foamflower

It's hard to know how to tackle a new subject you know nothing about. Cooking, gardening, knitting, hiking, drawing, a new programming language, a new spoken language, weight lifting, I could go on forever.

It's especially hard because many of these subjects require a large amount of practice. Indeed, successfully becoming adept at many of these require large amounts of failure and repetition, but it's hard to convince yourself to put in the time and exposure yourself to the amount of failure needed for improvement.

By writing a curriculum for yourself, you acknowledge a minimum amount of time and repetition that you think will be necessary for you to grow in an area. You can set out steps for yourself that guide your learning, steps that are all SMART goals. The important thing is that your curriculum is a dependency graph. You have to finish A in its entirety before starting B, and you have to finish B and C in their entireties before beginning D, and so on. This gives you a few benefits:

• A concrete feeling of progression (a la achievements in video games)
• A strong foundation for each new component/skill you learn
• Enough practice to expose yourself to the nuances and unspeakable truths of a subject (i.e. learned intuition)