Learning: The tale of two common approaches

This write up is a result of my thoughts on how people learn new things. An analysis between those who learn - 'from the basics', and those who learn - 'as and when required'.

Even if we do not put any effort to learn, we learn continuously and subconsciously. In most industries such as IT, you do not have a choice to hold your learning process because it will drastically impact your career. People say 'Sharpen Your Axe' all time. Technology is advancing and the process is improving every now so as the businesses also transform accordingly. Those who do not learn fast, be it a person or business, will be left behind and one day they will be sent back home or, out of business - for not growing up!

Well, what I am discussing here is about the strategy of learning new. It is not about what or where, but how one is learning.

Type 1

“If you want to learn to swim, jump into the water.” – Bruce Lee

When I was fascinated about Machine Learning, what I did was to follow some online tutorial and download a Python library named scikit-learn. I did much experiments with that and gained confidence very quickly. So yes, directly digging into a new subject works well.

Type 2

"Nail the basics first, detail the details later" – Chris Anderson

While I was in school, my brother introduced me to QBasic language, and it is with that knowledge as foundation, later I was quickly able to learn a lot of other languages of that time such as Pascal, Fortran, Cobol and C. So yes, the foundation will help learn new subjects faster.

The question

So, are you a person who usually learn from basics all the time when you have to learn something new, or do you directly go into the new subject?

“You can’t build a great building on a weak foundation” – Gordan B Hinckley

If you go to villages, you can see 'traditional house construction engineers', who are well known in the community and those are real experts in their job, but mostly uneducated. The knowledge they gained are through experience, mistakes and through their mentors. The houses they build last long and will be beautiful as per the house owner's imaginations. But most of these are actually accidental engineers and good only for building small structures. They will never take up a big budget project because they are not confident on how this 'new methods' of construction works.

On the other hand, the new generation engineers are experts in constructing big structures as well as small buildings and capable of go even further because their foundation knowledge is strong, which gives them capability to analyze and continue learning and taking new challenges.

One more type, Type 3

But, my take on this is a hybrid approach.

Directly jump into the ocean first, then go back and learn the basics when required.

In the space of technology, not everyone can master all the tracks from the foundation level. By the time you learn the foundation and come back to learn the new technology, you will end up missing a new project or customer. So it is important that you learn the new technology, but have a strong foundation level knowledge as well. While I was learning scikit-learn, I realized that it is a high level abstraction library and anyone with basic Python programming can implement Machine Learning models. But it was when real projects came to me then I realized, without knowing 'how stuff works behind the screen', it is impossible to build a bigger, meaningful project. For you to build scalable, fast and realistic apps, without strong foundation knowledge in Mathematical Statistics and system programming is not easy to achieve. Then in parallel I was taking some MOOC courses to make myself better in the Data Science world.

Conclusion

You do not have to bother about the lack of foundation knowledge on a subject first. Start learning the advanced subject directly, and as and when required learn the required foundation concepts. This way, you will not be left behind but you learn continuously. This works, at least in my case.