A skill becomes valuable only when you make something out of it beneficially. Everyone can learn a skill but only some could use them to solve problems and make the best out of it.
An important part of learning is evaluating yourself.
Just like a machine learning model, we even have a test phase. But we often forget about it and get carried away only with the training phase.
A model’s performance is evaluated on the test set, likewise to know how well did we learn the skill can be evaluated and optimized to the best. Rather than just learning a skill we should find a way to test it somewhere.
Be it any project, competition, or even recalling whatever you learned at times, will fix your forgetting curve. You don’t really need a mentor when you have an open internet world. Joining a community and engaging with them by asking questions could even boost your learning ability.
Make a gap between your learning cycle name it as Training and Testing phase respectively (you can even choose any name you want to). Fix some timeline, for instance, I will be learning this skill 3 weeks from now. That’s your training phase.
Remember don’t ever test yourself in this timeline, consume as much as you can throughout the weeks. You can try recalling at times, but you have to find the patterns well in the training phase now like a machine learning model will do.
Done training, next we test our model or evaluate its performance. Based on the performance whether it makes us satisfactory or not. We tune it, which means we go back to the training phase again and learn them well again appear for the evaluation phase.
Exactly, dedicate the next 3 weeks or 2 for your testing purpose. Holding whatever you consumed so far, now it’s time to put them to the test.
Competitions, exams, projects, or whatever suits your learning focus on them. Don’t look back at the training thing, and observe wherever you want wrong. Jotting down them, after the end of the training phase we back again into the training phase.
Switching back and forth helps us to optimize our learnings. Remember, setting up the time limit is solemnly up to us since there are no barriers and completely up to our comfort.