Learning Is a Skill

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You’ve probably encountered someone in your life that was better than you at everything. That topic that you’ve been learning for years? They know more. This skill that you’ve been developing for a while? They do it better. That super-niche thing that you’re extremely sure there is no way on planet Earth that they'd even know about? Yep, you guessed it: they perfected it years ago.

You might attribute this to talent or intelligence, but you'd be wrong. Learning is in itself a skill. What might’ve taken you months or years to learn, they probably did it in much less time and then went on to learn something else. Stacking their saved time and investing it exponentially.

I don’t envy these people. I look up to them.

Just to name one of them, I'll use Gawx as an example:

Art, storytelling, color grading, composition, graphic design, pacing, cinematography, marketing, fashion, creativity, interior design, cameras, lenses, and so on.

I have only mentioned the ones off the top of my head, and the ones that I even know have a name (and that I have generalized into broader topics. For example: cameras would branch out to stuff like lenses, depth of field, filming techniques, different uses of equipment for different scenarios…). If I went in-depth into his full catalogue of skills, it would probably be in the hundreds if not thousands.

It might look seriously overwhelming, because it is. You might get discouraged.

That’s why learning isn’t only a skill you can develop, but a mindset you need to adopt.

KnowledgeDiscoverabilitySignal qualitySocial skillBarrierValue

Phase 1Phase 2Phase 3Phase 4Phase 5

Knowledge92

Discoverability12

Signal quality88

Social skill88

Barrier88

Value95

Schrodinger’s Specialness

Throughout your life, I'm sure you’ve heard a lot of people say either one of the following two statements:

I'd love to tell you that one of them is correct, and the other is incorrect. But I can't. That’s too binary. So I will start with the latter group and how I interpret it myself.

Let's take these words as in you, specifically, are not special. But there are people in the world that are. What makes them special? Meh, who knows, it might be talent, giftedness, destiny; but you're not part of them. All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.

You can never reach them because they were predestined to be special. Putting any effort into anything is worthless, since you will never achieve what these people obtained naturally.

Let's take these words as in no one is special. We are all equal (ignoring how flawed that statement is). Then, what stops you from learning what they know? Absolutely nothing. They're not special, and I'm not special; so if they can do it, why couldn’t I?

We turn the statement from something nihilisticA view that life, effort, or values have no inherent meaning. and hopeless to some sort of delusional optimism. We are removing the excuses (giftedness, talent, destiny). The only barrier between those people and you is the amount of time that they have dedicated to their craft.

I can't be bothered to entertain this one, neither in favor of it nor against it. If you think you're special, you probably don’t need me to anyways.

Where everyone starts. You might’ve heard of the topic loosely, or might be completely unaware that it exists. In short, you don’t know what you don’t know.

This phase lasts until you know what you want to learn, which might seem short-lived but for most topics you'll be at this phase for your whole life.

Each phase from now will have an example. I would like for everyone to be able to understand them (although that goes slightly against the philosophy of what is explained in this blog) as much as possible, so I will use Minecraft as an example. More specifically, technical MinecraftA Minecraft subcommunity focused on advanced mechanics and automation., or TMC for short. Everyone knows or has played Minecraft, so I think it’s a good baseline to expand from.

Once you have decided what you want to learn, here comes the hardest part: learning the basics. Not only will you have a lot of information at your disposal, but you will have a lot of bad information at your disposal. You need to learn how to filter that bad information to the best of your ability while being bombarded with an overwhelming amount of it.

Worry not, you'll 100% of the time learn bad and incorrect information at this stage, but the idea is to build a base to the best of your ability that you can build off of. The less misinformation you ingest at this step, the less stuff you will have to re-learn later down the line. But as I said, it's really inevitable.

Another platform you can use to learn the basics is Reddit. The first (and maybe the only) community you'll find for your topic will be filled with newcomers’ posts that have already asked everything that you're planning to ask. And lucky for you, the experts have already replied to them.

Despite this, Reddit also suffers from the same issue as the previously mentioned platforms: it's filled with people that might seem like they know a lot, but only know the superficial information. This happens because these communities end up becoming echo chambersCommunities where repeated views reinforce each other.. The experts of the community either stay stuck on the same knowledge tier, or decide to advance to the next tiers, leaving Reddit and taking their newly acquired information with them.

A more recent way of learning these basics is with AI. Bear with me for a second. I wouldn’t replace watching YouTube videos / diving into Reddit with it, but it’s a particularly good tool for exactly what you're looking for: learning the basics. Since it has been trained mostly on the information I have mentioned above (the superficial stuff), it can help you quickly find definitions or ask stuff without needing to watch a whole video or thread for it. It’s a good support, but only for this phase. Or if your niche is popular, say a sport or mathematics, maybe the next one as well.

