Learning is a Skill

Introduction

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.

Knowledge: 92
Discoverability: 12
Signal quality: 88
Social skill: 88
Barrier: 88
Value: 95

Schrodinger’s Specialness

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

You are special
You are not special

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.

You Are Not Special

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 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.

You Are Special

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.

Phase 1: Unknowledgement

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.

Example

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, , or TMC for short. Everyone knows or has played Minecraft, so I think it’s a good baseline to expand from.

Phase 2: Dunning-Kruger’s Catastrophe

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.

You’ll end up watching YouTube videos from the most popular people in the . The ones that amass millions of views, and perhaps subscribers as well. You must know the following: You mustn’t take what these people say to heart. Not only is what these people teach mainly superficial, but sometimes even incorrect; since their main objective is appealing to the masses, who don’t know what is correct and what is not and just want to feel entertained. The creators will water down everything so that everyone can understand what they're saying. Or rather, think they understand it.

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 . 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 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.

Example

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 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 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 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.

Phase 3: Finding the Room

You're now the 99% of the 1%, just another beginner in the hobby. This has probably gone from a weekend research or brief 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 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) 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 information. Don’t make a bad first impression.

Whether it be from the Discord server or from your own more advanced research, you'll end up finding more specific YouTube channels, whether it be entertainment-focused content, tutorials, or just general knowledge. These channels are most of the time big, but not so big as to need to satisfy the average person like the previous ones; they allow themselves to be more technical. As a rule of thumb, these content creators usually have between 50k and 500k subscribers, and are respected in the community to some degree, unlike the previous ones.

Example

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 video of a smaller channel that didn’t initially appear on your YouTube searches.

Phase 4: The Unindexed Layer

After talking and familiarizing yourself with your niche, the surface information might not be enough. You already know it. You want to learn more. By this point, you should’ve already made some connections or friendships, and probably discovered subcommunities in Discord as well. If not, you know what you have to do.

Inside of every niche there will be dozens if not hundreds of smaller Discord servers about it. If you're only aware of the most popular one, you're doing something wrong (and are still on phase 3, despite how much you think you know). On these servers, you will find information that has never been and will never be by search engines: conversations between knowledgeable people. These will give you an insane amount of value, even if just reading over them.

This is a topic that could probably cover a whole other blog post, but Discord becoming the standard for communities has damaged the discoverability of them like never before, since they can't be searched naturally on the web. All questions, all answers, all conversations and all knowledge become forever trapped on these servers, with the risk of being completely lost if anything were to happen, like server deletion. That’s why is such an important factor (that I'll go over later) and why being able to comfortably browse Discord is such an important skill to learn nowadays if you want to learn something independently and in depth.

These servers will feature a smaller active user base, most of the time with the usuals chatting in the general chat. Don’t be scared of them, they were once someone like you (and hopefully they haven’t forgotten about that). If you can read the room, and follow once again the previous tips, you should have no problem naturally joining some conversations or asking questions; maybe becoming the usual yourself in the long run.

But not everything is sunshine and roses. Within the depths of each hobby, they are always there: the . Professional gatekeepers that think they are better than everyone else, and that won't be ashamed to let you know that. These people are sad, since most of the time they base their whole personalities on that niche/hobby, but they're always there: in the shadows, waiting for someone new they can humiliate when the chance arises.

No need to be scared though, they are just . The easiest way to move on is to ignore and/or block them the second you notice them; don’t give them the attention they wish to obtain. Just make sure you don’t become one of them.

You will also discover a goldmine of knowledge. Guides that only live exclusively in certain Discord channels, spreadsheets that can only be accessed by a link that was posted a few times throughout the years, or YouTube channels that don’t market themselves towards non-enthusiasts and thus are much much smaller (100-10k subscribers). This is the content that the hobbyists consume, and that you should too if you want to further expand your index of information.

Example

After discovering some farms from the Minecraft Discord server, you now have enough materials to build the project you wanted to. But viewing a tutorial block by block seems extremely slow… Is this how people usually do it? You decide to research on the topic and find out about , a mod that allows you to display a sort of holographic image of the construction that you want to build.

With this newly acquired knowledge, you look over some farms that you decided to skip over before since you didn’t know what were. They seem more overwhelming than what you're used to building, but you give them a try anyway. After finishing following the schematic, you turn on the farm and… Nada, it does not work.

You decide to check if there were any extra instructions that you may have missed, and end up on another Discord server called Slimestone Tech Archive, where there is a specific thread about the farm you were building. Despite searching the previous messages in there, no one seems to have a solution to the problem that you were facing, so you decide to ask for help. In the meantime, you decide to inspect the actual build and understand how it works, and see if you can figure out a solution by yourself. You end up figuring out how it works: X happens, which allows Y to make Z, and then all of that gets transported and stored into A, B and C. That’s neat, maybe you can implement that storage system somewhere else. But it's still too advanced, and you can't figure out what went wrong and where despite obtaining the surface knowledge on how it worked.

