A little bit of continuation of my last post – addiction to work. Today I’m learning a new programming JavaScrip library. It might not mean anything to you but let’s put it this way. Each programming language in IT is like a natural language. If you know French, you might understand a few words in English but in principle, they’re totally different. The libraries are like dialects. If you speak American English you might not fully understand Kiwi English or Scottish English. So you’ll need to learn a bunch of new words. That’s what I’m doing.
And I believe you should do it at every stage of your life. No matter what you do, you should learn something new. It could be anything from cooking a new meal through repairing the car up to how nuclear power plants work. There is a couple of aspects to that.
Firstly – you become creative. You never know when your knowledge will be useful. It doesn’t have to be useful at work or in everyday life. But widening horizons will create a wider perspective of the world in your mind. Sometimes in the least expected time, you might find the knowledge you just learned useful. (especially the knowledge of nuclear physics in zombie apocalypse times 🙂 )
Secondly – you never know what’s going to happen in the world in the future. Keeping yourself on your toes gives you the ability to adapt to market and economy changes quickly. You were a digger operator but in the spare time, you’ve learned how to cook very well? In a bad economy, construction might not require that many digger operators but we all need to eat so cooking jobs might still be open. It’s a little bit naive and simplistic approach but I’m sure you know what I mean.
So in my life, I’ve learned some stupid stuff that I’ve never ever used and sometimes I still learn stuff that I possibly will never use. But I call myself a very creative person and I believe it’s from all those little things that I learn. I’ve passed Prince2 certification – a very strict project management certificate used mostly for the construction industry. Did I ever use it? No. Do I regret it (it cost quite a bit of money)? No. Because just after that I’ve learned agile project management that not only I found useful but gave me the job. And I only found out about agile project management as an alternative to traditional project management methodology.
Here I am then, learning Vue JS and hoping that it not only makes my startup more modern from the user perspective but will also give me some knowledge I will be able to use in the future. And if not – at least my small brain’s cells have something to do other than snoozing 😀