Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about what to learn — vs — what I’m happy to let fly over my head. Most importantly, on how to make a separation between the two that is more intentional.

Back when I worked solo, it was important to focus on skills I could sell. In hind site, that was quite a detrimental aspect of being self-employed, having to be so pragmatic on what I spent time learning. For me, it meant learning WordPress pretty well — but never touching jQuery or JavaScript.

At my old co-working space, I was always perfectly content being in a room of smart developers and understanding 5% of the talk. Because hey, I understand 5% of this and how cool is that?! And not being okay with it, would have meant leaving a room I wanted to be in.

But compared to how lots of developers learn, maybe I’ve been a bit lazy and skipped cultivating a habit of digging into things that are new for me. Not trying to read up on all the things has been important to be able to move forward. But now I want to learn how to learn more on purpose.

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Note to self — Cultivate a habit of learning things that are new for me. Sometimes by digging into them, other times just getting a superficial general idea is fine. 💪