Too Much to Learn, Too Little Progress: The Pressure Trap

Before being an independent creator, I worked as a learning professional for some years. As a person inside the domain, I loved talking about growing a "culture of learning" or becoming a "learning organization", but even when I was thinking about learning almost all the time as a corporate professional - I never felt that the pressure of being a great learner was ever higher than what it is now. I still do think that learning and growing beyond your current skillset is a wonderful thing so people should and will always invest in it. However, through my profession, I understood that learning under pressure simply doesn't work. But for some reason, we're getting closer and closer to making learning an obligation, and that needs some rethinking. Not the need of learning, but the pressure to learn that makes learning almost useless.

What learning actually is

Learning is fundamentally the process of adapting to change. So wherever there's change, there's a need to learn. The change could be in present - your organization introduced a new tool so you need to learn how to work with it, or it could be in future - say you want to be the head of design in 2 years so I need to get better at stakeholder management. In another way, learning is always goal driven, there's an initial state, an end state and you need a way to fill this gap. Filling this gap takes three stages:

AI made learning personal - and overwhelming

While learning is a way of life and we all do it in one form or another, technology's inherent nature to evolve makes it necessary that you keep learning, probably faster than any other domain. And with AI, we finally have a companion that makes us learn in the speed of change. Today if I create an E-learning course about prompting AI agents, it will go obsolete in about 2 months - a new model will be released which will be better at filling up lost context that most prompting advice is directed at. So if you refer to that course, you're already lagging because you're using an outdated source to learn in the present moment. The only thing that matches the speed of change of AI is AI itself.

So anyone who's using AI to learn, is doing 2 things - finding new inroads to the process of getting things done which were not possible before, and making the learning process personalized to their journey.

This sheer ability to make happen so quickly is a super power, but it also means that there are as many things to learn as there are learners. This is a unique situation, because so far people had limited power to personalize learning, so they made discoveries far less and hence fewer possibilities to take inspiration from. But that's completely flipped. I think if I asked any indie creator about their way of working, systems they use, I bet there's going to be something I'd want to learn from it. This flipped situation has made the learning needs imbalanced, and we need to understand it to not fall for it.

The multiple roads problem

The situation is equivalent to saying that as there are 10 roads that need to take me from point a to point b, I will walk all the 10 roads to half way and then hope to reach to point b. When I open social media, I see hundreds of posts about people saying here's how you grow your business, if I started today here's what I would do, you'd be paying thousands of dollars for this advice, but he gave it for free here. See I'm not judging the quality of the content, a lot of it is genuinely good. But in the end, they're all expressing their perspective, their learned experience of what worked for them - a road among 10 others that can take a person from point a to point b. There were never so many roads, so you never had this problem at the current scale, but it is now and I see people falling for the pressure of learning all the roads, including myself.

First principles as the way out

And that's where first principles thinking becomes important. It's almost impossible to not fall for the learning pressure, I'm trying to find out the way to keep myself away from it. What seems to have started working for me is to keep my head steady in first principles - knowing the current and end state, going through the knowledge-skill-ability framework for my specific case. Starting with directly applying what I know already, finding the gaps in understanding at an elemental level - not wide topics like how to make my business grow - but rather what can make my website get more traffic, then going out to find solutions for those gaps only, which fit my situation, the errors I hit when I tried the ways to get more traffic myself.

This is an evolving stance, I'm trying to build my learning needs more around first principles thinking, rather than the shiny objects in the tech world. I'll share more as I go through this journey, please use the comments section to share your perspective.

Follow along as I build and experiment in public - @lifedesignshare on X.