The subject of this post is idle learning/study which can be contrasted with learning/study that is profitable. I've been very guilty of learning about all sorts of stuff—often things that nobody asked me to learn and really that nobody near me is too interested in.

The reasons I have done this so much are many, but there are some big trends. First, we have a culture (in the West, United States) that gives some prestige to "trivia" in these sense of "knowing random stuff". One might say that much of entertainment is predicated on this—more sports games, for instance, generate more statistics for people to know about. Without some immediate work/task in front of me or another clear goal, I have been lead into a lot of idle study to just do something potentially useful in times when I lacked direction. Second, there is the matter of ego/pride. You may be aware of the "condescending nerd" stereotype—some tech professional looking down on everyone who doesn't have the exact domain-specific knowledge he does. There is a sense in which the IT guy is right in that he does know stuff others don't. But the arrogance of the IT guy is misplaced in that his own skills may go obsolete (and so he could get fired), there are other people more skilled than him even in his domain, and of course the people he is looking down on probably know lots about other (useful) things he doesn't know—e.g. a CEO may be hiring him to do some tech stuff as to not have to waste valuable time with some really confusing technology.

Third, I think that having general world knowledge and doing exploratory study of various things is not bad in of itself. Similarly, cake itself isn't evil, but of course you shouldn't eat cake everyday. Similarly, getting distracted by random this-and-that when there are more important matters to attend to.

"Market Backwards" Approach to Learning

I've been studying some entrepreneurs on YouTube. Specifically, I've been looking at the work of FIRE (Frugal Investment Retire Early) type approaches. Lots of interesting people in this sphere...!

One fellow, Sam Ovens, shared a thought I found particularly helpful in a video titled something along the lines of "You don't have to be an expert" (I'm typing this on a slow computer so I will not dig up the specific video now—we can discuss the idea even without me digging up the timestamp and URL!). What Sam shared was this idea of the "market backwards" approach.

Rather than getting some skills (e.g. LEARN TO CODE) and then rushing to the market to see how those skills may fit in to the current marketplace wherever you may happen to be (this would be called the "market forwards" approach), you start with the market, looking at what sorts of problems people have which they would pay money to have solved.

Then, you can learn the appropriate skills in a short-ish period of time to accomplish whatever you need to. For many things, you don't even need to become an expert. Let's look at creating a website for instance. There are many Wordpress experts out there—should you become one of these people? Maybe if you have a job lined up, this may be a good idea (that is, there is a market waiting for you).

A better approach, however, might be to hire out the appropriate nerd labor OR to just use some adequately flexible template type system that is already tried and true in the marketplace to accomplish your website building needs. Rather than hiring or training an expensive developer (this may be spending $100k or so a year), you can learn enough about web technologies to know what you want and then take care of the business side of things making sure the right work gets done rather than wasting your time being frustrated over some large tech company's choices of software design.

Advantages of Exploratory Learning

Knowing various things about various stuff can be useful for getting connected with different people, finding new clients, and so on and so forth. Retarding language learning, you may have heard that "just a little bit of time spent learning the language of a country you are going to visit will really impress the locals".

More generally—people appreciate it when you put forth even a little bit of effort to understand them—this often means understanding what sorts of problems they have to deal with. This also might mean business opportunitites for you; by listening to people and finding out what they need, you also position yourself to figure out how to have a mutually beneficial relationship where you provide the desired/good services.