Most people just try to understand something well enough to begin using it. Then, once they’ve used it a few times, they get the false feeling that they are somewhat of an expert.
They are not.
In order to truly know something, you have to explore it in depth. Not just be exposed to it – even repeatedly.
You must get into it and figure out what it’s doing and how it’s doing it.
As a SQL programmer, I was told many years ago the following: don’t ever run code if you don’t know what it does.
This was important, because when I first started out, I used to borrow code from others that was designed to get the result I needed. Everyone did it. Why reinvent the wheel?
The problem was that most of the time when people borrowed code, they knew what it did and could have written the code themselves. They were just trying to save time.
I, on the other hand didn’t yet know how to write all the code I borrowed.
So I had to spend the time learning it – before I used it.
If I didn’t take the time to understand it, at least two things would have happened. 1. every once in a while I might use some code in the wrong way and either get the wrong results, or worse, crash the server. 2. I would not have learned and would forever be dependent on other people and their coding skills.
The same goes for anything else, even martial arts. You can just do things as you see them being used by someone else…
Or, you can decide to learn and understand as much as you can about as much as you can.
Concepts will begin to flood your mind exponentially as you combine other ideas. (See this post on the concept of exponential learning.)
And with that habit of trying to understand, you will become unstoppable.
Not only will be better at the thing you set out to learn. You’ll actually learn more about other things that you don’t even know you’re picking up on.
