I have been thinking about what could really help me engage with some concepts/skills that I would like to learn and retain for a significant amount of time, after a significant time spent trialing various approaches I realized the best way for me involved a 3 step approach:

1. Decide what to learn
2. Find out a way to learn it - documentation/youtube/course/ask someone and then engage with the material
3. Build the smallest application/implementation.
4. Tell your friends about it, ex: blog/tweet it.

I realized that this approach came from my time spent self-learning to play the guitar without a 1-1 teacher, i.e. from youtube. I would vibe with a specific song and decide to learn it, then find the tabs/chords for that song from ultimateguitar.com then spend some time engaging with the material, the third and the final step would be to perform it among friends sometimes again and again in different settings. The final step is what I call closing the loop and it helped me apply this methodology at work and in various hobbies/things I want to learn. I called these experiences learning experiments.

These are real simple/humble approaches to learning where we can build something small, nothing too fancy to demonstrate what we have just learned. I am currently trying to learn React concepts and wanted to practice the technique of fetching data via React Hooks, Here is the approach I followed:

1. Made up my mind to learn React Hooks
2. Found the documentation on some React hooks like this if the documentation is too intimidating or does not make sense then find the same topic on youtube/ Udemy etc as sometimes the video format can make a big difference compared to text, then began studying the material.
3. Decided to implement a simple project where I would use React Hooks to talk to 3rd party APIs and fetch data to display on a front end.
4. After some trial and error approach, I was able to get a working application and then deployed it publicly here.

As you can see it is really basic and nothing too fancy, the UX is not too polished as the point of this learning experiment was to learn and demonstrate the knowledge of React Hooks. Here are some recommendations to implement learning experiments into our daily routine:

1. It need not be perfect/working with all the bells and whistles, just the most basic application.
2. Learning is useless unless it is applied and learning experiments provide an opportunity for the application.
3. Going from Unknown to known is an important quality that can be useful in various scenarios. As more and more human knowledge is available on the internet via text/video/audio medium, the opportunity to pick and apply them is immense but retention can be a challenge.
4. Keep a log of your learning experiments performed over the year in a blog, revisit the learning experiments every few weeks/months. If possible teach it to somebody.
5. This methodology can apply to anything you want to learn. Learning to play a song on the ukulele? a specific technique on the chessboard, getting familiar with typescript? the sky is the limit

On a closing note, I have to say that a while back curiosity on how to learn led me to do the course Learning to learn which gave various insights that learning while also setting up a framework for doing experimentations with my learning styles which can be different for everyone. I would highly recommend that course if you would like to go down that rabbit hole.

Additional references:

1. Learning How to Learn course - https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn
2. My Blog - https://praveen.blog
3. Start your personal blog here - https://WordPress.com