Humans, unlike machines, have free will and consciousness, which lets them decide when and if they want to run the program (use the skills they learned at some point).

Parents or babysitters are mentors in a child’s life, providing 24/7 support on their journey to discover this weird world and how to explain it in a way that the child can understand. They help children acquire basic skills as a basis for more complex actions. During early childhood and school, they always have a mentor who accompanies them and helps them learn. They acquire knowledge quickly when this early mentoring is appropriately done. This is why primary education is so important. Let the child alone without the help of a mentor and watch how the “fast learning” myth is falling apart. If there are flaws in primary education, making it up and correcting it later becomes challenging. Adopting new knowledge, even in a not-so-complex area, can become time-consuming and sometimes nearly impossible.

Learning as an adult

As grown-ups, we are like old computers that have been used for a while. We have a lot of data stored. Some of it is corrupted, some of it is not relevant, and some of it is not accessible because we tend to forget things over time if we are not using that specific knowledge on a daily basis. There is also an opposite example where we use the skill like we are on autopilot. As an example, let’s consider shifting gears in a car (sorry, USA). You are doing it without thinking about it. You are not aware of the process, but you are doing it. If you drove a car with a manual transmission for a while, when you switch to automatic, at the beginning, you will be looking for the clutch pedal, and you will be trying to shift gears. This is a perfect example of how the brain works and what kind of habits I am talking about. Ok, shifting gears is not a “bad” habit, but it illustrates the point, right?

However, because of the previously accumulated knowledge, adults can learn much faster than children. They can make connections between new and old knowledge, which helps them understand new concepts more quickly. The only thing that can slow them down is the lack of motivation or unwillingness to change and adopt. This is how “gatekeepers” are born. A gatekeeper is a person who has learned a particular technology or skill in a certain way and is unwilling to change that. They are doing everything to make the process dependent on them and keep the status quo. This is a very bad practice, and it is not sustainable in the long term.

"The most dangerous phrase in the language is, 'We've always done it this way.'"

Closing thoughts

I believe that one of the biggest issues in solving complex problems in real-world environments is the lack of solid foundational knowledge. For that reason, I go back to the basics with my students to build a strong foundation. The term “senior” is often used carelessly these days, without truly reflecting a person’s depth of knowledge or expertise.

Recognizing that there are different levels of knowledge is normal and should not be considered sensitive or controversial, as I sometimes notice in conversations. You would not want a high school student performing heart surgery on you or your loved ones, nor a cardiac surgeon designing the house where you plan to move with your family. For this reason, it is very important to understand and differentiate people’s skills and expertise. This leads to safer and more efficient work environments, as well as better results in general.

Another misconception I encounter in these discussions is the belief that this kind of direct approach excludes or eliminates people in some way or that this leads to setting unreasonable criteria or raising the bar too high. In reality, it is quite the opposite. Learning from the foundation and motivating people to actually understand the system from a very low level may slow down the process at the start, but it pays off exponentially as a long-term investment. This benefits everyone, from individuals to companies.

"Citius-Altius-Fortius"

Finally, I want to emphasize that learning is a lifelong process that requires consistent effort. I cannot imagine a point where anyone could genuinely say, “I know enough. I don’t need to learn anything else”, especially not in tech, where change is constant. Even though the last sentence sounds like an oxymoron, it is actually a fact.