Learning everything in 5 minutes... Kinda.

Hey. Hey. 👋

You didn't expect something new from me this quick didn't you? that assumes that someone actually reads this blog... but okay... I don't actually know since I don't track you but this is another story. 😅

Hope you are doing well so far.

Today I wanna talk about something not really related to computers and IT (shocking I know) but rather about something that can be applied to everyday life.

I don't really know how well known this all is so I'm taking a bit of a shot in the dark but I think you could make an argument about every piece of content on here.

People also seemed to be kinda interested or never really heard about this so yeah. Here we go.

What are we actually talking about?

K N O W L E D G E

Or rather the acquisition of knowledge.

I think everyone has had this moment. You saw something cool or you wanted to do something else and just procrastinate it off or you say you don't have any time.

It happens to all of us. Especially me. I'm not really perfect in that regard and you shouldn't orient yourself on me but I wanna share some advice on how you can mitigate that somewhat.

About a year and a half ago I saw a university lecture where the lecturer talked about how the average person in the IT field reads less than one book per year and doesn't really build up the knowledge in the corresponding field.

After this moment I kinda felt motivated and as a university student it's basically the best time of a person's life to get a lot of books to read, for free. Thanks educational programs and libraries for that one. 👍

But then the demotivation kicked in when I started looking at all of this.

Those books have at least about 300 to 400 pages of technical knowledge, sometimes even way more and that felt a bit daunting. (I can never do this... I don't really have time for this...) 😢

My Solution

But then it hit me... Wait a second. If the average person reads less than a book every single year I can beat the average by reading a single page per day.

A single page. That isn't really a whole lot and takes even for the slower readers not more than one to two minutes to do.

If you take out five minutes per day to read in that case you can read with a very conservative reading speed of a page per minute, five pages per day. 150 pages per month and 1825 pages per year.

That's a lot of pages.

If you take an average length of 350 pages per book that's about five books per year, about four more than the average per year.

Crazy isn't it? 🤔

The more I think about all of this the more I think that this can be basically applied to every aspect of life that you wanted to learn.

Basically everyone has five minutes a day free to do something, even the busiest of you and everyone has something that you wanted to do but procrastinated for a while.

This aspect of taking a very small chunk of a day which is negligible in most lifes helped me at least to overcome this hurdle of entry, fend off procrastination and build a habit.

Habit Building

You see.

This habit building is also an important aspect of all of that.

Once I started doing this reading it became a bit of a habit.

I'm not really an avid reader right now but I think on average my reading time is above those five minutes I mentioned before.

This aspect helped to propell my amount which I read per year from those five books to about ten.

Ten books by doing basically "nothing". Crazy. 🤔

Other findings

The last aspect I wanted to talk about this topic I wanted to talk about doesn't really come from myself but rather from a TED talk by Josh Kaufmann.

Link to the TED talk

He talked about how you can learn basically every skill in it's basics in 20 hours. Go give it a watch. It's a really neat one.

Why is this relevant?

You see, next to those factors of cumulative time acquisition and habit building you tend to learn new thing very very quickly in the beginning which also increases the amount of knowledge you can aquire.

If you take 5 minutes a day that's about 30 hours in a year.

In this TED talk he learned how to play the ukulele pretty decently in about 20 hours and this can be applied to nearly everything. (even juggeling flaming chainsaws... I wouldn't suggest you do that one though...)

With this method you can easily take a completely new skillset like playing a musical instrument in that case and be pretty decent after a while.

I'm pretty sure that there are a lot more factors which will help you even more in this method but I'm not really an expert in this field or the perfect authority in this matter.

I'm just an ordinary person who talks about his personal experience but I think this advice can be beneficial for a lot of people out there who want to do something.

So yeah.

Hope you found my advice useful and take something from it for yourself. 😁

See ya. 👋

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TLDR: Take five minutes of your day to build a habit and learn whichever skill you wanted to learn in a relatively small amount of time quickly. It really works. Try it out. 😉