The education trap

Learning is great, just don't get too far ahead of your actual abilities

Library of Alexandria

“The merely well-informed man is the most useless bore on God's earth.”

—Alfred North Whitehead

Everyone reading this wants to be more productive with their work, art, writing or other personal and professional pursuits. The best answer to accomplish this is very simple: actually show up and ship things. There’s a problem with this in modernity, because even for people who take their craft seriously, there’s a pernicious form of distraction all around us we don’t really talk about: education. And make no mistake, education can be a great thing.

But there’s a trap you can fall into if you are any sort of intellectual or creative person looking to do better work. The same person who wants to do more invariably wants to do better. And so with a near-infinite well of inspiration around us in the forms of videos, podcasts, books, even organized meet-ups with others in our field you can easily find and attend, it’s very possible you end up in an endless state of just learning. You might learn a lot. And you absolutely can develop very good theoretical ability and even great aesthetic doing this.

The problem is the main thing you actually need to be able to do, for any pursuit, is create. The danger in so much education is you could easily develop ambition so high, you find yourself frustrated you can’t sit down and actually do anything with it. Your inner mental state has evolved far beyond your ability to execute. That’s exceedingly frustrating, and a very modern kind of problem.

The risk for any of us here, with access to the best minds, the most content, the fanciest tools, is we never put in the reps. More learning than doing. And so you reach a stage you can critique the parts of the world you’re involved with, know what could be better, but because you’re unpracticed you never get into real flow experiences to build, so you never actually create anything that meets your ambition. You become a sharp critic and an impotent creator.

Again, AI here is a double edge sword: it can help slice through writer’s block of various forms, but used too soon has the effect of neutering your ability to do anything without it, as we discussed last week. Young people learning with the simplest tools possible is for sure the way forward, whatever the paper and pen equivalent is for your craft or sector. Professional pilots learn on a single-engine Cessna before a 747 for a reason. Others might sit around waiting, because “better AI” is always just around the corner (this is a fairly nihilistic state).

There’s many other areas we see this to be true with technology taking people away from places they should be. Young people have lost the ability to socialize because they didn’t get enough time with peers in physical spaces while young. We’re reversing this now, but for many it’s going to be extraordinarily difficult to learn those habits later (learning good habits while young has a massive advantage, as everyone knows this is the time your brain is the most plastic and malleable).

Any of us can succumb to this as well, even the well-intentioned who don’t procrastinate with TikTok or Instagram, they likely procrastinate by learning. And it feels good to those of us who have ambition because you probably are in fact learning things. I think the 80/20 rules applies, where 80% of the time spent in a craft is creating and 20% learning. You’d be practiced enough to regularly achieve a flow experience. You’re learning enough to not stagnate and actually improve.

There’s an inverse here, you can spend time only doing, when some education or even feedback would be really helpful. For my own music, which I make in my free time, I was at 100% doing for many years (I’ve written 10 albums, although only share 6). If I choose to write another, I’m reasonably confident it would be better as I’ve now taken some time off to have perspective (this is a form of learning for an artist). I’ve never watched a tutorial on making music, post-production or listened to a composer podcast. Because I don’t want my style influenced by others. But I would have probably benefited from a small amount of that, too. Whereas with my work on internet companies, I’ve learned a lot from others, perhaps too much as I spend a lot of time on the education side. Anyway, I share this to give some personal perspective. Getting the balance right is difficult, but likely worth it.