In the name of Allah, most gracious and most merciful,
Thanks to Allah I have managed to succeed on the ninth day of the 40-day challenge. Although I faced yesterday’s problem of difficult engagement, I understood why this happened, and I thought about how could I prevent this from happening again in the future. In this post, I will share the challenge I faced, the proposed solution, the key takeaways from these things, and some useful information that I learned.
Table of Contents
1. The Challenge
I also have had an eight-hour online training for the exam I wanted to take. I was not too engaged, but I was better than yesterday. Again, the main problem is that I was not prepared enough for the session since this training is supposed to be taken after having certain prerequisites as far as I think. And that reveals something that is very important in learning. Whatever techniques you know, however enthusiastic you are, if you didn’t learn sciences, and difficult things in a certain sequence or order, you won’t learn much.
Yes, I know that it is good to jump directly into what you want to learn and do something with your hands but that doesn’t mean that you will skip the prerequisites. You do this for making learning more interactive, and for knowing what exactly you should focus on in your learning. Because difficult domains and sciences have an internal logic that you should know by learning them step by step. It is like you are building a building. You can’t start to build the fourth floor before building the floors before it and building the foundation that will withstand, and carry that whole building.
However, I was more engaged today than yesterday because I was exposed yesterday in the online training to similar pieces of information. So repetition helped me to start making sense of things. But again I won’t be truly and fully engaged until I understand why I am using the technology in a certain way? Why this, and why that? Yes, doing something without understanding what you are doing will give you an initial boost, and engagement because you are doing something new. However, if you continued in that way without benefiting from your struggle feedback, and return back to learning what you miss, I think you will be disengaged at the end because you don’t know and understand what you are actually doing. So jumping right into something is for having good feedback with which I will identify by weak, and strong points to strengthen both the weak and strong and not just because I will continue making something for the sake of just doing.
2. The Proposed Solution
The proposed solution to prevent this from happening in the future is to prepare well before such online training to enjoy its fruits and benefits. I will do this starting from tomorrow by mostly following the plan I stated in yesterday’s post.
3. Key Takeaways
- When you are learning something, don’t skip the prerequisites. If you directly jumped into learning something new it may be good if you will benefit from the feedback you receive to know what exactly you need to learn, but you won’t skip the prerequisites.
- Even if you said. You know, people do this thing in a totally wrong way, and I want to invent a new way. Well, you could do that if you first learned what others did, understood it well enough to build upon it or even build it in a new way but you should know what others has did before you. That is because you may be missing something that is intuitive in that domain because you didn’t learn what is already there. Had you learned it truly you would have understood what is good, and what could be enhanced. You can’t judge something you don’t know. You should know it first, understand it, and then say I have another way to do it. That usually takes time because you should learn a lot to reach to that level of expertise and depth to the extent in which you modify and reinvent things.
- Prepare yourself before whatever you will learn especially if it is something new to you. I think this will decrease the difficulty of what you learn, and will make you ask better questions because it is not your first time exposure to what you are learning. But of course prepare from accredited resources to avoid messing up with your initial understanding which may need unlearning what you wrongly learning instead of starting from the correct path from the beginning.
4. Useful Pieces of Information
- You are limited with your belief. If you believe you can do something, you will think how to do it, ask people, search for what others has done, and so on. You will take action that should make you closer to your goal. However, if you don’t believe why will you even try? You think that it is impossible.
- Success even in intellectually demanding domains is not about your IQ, but it is about persistence and using what you already have to reach to where you want to reach.
- Tackle your fear in this way:
- Isolate it by identifying what you exactly fear from
- Take action to solve that fear
- Acknowledge your problems and weaknesses before solving them. Pretending that problems don’t exist won’t make you identify them. How will you solve something that you didn’t identify? In order to cure a disease, you have first to identify it.
- Age is never a problem. Don’t say I am too old to learn that thing or to do so. In history there are numerous examples of people who started working too old and achieved unexpected great achievements.
- The biggest problem is your attitude, and how you think, but it is not your situations and circumstances. We are hugely affected by how we think. We usually think before taking actions. So if your thinking was very negative, how will you expect to achieve something good?
- Replace worrying time with doing time provided that you identified what you are worrying about and thought how will you take action, and solve it.
Finally
Thank you. I hope this post has been beneficial to you. I would appreciate any comments if anyone needed more clarifications or if anyone has seen something wrong in what I have written in order to modify it, and I would also appreciate any possible enhancements or suggestions. We are humans, and errors are expected from us, but we could also minimize those errors by learning from our mistakes and by seeking to improve what we do.
Allah bless our master Muhammad and his family.
