Trying to Learn Everything Kills Your Productivity

A few days ago, I was browsing my new notifications when one of them caught my attention. It was a new promotion from Udemy.

It had been several months since the last time I used it. And I did not complete more than one of the multiple courses I bought in these once-in-a-lifetime chances that repeat several times during the year.

I’m sure that most of you are familiar with this as well. It is normal to fall for this when a massive amount of knowledge is just a few clicks and $10 away.

We have so many options that we end not taking any of them, we jump from one to another, and everything that we achieve is just the loss of money in things we do not use.

Taking a course to reinforce our English grammar is okay. Taking one to learn how to create web pages on WordPress is okay too because both can be related to the same project. But enrolling in many courses in lots of different subjects is counterproductive.

Online courses are attractive because they promise something that we would like; to effortlessly learn different new skills.

We try to learn too many things at once, and that is very unproductive because when we face the endless possibilities that educational apps present us, we suffer the paradox of choice.

As the number of choices grows further, the negatives escalate until we become overloaded. At this point, choice no longer liberates, but debilitates. It might even be said to tyrannize.

~ Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice

We have so many options that we end not taking any of them. We just jump from one to another without finishing any of them, and everything that we achieve is just the loss of money in things we do not use and the frustration that comes with not having finished what we started.

Geniuses Do Not Work Like That

We keep lying to ourselves with the illusion of being geniuses, but we ignore the fact that geniuses do not have the enormous amount of knowledge inside their heads that we possess as species now.

We could think of Leonardo da Vinci, but in his times they did not have rocket science or Quantum Physics so geniuses had fewer areas to cover. Good luck trying to know everything now that every area of knowledge has its own specialized sub-categories.

Modern geniuses like Bill Gates and Albert Einstein did not achieve what they did by trying to cover every single field, but by obsessing over narrow areas of human knowledge: Computer Science and Physics.

As Genius Turner quoted in Why So Many Billionaires are College Dropouts:

‘When you’re obsessing about one thing, you can reach insights about how to solve hard problems. If you have too many things to think about, you’ll get to the superficial solution, not the brilliant one.’

That is. The only way to actually learn is not jumping from course to course $10 at a time. It is instead a long-term run pursuing what we really love.

We Should Focus on Something That We Really Want to Do

Instead of trying to learn everything, which is impossible, we must try to learn everything regarding our true interests.

We need to focus on what we really want to learn and stick to it like the doctors stuck leeches to their patients in da Vinci’s times.

It means not taking the easy way of buying many courses and then procrastinating our learning but learning about a single topic a bit every day to keep gaining knowledge in what we want to learn. It is what I have been doing for years, and to me, it has worked better than many courses.

You have to decide. Do you want to learn piano or rocket science? Choose well, because you won’t be able to master both of them. Human potential is limited, and so is our time.

If you focus on a single thing at a time, you will achieve greater things.

In a Nutshell

Learning different things is an excellent tool for self-development, but we must be careful with that, as it might prevent us from mastering anything, and it can lead us to frustration.

It is better to focus on one topic that we find interesting and learn about it day after day, at least until we have internalized the basics.

Thank you for reading .