How does one learn anything? The obvious answer would be to sit down, and - depending on what kind of thing it is - either study or practice it. But that's not always as easy as it sounds.
When you've got a class with an assignment due, or when your boss wants that task done as soon as possible, the question of learning any required skill is relatively trivial. That's not a problem for most people, despite the effort and - possibly - pain needed, when you've got a task to do, you've got a task to do. It wasn't until my boss was complaining about not getting the chance to complete an online data science course he started a few months ago, despite seemingly having more than enough time to do so, that made me think: Why is it that we can hop instantly onto something new, and dive into all the details, becoming an expert overnight; while with other things, it takes forever to make any sort of progress at all. It all just seemed arbitrary to me, no rhyme or reason. It's not like I haven't had this happen to me before, be it stuck on "learning" new software for my 3D work or even something as simple as reading a book. One book would take me 3 days to finish, while another would take me 3 months. That drove me crazy.
I tried to rationalise it for so long, before - somehow - giving up and blaming it on the fact that life has its ups and downs. Sometimes you're just too busy, or you don't have the mental energy at the end of the day to sit down and read a book. That conclusion did seemingly make perfect sense to me, despite being extremely anticlimactic. After all, projects come and go, and it did seem to follow that when I was working on a demanding project I didn't really have much time to do anything else, so I left the issue at that.
It wasn't until a few days ago, however, that I came across this video by Johnny Harris from a few years back, that things began to make a lot more sense. In the video, he talks about how he reached out to the US State Department telling them how terrible their introductory video was for one of their programs, offering them to make them a new one for free. At the time, he barely new anything about animation and had almost no experience (except for one short logo animation which he shows in the video). For the following few weeks, he worked on that promised project, devouring every possible course or tutorial he could come across. Eventually delivering an animated video that was much better than the one published on the State Department's website, and significantly better than anything he had previously done.
So, according to Johnny's reflections in his video, all we gotta do is promise people shit we can't do and then struggle for a couple of weeks until we can? In a severely oversimplified manner, yes, it is in fact as simple as that. Why does it work though? Why is it that throwing yourself in the deep end of the ocean when you can't swim actually teaches you how to survive? It's not just pure survival instinct in that case, because Johnny could have just bailed out on that project with no significant consequences, if any at all.
Ali Abdaal talks about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation in one of his recent videos, he mentions how he "game-ifies" the tasks he needs to do, in turn motivating him to actually do what he wants or needs to do. Looking forward to doing something because it's fun or because you subconsciously want to do it is what he refers to as intrinsic motivation, like craving chocolate or getting takeout. The opposite applies to things like paying your bills or meeting deadlines at your job - external factors that motivate you classify as extrinsic motivation. Depending on intrinsic motivation for anything that isn't urgent - such as trying to learn something on your spare time - is just a way of saying"I wish" then wrapping yourself in warm blankets and going back to sleep.
Looking back at this, I can see how this fit with my story learning graphic design as a start. I started off in high school with pretty much basic (if not below that) knowledge of photoshop. Between a poster for this and prints for that, I found myself committing to things I've never done before and spending late nights up figuring out how to do it. And that's exactly what happened, I figured out how to do it, coming out of high school to work as a professional graphic designer (I also had to over-commit my way into that a little bit but we got there eventually).
That's all good and cleared up, but how does one make sure there's always an extrinsic motivator to make sure goals are being met instead of taking a nap every time there's some time to spare? There's always the Johnny Harris method of taking over jobs and learning along the way - which seems to have worked perfectly fine for me, just make sure the stakes aren't too high or you end up losing too much. If you're not the adventurous type, setting your own deadlines also seems to do the trick, though to a little bit less of an extent. If you're setting your own deadlines, make sure to write down your goals and refer back to them from time to time as a reminder of what you need to do. I like to use Todoist, which is simple but also integrates any bells and whistles you may need to use for organization. If you're more onto the gamification side of things Habitica is going to be a good option, though you'll probably get the most of it if you have a few friends to tag along using the app to reach its full potential.
Ultimately, it's worth noting that everyone tends to work at their own pace and have their own way of learning. Squeezing yourself into a tight deadline may work for some and cause a panic attack for others. Setting extrinsic motivators may not necessarily look the same for everyone, but it all boils down to making sure that you're not relying on sheer willpower to get yourself to work, because in all fairness, that just does not work.
