I would like to talk about my thoughts on learning new things while not forgetting the value of fundamentals. Where I come from history, culture and values are the most important things before learning something new. It is always interesting to learn new things and excel in the area of expertise you are targeting. And we all want to do things fast cause there’s so much information to digest in such short time frame.

Start from the beginning:

What you need to do is start from the beginning not end. Start to study your subject all the way even before its inception times. This way you can visually understand why and where it came from. Remember humans invent to solve problems. If you are doing something new you are solving an existing problem thus you need to know why are you doing that. If your goal is to learn how to play a new musical instrument don’t go just buy the most expensive one at first. That won’t help. What you want to do is learn fundamentals of the music via most simple instrument possible. Flute or keyboard in this case. Learning guitar, violin or drums would come much later stage. If you apply the same rule here in business life you’re much better off getting there and become an expert.

Mastering takes time:

It’s believed that approximately 10,000 hours needed to master a single subject. I’m probably excluding the talent factor in this estimate. If you are talented enough to work and reach higher mastery levels in a shorter timeframe you are either gifted or else extremely lucky to do so. To sustain success in a long run during business life, there are a lot of challenges in front of you. One of that is competing with others who have done the same work for a prolonged time. While trying to catch up with latest and greatest it’s better to start dedicating more time to it.

Time and material on single subject pay off over time:

One thing I found useful is to focus on a single subject at given time. The focus is important in this case of learning while becoming subject matter expert. If we go about the same example above on musical instrument before you’ve mastered the piano skills you wanted to move to electric guitar. Now you are not only failed to learn basics you have opened another hell gate for figuring out techniques behind how electric guitar works with its amplifier, pedals and the sound system around it. This is all fun nothing wrong with it but it will set you back maybe classic or acoustic guitar would have worked better to start with. Again if you apply the same rule in your business life to focus on a single subject, you will see goals are becoming much easier to achieve. It’s not to say there aren’t other techniques such as “Deep Work”.

In conclusion, we are living in technology era with cutting-edge resources at our disposal. When there’s a need to learn something new make sure to spend enough time to learn fundamentals first. This method of building knowledge from the ground up will help you to become more efficient in your endeavor.