Create to Learn: Why You Should Only Do Things for Experience
If you’ve ever created something like an app, you know the buzz about real users. There is nothing better than knowing that you have helped or entertained another person. So when you do something just for yourself, it can seem like a step backward, except for one very good reason: to help you learn.
This post originally appeared on the Crew blog .
Build to Learn
Creating small, standalone projects is a great way to learn and develop your skills. When you learn by creating something new, rather than just reading and learning theory, you are learning implicitly, not implicitly , and are more likely to retain and use the knowledge you gain. As Richard Branson said:
“Forget the rules and learn from your own experience instead. You can gain a lot more by not knowing how to do things the ‘right’ way and learning how to do it your own way. “
Let’s say you want to try out a new technology. Maybe a new tool has just become available or a new programming language is of interest to you. Thus, you create a small project solely designed to provide you with a real laboratory to experiment with. You develop something so small that you can easily get started and then spend most of your time learning from hands-on experience.
Newbies cannot afford the luxury of having this level of knowledge and being able to play with new technologies. As a seasoned creative person in your field, you already have the skills to design and build small projects to help you research, answer questions, and improve your skills.
Learning by doing, educators and psychologists are often referred to as learning by doing . In 1984, psychologist David Kolb developed a theory of experiential learning that includes four steps:
Simply put, the flow of this four-step process goes something like this: you have some experience with something new (specific experience), then you reflect on that experience (reflective observation), combine it with your existing knowledge to change it. into a concept or theory (abstract conceptualization) and finally apply that concept or theory to other projects (active experimentation).
The important point here is that your future ideas are based on experience with something practical .
Veteran iOS developer David Smith takes a similar learning-by-doing approach when he wants to test Apple’s new technology. If Apple announces a new API that David wants to know about, he will read it and then create a small project to test it. These designs are never released to users, but the process helps him conceptualize the new technology so that he can later use it in the products he sends to customers.
Create in practice
I’ve known for a long time that deliberate practice is essential if you ever want to truly excel at something. Conscious practice is a conscious effort to focus on specific areas of your skill that require work . For example, instead of playing songs that you know well on the piano, purposeful practice will be to play scales or focus on those few measures that you simply cannot understand correctly. It’s painful and often boring, but that’s what separates pros from amateurs .
When I started learning iOS development, I didn’t know how to purposefully practice my skills. I couldn’t figure out how to practice the little things that I am not good at in the context of building a large project. Once you’ve solved a problem in the product you are creating, you no longer need to work on it. Of course, this means that you have to wait until the same problem occurs again in another project in order to apply the same solution.
Without the ability to consciously and regularly practice a new skill or work on a technique, we quickly lose understanding of the problem, and facing a problem in the future may seem like the beginning of a new one.
The answer is to create small projects just for yourself – projects that will force you to answer tough questions. Projects that allow you to focus on one specific skill or technology at a time.
I recently started a small project that uses a list view, which gave me the additional (and much needed) practice of making a list and creating it the way I want:
I still need practice with this, so I could continue by creating a few small projects, even one per week, to practice composing list views with different data and slight layout variations.
Another thing I’m terrible at is writing fiction. If I wanted to get better, I could work on some stories. I don’t need to release them, but I can use each as a platform to experiment on a specific area of my weak skill. You could practice character development. Another could focus more on clarity in my letter. The other can be strictly narrative and used to experiment with the twists and turns of history.
Jennifer Dewalt was on a similar project when she learned to program from scratch, building 180 websites in 180 days. She went from basic websites with only HTML and some basic CSS to learning JavaScript and Ruby on Rails, making games and calculators. Here is one of 180 websites Jennifer built in 180 days:
Although Jennifer shares all of her code on GitHub , she follows a process similar to what I suggest: she uses this project as a practice opportunity .
Build for yourself
Your experimental projects may well turn into publicly released works that you are proud of. There is nothing wrong. But the freedom this type of work gives is partly due to the fact that it is not intended for an audience .
Jennifer mentions on her website that it is difficult to host all of her tutorial projects on GitHub :
“It’s scary to reveal all your mistakes and misunderstandings.”
I am totally in favor of sharing your work . In fact, I think most of us could share more with you than we do. But there is a difference between your work and your experimentation or learning . We all experience inevitable anxiety to one degree or another when we know that other people will see what we are working on. Making things just for you removes all of these fears.
Start with a plan to keep your work confidential. Allow yourself to experiment without fear of judgment or wondering if you will get praise or make a fortune on what you are building. Just focus on your craft and education or the improvements you are striving for.
This can be a surprisingly humiliating experience . In a sea of likes and voices, when we are so used to evaluating ourselves and our work based on the reactions of other people, working for yourself can really change your point of view.
It’s easy to apologize for why you’re not improving your skills. I don’t work as hard as I should to become a better writer because it’s difficult and time consuming and I’m very busy .
But if we let these excuses get us carried away, we will be doomed to let our skills become obsolete and outdated. We all know we need to make a conscious effort to learn and hone our crafts. I gave you a plan to do this – now it’s up to you.
Create to Learn: Why You Should Create Things Nobody Will Ever Use | Crew