A lot of people, perhaps you included, won't go past this point. One of the strangest things about learning anything is that the first serious weekend of research can already put you ahead of most of the planet. If you learn the basics of a niche through Reddit, beginner YouTube videos, and a few guides, you will already know more about that subject than 95-99% of people alive. Because most people never even enter the room. They do not know the vocabulary, the tools, the debates, the common beginner mistakes, or even that the niche exists.

Your comparison group is still the general population. You go from knowing nothing to being able to explain the topic and look like you know what you're talking about for people that don't. What you have learned is enough to make you look knowledgeable from the outside, but not enough to make you good on the inside.

It is the Dunning-KrugerA cognitive bias where people with limited knowledge overestimate their understanding. phase: you've learned the map exists, but you have not yet walked the terrain. So don’t be mistaken, you still don’t know anything. You mustn’t mistake confidence for overconfidence. The former is good, the latter is not. Stay self-aware.

You have your own singleplayer world that you have played for a while, and you need a large amount of iron for a project that you want to do. Instead of going to the mines and mining for hours, you decide to search for how to obtain it way faster. You search “How to obtain iron fast in Minecraft 1.21.10”, which leads you to an iron farmA Minecraft build that automatically produces iron. video tutorial. A step by step, block by block tutorial. The video is awesome, you build it and everything works fine, until it doesn’t. After a while, the zombie that is supposed to scare the villagers for the golems to spawn (iron farm 101) has despawned. You don’t know why, so you research on Reddit. You find a thread on r/Minecraft where this has happened to other people, and other people have already answered with the solution: putting a nametagAn item used to name an in-game creature and prevent despawning. on the zombie. After following it, your problem has been solved and everything works like it should.

Shulkercraft’s videos, arguably the most popular Minecraft channel for beginner farms, average around 2-8M views on his iron farms. Over 350M Minecraft copies have been sold, although the actual number is probably much higher taking into account cracked accountsUnofficial or pirated game accounts. and such, so let's say 400M.

5M is 1.25% of 400M. This percentage is only a rough estimate (as there are a lot of factors we aren’t taking into account, like view repeats, people that already know how to make it from memory, people just watching it without actually building, etc), but it goes to show how something as common and basic as an iron farm already puts you ahead of most of the playerbase.

You're now the 99% of the 1%, just another beginner in the hobby. This has probably gone from a weekend research or brief hyperfixationAn intense period of focus on one topic. into something that you like more than that, and thus you want to go deeper. The information that you have obtained until now was useful, but generic, so to go further down the rabbit hole you need to get information from different places.

The process is pretty similar to the previous phase, but instead of going for the most popular places, you will instead have to find the ones that are slightly less visible to an outsider. Not gatekeptKept hard to access by insiders or community norms. per se (we are still not there) but you have to actually look to find them. You'll find yourself on a more specific subreddit about your niche (if phase 2 was r/computers or r/gaming, phase 3 would be r/graphicscard or r/specificgame) where you'll be able to learn more. But don’t be mistaken, these subreddits still follow the previous rule: the true experts have left Reddit.

So once you ingest newer information from this subreddit, you will have to start joining Discord servers and actually interact with people (I know, scary). Make sure by this point you have the basics down. There is no faster way to get clowned than to join a Discord server and start asking the same generic beginner questions that everyone does. You can (and should) lurkRead a community without posting, usually to learn its norms. for a bit before actually talking. This allows you to read the room easier and furthermore learn more of the terminology that might’ve not reached Reddit.

If you have any questions, you should always try and see if someone else has asked them before. The search function in Discord is something that surprisingly a LOT of people are not aware of and don’t use at all, despite how useful it is. It has a bit of a learning curve, as you cannot search phrases like in a regular search engine, but instead you have to search via keywords. Doing all of this will already put you ahead of most beginners, not only in the knowledge area but in the social one. No one likes people that just want to be spoonfedGiven answers without doing basic searching first. information. Don’t make a bad first impression.

After building a few farms from Shulkercraft, you decide to embark on a more ambitious project, where you need blocks that their videos don’t offer a solution to. So, you decide to dig into r/technicalminecraft and r/redstone, where you find a few small farms that are for exactly the block that you need, but they don’t produce enough materials. You ask on one of those posts for a design that produces more, and you get told to visit the Minecraft Discord, where you end up finding the vide