I had to face many challenges as a self-learner. Finding the right things to learn, motivation, etc. What is for you the biggest challenge of being self-taught?
Solitude. Then, I'd say acceptance from friends/family, followed by a good routine.<p>I've tried learning alone, but after 6 - 12 months it becomes really difficult. Being around a self-learning community daily makes a world of difference, I'm about to start my fourth year and I'm loving it.<p>Being part of a program also reduces societal pressure. Any program really, just to be able to give a simple answer when people ask you what you are doing. Otherwise, it's easy to be met with doubt and cynical questions.<p>Lastly routine, I see self-learning as a day job. You want to clock N hours per day and don't spend any time procrastinating. I've been building habits for 5-10 years, and I'm reaching a point where I can be productive, but it takes time and patience.
Knowing when you've actually, deeply learned something.<p>I've lost count of the number of times I've read a chapter in a book, felt I understood the material very well, but utterly and completely failed to reproduce anything when you take the book away and replace it with a blank piece of paper (or IDE).<p>Usually you can tell that you've failed to internalize everything when you try to teach it to someone else. You become aware pretty quickly where the gaps are. If you're on your own, though, it requires a lot more discipline.
i think there is too much information out there as far as im concerned. I dont even know where to begin sometimes because the advice pulls in every direction. There was an article about prisoners learning coding and some commenter said that they had come up with their own solutions to popular libraries just because those libraries were out of reach at the time of learning. The experience allowed them to learn intricate details and rely more on intuition rather than online advice exchanges. anyhow, i think i know my problem and what i need to do but im still stuck in that loop where im always looking for the BEST resource to learn something new.
The constant fear that I missed a force multiplier early on.<p>It's like a stalking mission in LA Noire where I spent hours on a mission having not realised there was a car for me to use at the very start.<p>More practically: thank God someone was there to introduce me to an IDE and code discovery autocomplete when I was just learning programming for the first time.
Finding good sources. I constantly have to do my best to figure out if a source is credible when learning something in an unfamiliar field. Has this statement been disproven? Is this an opinion or a fact? Will following this idea bear fruit?
- too many poorly-formed opinions providing hard and fast rules about what other people should do without any consideration of the spectrum of situations and abilities<p>- knowing what there is to learn within any topic and what order you should tackle things<p>- whether advice about what to learn in some topic, how, and in what order is any good or not<p>- when to quit or stick when a certain approach doesn't seem to work<p>- how to test your learning, and how to assess your efficiency<p>- how to sustain motivation while playing the 'teacher' (i.e. co-ordinator) role when you'd rather learn, and the 'learner' role when you'd rather teach.<p>- how not to make certain important things be associated with pain and boredom, when approaching them in a free, open, playful mode would make them stick much better<p>- how to avoid or undo damaging perfectionism about resources and approach and personal standards for outcome and ability<p>---<p>Self-learning is extremely difficult and I don't advise it to anyone, although I wouldn't discourage trying it either.<p>The traditional didactic models you already know are the best. The problem is getting the right people to teach the right subjects, and ensuring free and open access for all people of all ages.<p>Ultimately effective self-teaching tends to mean you implement the classical methods but in non-traditional formats.<p>I find it's usually only those with top percentile proclivity or motivation for a given subject can sit down with a textbook and notebook/repl and absorb information as effectively as the rest of us would with a good teacher and engaged classmates.<p>If you're like me and you're unable to go to Uni but want to self-teach programming/CS, learn the minimum required to get into a related apprenticeship-style position and throw yourself into it.
