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The Profitability of Knowledge: Learning for Use vs. Learning for Joy

Hello peers in wisdom,

Today I bring to the table the next question. Is any knowledge profitable?

Context

I am a newbie back-end developer and recently I was studying a pair of low level programming concepts. While doing so, I asked myself "Am I really going to use this? If yes, when? if not... why?" That’s when I realized I was studying simply because it was entertaining. 

Is that wasting my time?

It could be... but what is the purpose of life? Isn't everything we do, in some sense, a waste of time? 

I will defined as an inefficient activity. The time my brain will retain the vivid image of those new pieces of information is very short, I am talking about one week max, after that just crumbs of knowledge and a memory of joy for learning something new will remain. It would be better if I applied that knowledge to something practical....

What is the alternative?

Some time ago I read a post talking about learning just-in-time JIT. This approach brings numerous benefits to us:

  1. Your knowledge is applied instantly.
  2. You implement the 3 steps of learning, encoding, storage and retrieval.
  3. You start getting things done quickly.

You may think "If I do this the quality of the project will be poor because I am unaware of  many important concepts" and yes, that is true. You can somehow conclude and deploy a project with every existing bad practice and you will never know. That’s why you shouldn’t do everything alone, ask for feedback on your code, read more experimented programmer's code and learn from them, and just after you read it implement it in your code.

Conclusion

If I want to be efficient I need to

  1. Start applying immediately the concepts I am studying
  2. or Stop studying them if I have no plans to apply them in the next week 


As you could notice, this entry was an introspective one and somehow biased by own my experience. I would definitely like to hear your point of view in the comments.


-Alan 




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