You've Probably Read Enough

Like most things, it's not an extreme of one or the other. Once you stop reading and start doing, it's not like you can never go back to reading. If you dive into doing right away, that doesn't mean you can't go back and read.

Studying, doing, reviewing is a good feedback loop. You study what you're going to learn in small chunks, spend some time grinding it out and working on it the best you can, then stepping back and reviewing your progress or lack thereof. Then back to reading, either reviewing what you read before, or moving onto the next chunk if you've mastered the previous one.

The basic premise is correct. Most people on HN are liable to read too much, and not do enough.

Personally I believe you have to do both for the fastest learning process. The "read, do, reflect" cycle. If you're not actively "doing" then you will read and associate things quite differently. Without doing, you can build up a very strong theoretical knowledge about a subject, but in doing, not realise the correct time to act on that knowledge. It can also lead to analysis paralysis, as you /know/ there is a bigger picture, and you're trying to figure it out - where as the guy who never read, but just learned by doing, never got slowed down by wondering about that bigger picture.

I know people who just do, and never read - they miss out on a lot of shortcuts they could easily learn, or understanding the bigger picture, motivations etc.

Reflection happens quite naturally for most of us here, but you'll often find it works best when you are actively writing ideas down, or communicating them to others. It then fuels going and reading or doing to fill knowledge gaps.

If you're not doing, then the next best thing you can do is mental rehearsal - if you /did/ have to apply this skill/knowledge to a real situation, how would you do it. You can then find yourself self-coaching when you do the activity for real.

As an aside, this is why hobbies are a Good Thing (tm). They allow you to have different sets of associations, so when I'm learning about a new area, I can link an idea to say organising a scuba dive, rather than something like a sprint planning session.

I think this is a relatively new phenomenon. 20 years ago you had to try hard to find an exhaustive amount of information on any specific topic, and what you did find tended to have been through a few gatekeepers. Now you can fritter away the days reading "useful" information because it's so prolific and readily available almost anywhere you are.

No you probably haven't. The lessons I've learned as being a part of this community over the past three years have been immeasurable, and that comes from browsing this site daily. Here's a sample from the top of my head, and this doesn't even come close to the edge cases where I've encountered a specific problem in my day job and thought to myself "oh shit, I remember reading an article about this on HN, let me go search for it". This also applies to all the reading I've done for fun and in school.

- Drawing U.S choropleth thematic maps (flowing data)

- A/B testing, Adwords, SEO (patio11's blog)

- D3 framework

- VIM advice

- Product development and importance of design

- Being data driven

- Conversion optimization

- Importance of machine learning on web scale problems

- Stupid business models vs business models that actually seem to work

- Mistakes to avoid

Yes you learn by doing. But you learn just as much through discovery, and discovery only happens when you read a shit ton more than you have to. Discovery leads to idea generation. Idea generation leads to products. Creating products leads to learning.

I think this is good advice if you have a particular goal in mind ("be able to edit videos"). It's harder if your goal is more vague ("be better at what I do").

I've found that I read through technical books/articles to get through them as fast as possible rather than actual learning. In the end, they don't help me much because I forget most of it.

Lately, instead of reading chapter after chapter of a book, I like to take in a concept, reflect on how it might have applied to past, present, and future projects. Then, I like to write code to prototype the concept, while examining at how I might have done it previously. I find it helps a lot more than blind reading. Of course, it also takes a bit longer.