Learning Machine
Improving rate of learning and practical approaches
I had the chance to do some consulting contract work while I was laid off. During my time there, I had the chance to work with several interns who were split between new grads and students doing their first internships.
One of the most significant opportunities I ended up discussing with them is the need to accelerate their pace of learning in the interest of supporting their career growth - at least what my short career has taught me.
The move between interns to full time to more senior contributors is that the role gets less defined and you have to take up more ownership and drive your own projects.
To get that confidence, it helps to have a base of knowledge to draw from. This usually comes from people that are not actually at the company you work at. Logic being if you’re trying to accelerate your path, you’re not going to do it by implementing knowledge your boss or team have.
Breaking down how I spend my time productively procrastinating / finding new opportunities to pick up skills:
Building an education feed on social media
I doom scroll Linkedin when I’m bored at work sometimes.
There’s a lot of junk on LI, so to cut through the noise every time I see a post I find particularly insightful I will
Save it for future reference on LI
Follow the person who wrote it so I can see more of their posts and posts they’re engaging with (which are often high quality also)
Conversely, unfollow anyone who is posting useless hustle porn.
There are practice areas around Product Led Growth, B2C consumer marketing, sales and improving Go To Market at startups that I want to learn more about.
I think quality matters more than quantity. Why follow a wide range of people of unknown quality when you can just follow the best in the business.
Some ppl
Advisor on growth for many well known companies in tech
Follow the ppl who run it directly also
I don’t work in sales, but marketing is really sales at scale + supporting sales so it helps to understand how top sales professionals work, their day to day, how they approach their job
Product stuff, don’t read all of it but sometimes catches my eye
Data and best practices for PLG
Using data in marketing
Best practices in GTM for 2023
TikTok marketing agency for b2c companies
b2c marketing trends eventually hit b2b
She’s always posting great examples of hooks and video formats
I never use TikTok - still interesting
Saying yes to work opportunities to pickup new skills
One of the big parts of my consulting engagement was building better processes and reporting in Hubspot CRM.
An intern asked me how I learned Hubspot, and I realized no one had ever really taught me how to use it. I had just done enough Googling and used Hubspot so many times that I knew best practices.
Sometimes there are opportunities that pop up in work / internships that will let you acquire these skills. They will often start with someone saying something like
“This team / person who knows the most about XYZ doesn’t have the time or capacity to work on this project so we are delayed”
“We are bottlenecked or roadblocked because we are unable to implement this”
“We’re still waiting on XYZ due to shifting priorities”
Pattern: There is valuable work that needs to be done, but the people who normally do it are swamped and have other priorities
Approach: Volunteer to do it and bother the person who knows the most about it to teach you. They will always be happy to do it because they perceive you as reducing the bitch work on their plate.
Even if you know nothing about it, I have never regretted investing time towards diving into those projects.
Other examples for me that paid off include product marketing, content writing, web development, React JS, and SQL.
Unintended beneficial outcome is that those new skills and responsibilities make for a compelling lever for negotiating your pay up.
Increasing “Range” and cross domain knowledge
In the book “Range”, author David Epstein emphasizes that specialization - focusing only on one domain area - does not lead to higher performance.
In reality, top performers from a wide range of professional practices (biology, marketing, research, engineering) are multi-disciplinary.
This is a great summary: https://fourminutebooks.com/range-summary/
I will misquote this, but at one point the book mentions how the majority of Nobel Prize winners in a scientific field had a hobby such as music or art.
Spending time learning in different domains outside of your scope of work exposes you to different ways of thinking, approaches that are common in other industries but novel in yours, and just cool stuff that is interesting to know.
So while my “career” is focused rn on startups and growth I
Read National Geographic religiously
Play video games and try to improve my rank (requires learning lol)
Play sports like basketball and try to improve there
Try new hobbies (film photography, signed up for woodworking classes)
Also philosophically, I think it’s much more rewarding to optimize for being a more interesting, well-rounded individual vs. being successful in career at the cost of becoming a bland potato of a person.