If you have some innate tendencies in your learning, then try not to suppress them. On the contrary, try to exploit them so that will give you an edge or advantage over others.
For example, suppose that you are the kind of person who wants to understand everything in detail. If you are continuously in a hurry and didn’t give yourself the time to grasp the most important details, you can be ruining your learning experience because of the desire of having fast results, or because you are somehow pushed to act fast. Acting fast is important, but satisfying your innate needs to find some time to stop for a while and ask why are you doing so, and what are the details that will satisfy you, can make you love more what you are doing which in return increases the probability of success in your career.
On the other hand, suppose that you are the kind of person who is practical and wants to always implement things as fast as possible, and you are learning or doing something that is pure theory. Again, don’t suppress your natural tendency by just studying all theory although you don’t enjoy it that much. Carve out some time to think about how could you apply those things in your daily life. Write a program, or even just try to force out any practical application and play around with things.
If you know a lot about learning, you will know that both theory and practice are important and shouldn’t be dismissed anyway. But the idea I am stressing on here is to take advantage of your natural tendencies to find out the right balance of theory, and practical application that will keep you learning effectively while enjoying what are you doing.
In summary, design your learning to be enjoyable as much as you can using your innated tendencies while never dismissing doing the other parts of learning that are essential for your learning although you may not necessarily like them. Again, the right balance is the key, and it is difficult to find a one-size-fits-all strategy as you could usually see in many life endeavors.
And I want to use a great quote here that may be relevant to this idea from the book “Pragmatic Thinking and Learning”
“Working with new material or solving a problem in a playful manner makes it more enjoyable, but it also makes it easier to learn.”
Allah bless our master Muhammad and his family.