As few others have said, for me it is structuring my learning to get to the end goal. Say I want to build a website or any other idea, I need to destructure things I need to learn in order to build this idea.<p>Currently I use Trello for this: <a href="https://trello.com/b/cu32qF3q" rel="nofollow">https://trello.com/b/cu32qF3q</a><p>In future I want to build a website ala Goodreads/Google/Roadmap that lets you craft optimized learning paths for creating any idea. Sad this doesn't exist yet.<p><a href="https://docs.learn-anything.org/roadmap" rel="nofollow">https://docs.learn-anything.org/roadmap</a><p><a href="https://roadmap.sh" rel="nofollow">https://roadmap.sh</a>
80% of the things that can be learned by a mentor is invisible to the mentor. It doesn't show up in books, videos, tutorials, etc. It's in subtle unspoken habits.<p>A lot of my mentors are sloppy. They don't look for the best tools. When I ask them for the best site to train programming skills, they point me to Project Euler, not a more fancy new thing. Some will measure progress by lines of code. Some, when stressed out, move faster or choose to pass out on the keyboard, as opposed to relaxing. Many seem dismissive of planning and insist that you have to get lucky.<p>80% of people are in the bottom 80%. Communities like HN are likely well in the top 20%, in terms of success, and have to look at the top 10% to improve.<p>What this means is that advice you get from 80% of people will be bad. There might be some viral article on Forbes about how you need to wake up at 4 AM or have a solid breakfast to be successful. When most people you meet give you consistent advice, it seems like it's true.<p>But you have to pay attention to who's doing this. If none of the people in top 20% are following popular logic, it could well be misguided. e.g. maybe lines of code are an important metric after all.
Sticking with it. A lot of this other stuff is about doing it at all, which isn't toooo easy, but however you do it, self learning is way harder than organized learning if you want to do more than like a week of it. If you want to reeeeally learn something for like 100+ hurs worth of learning, it's damned harder than spending 5-20 hours of "ooh exciting!" diving in.
Having the right resources available in a structured manner, and as a novice knowing which source or information is reliable.<p>There have been countless times where I've come to resent my initial source after a few months of digging deeper on the subject just because they've positioned themselves as an authority without the ability to properly teach.
Motivation for sure. It’s easy to self-learn on topics that really interest you. The hard part is to learn those topics that don’t interest you (and may be very tedious and/or frustrating) but are crucial as a foundation for the topics that do.
I didn’t see many challenges, except for a steep learning curve. Got hired as a junior, while having less knowledge in various subjects than uni graduates, I faster learnt and became productive in the tasks that we manage. Some even failed to meet the requirements since they focused too much on the theory and never got to the stage to actually apply it.<p>It may have been to my advantage that my senior peers quit & went on parental leave for months leaving me alone within the environments that I’m responsible for after only 8 months. Making it even steeper but also forcing me to apply the changes that I saw correct
Not being able to ask abstract conceptual questions of a book or website or etc.<p>Personally I'm a more visual learner and often while a book is busy with text syntax or misc details I will think I'm putting together a better understanding of what is happening / how things work....but the book goes on with details and I lose focus / get frustrated.<p>I so badly want to ask "Wait if a does b does that mean x is acting like this or that!?!?"
For me, it is knowing (or more accurately recognizing) when I'm going down the wrong path. Sometimes this is, of course, part of learning and sometimes it is a waste of time.<p>One thing great about the Internet and places like S.O. or H.N. or search engines, as well as other subject specific sites is it is much easier to find subject matter experts when you get stuck.
For me, it’s not knowing how far off the beginning is from an actionable amount of knowledge. Robotics is interesting, drones seem cool, neurology is fascinating, I’d love to get into biotech, etc. but do I have 3 years of self study before I can do or understand any of the interesting parts? Not really.
Depending on the material, understanding root concepts and knowledge must come before using it is needed more than just starting to play around and hoping it comes to you.<p>Self directed learning requires enough patience to recognize the best approach to learning it for you.
I did take a gap year to improve myself and my technical skills.<p>I rewrote my study plan at least 10 times.<p>Other than the self-discipline needed to sit down and study, it is hard to ignore the noise of contrasting opinions from Reddit, Hacker News and the rest of the Internet.
Lack of mentorship.<p>I'm still a self learner and going forward without proper guidance doesn't really help.<p>Things go much faster whenever there is someone there to help if not much but just to show a way.
Cost of new books. I usually need to see a tiny passage in a new book (I constantly monitor the internet for new releases) and am not willing to buy a book just for that.