The title is Do Yourself a Favor and Stop Learning but it rings true about a topic I’d like to relabel as ‘Learn the Right Things’.
I still spend quite a bit of time learning ‘garbage knowledge’. I classify that as knowledge that won’t have a useful impact on my immediate career nor is it solving any of humanity’s problems (although it tends to satisfy my thirst for knowledge). However, one thing I’ve been working on is trying to focus what I spend my very finite amount of time to learn things that are relevant to activities I need to get done (ex. learn enough JavaScript to be able to debug why some web page busted) and also try to keep some time for activities that can span over a longer period of time but have some decent payback. (Really sit down and understand the intrinsics of Network Security and break some stuff on the way to see why X, Y, Z is important)
Needless to say, it’s a hard process and I think it is part of the territory for a knowledge worker. There’s far more knowledge than you can ever absorb in one human lifetime. The best you can do is figure out how to use what is out there that is best for your situation. And pray that something you picked up pans out sometime in the future.