But lucky you, a kind stranger has answered your prayers. After inspecting the attached screenshots of your build (which you learned is common courtesy to add after inspecting the previous messages in that thread), they noticed that a block was facing the wrong way, making the whole contraption stop working. You try and replace that block, and voila, it's now working flawlessly.

Phase 5: 1% of the 1%

After a few years in the hobby, you’ve become one of the best. You're well known in the community by now. There is always more to learn, yes; but you're at the point where you know more than you don’t. A on the topic.

Stuff that you didn’t understand in retrospect now makes a lot more sense. You’re now doing the very things you criticized at the beginning of your journey, because now you understand why they were being done. Not only have you acquired knowledge, but you’ve acquired taste.

You’ve learned everything publicly available; there are no more secrets hidden from you. When you get to this point, there are only 2 ways you can learn new stuff: 1. Discovering it yourself, or 2. Discovering it from others directly. You might have a smaller circle in the niche, with people near your level of knowledge, where you will share new findings or talk about stuff related to the niche.

But just like your circle, there will be others like you guys, and the best way to keep learning is to not trap yourself in an echo chamber.

Example

After some years of doing projects and learning from your mistakes, you have learned how most farms work. You understand complex storage systems, , , timings, etc. If something doesn’t work, it's probably a flaw in how the farm was designed, not in how you built it. But that’s not a problem, since you can figure out how to fix it and kindly suggest the change to the creator.

There are a few paths that you can choose from here:

Content creation: You can share all of the knowledge you’ve gained throughout the years to teach other people. This can be through YouTube videos, written guides, sharing resources or making tools. This also ties back into what I said earlier about archiving, since most of your knowledge will not be publicly available.

Example

You decide to start a YouTube channel doing block by block tutorials about farms that were only available in those Discord servers. You not only show how to build them block by block, but you allow more advanced users to download the schematic and you also explain the intricacies of the machine, in order for people to actually understand how it works and learn, instead of just copying. You also do some guides and redstone tutorials, about problems that you had and that you’ve learned from, and common issues that people have when building farms.

Researcher: This one is not as feasible in all niches, but you will work in order to expand the hobby further. Making new discoveries and sharing them with the community. This one is the more technical path but essential to all communities that have survived the march of time. No easier way for an online community to die than to become stale. (chess is an exception)

Example

After doing so many farms, you're perfectly aware of how they work. So you decide to make your own systems. You make farms that haven’t been done before and upgrade previously made farms to be faster and more efficient. After a while, you make a discovery that allows most farms to transport materials 200% faster, allowing for more production and thus faster rates. Making this discovery public allowed other members of the community to start adopting it in their builds, until it slowly became a standard.

: Despite making use of information made available by other people, you will gatekeep it. You won't help the community advance or grow in any shape or form, since you will keep all of your knowledge to yourself (or in rare cases to your close circle). I would tell you not to become this person, but this can also come from a place of , which will eventually lead to…
Retired veteran: After becoming a master of the topic, we all have to eventually move on. This won't happen overnight, nor might it be a decision that you'll purposefully make; but it will instead happen slowly. You'll lose the drive and the motivation, you will start becoming more and more inactive, less up to date with new discoveries (if any are still happening), and eventually will move on. Maybe to another place, to repeat the cycle once again.

Conclusion

If you really want to learn something but can't figure out where and when to start, use this post as a blueprint. Stop blaming and just start, I can assure you that you will get much further than you think initially.

Off Topic

Wow, I heavily underestimated how exhausting it was to write blogs. I have a ton of stuff I would like to talk about but I just don’t want to pump out slop (this blog was 100% human written. I know, rare nowadays) and boring stuff, but actually useful content.

An issue with this is how much time this takes to make, from idea to actually being written. For example, this post took around 1-2 months and you might think, how? This was only a few pages long, surely it didn’t take you that long to write. And it did not, but from actually getting the idea, to actually thinking if it's blog-worthy, to thinking about how to structure it, make it interesting and easy to digest, to actually writing it, polishing it, fixing any issues, making any assets (ex. images), adding any extra formatting stuff (ex. tooltips, color theme) then publishing it; there is quite a journey that’s not really seen from an outsider. Which is quite on topic, actually

One of the hardest parts is to maintain motivation as well. I can be midway through the steps I mentioned earlier, with maybe 2000 words written and then just… not come back and finish what I was writing about. It happened with a previous draft (that will probably never see the light of day), and there is a very high chance that it could’ve happened with this one if not for the few break days that I had due to my CPU and motherboard getting burnt.

Anyways, hopefully there is a next blog, and if there is, it doesn’t take me half a year to write and post. That’s about it.