Rule No. 1 of Learning Anything New

Balancing Progress and Expectations

Come on Inner Peace! I Don’t Have All Day!

The first rule of learning is to keep your expectations realistic about time i.e. how long would it take to you to achieve what you are trying to do ?

Example: These days, I’m diving into learning Python. Let me share that I have no coding experience till date whatsoever.

After a few intense days on brilliant.org, I hit a rough patch. I skipped a couple of practice sessions, feeling discouraged about the slow progress I was making.

Watching YouTube tutorials on Python, I realized I was expecting too much progress too soon. I was expecting significant progress within a month; but for a newbie this was a tall order. This expectation of quick results was hindering my progress — leaving me frustrated in the process.

https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Photo_signed_by_Haruki_Murakami.jpg

This is one more piece of advice I have for you: don’t get impatient. Even if things are so tangled up you can’t do anything, don’t get desperate or blow a fuse and start yanking on one particular thread before it’s ready to come undone.

You have to realize it’s going to be a
long process and that you’ll work on things slowly, one at a time.
Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

Coincidentally, a ninth-grade student has joined my classes recently with shaky math skills. His class 9 exam was within a month and he was expecting good grades.

During our discussion he shared that he hadn’t practiced Maths from grades six to eight. As I found myself counseling him on the importance of normalizing expectations and patiently work on his Maths fundamentals— I couldn’t help but chuckle inwardly, realizing the irony of my own predicament!

So, the first rule of learning is to manage your expectations. As the sage Kung Fu panda once remarked, “Come on Inner Peace! I Don’t Have All Day!”

Remember: Frustration ∝ Expectation … in life as well as Python :-)