Why I stopped learning

5 years ago when I finished university I was learning something new every day, I was a software engineer and there was, what seemed to be an ocean of new shiny technology I wanted to learn about, things that make the application run faster, or UI look nicer, things that make the developer experience better. I moved from one company to another always jumping into a more interesting project, always being able to benefit from the things I’ve learnt before, finding niche and not so niche areas to improve the new code and the product I found myself working on.

And it worked for a while, and then I got an offer to lead a team of developers, I took it, of course, because that’s what your next career step is, right? Right? No, it’s really not, but I didn’t know that at the time. Anyway, this is a big change, we are not talking about another programming language or another framework here, it’s a completely different set of skills, and more importantly, values that I need to live now.

How it happened

This clarity of knowing exactly what I need to learn next, which was in plain sight at the start of one’s career, and sense of progress is exactly what motivated me and helped me greatly in achieving learning goals. However, when I moved into a more management focused role, it was the first time in my life that I didn’t know exactly what to learn about next, I had very little people experience and no idea of what I need to know about to become a good team lead or engineering manager or however you like to call it.

Not having a well defined goal, makes every self-improvement attempt much less effective and enjoyable, it starts making it feel like a chore, something you have to do to achieve something, but you are not sure exactly what, or are you even going in the right direction. If this persists a person will slowly invest less and less time into learning, probably the most evil thing about it is that it creeps in slowly, which makes it hard to notice, it’s something to do with frogs.

What helped me realise that this was happening to me was that I found myself struggling to focus, I would rarely get in the flow, and I started looking forward to not doing anything on the weekend a bit more than before. Don’t get me wrong, not doing anything over the weekend is amazing and I recommend it wholeheartedly, but I knew that it wasn’t who I was every weekend.

Regaining My Drive

Getting back on track is not an easy process and, much like it went away, getting back takes time. It requires self-reflection to identify the source of problem. What often seems to be the case is that the cheese has been moved, as stated in the famous book Who Moved My Chese , and we don’t realise it. This is what happened to me, it can come in different forms to each person, for me it was that even though my job description changed by quite a bit, I did not adapt my learning direction and just kept learning as if what I am doing is still individual contribution, I saw that I needed to change that.

Trying to optimise your learning path, like picking the best resources only, is not something you should be overthinking, it’s a sort of bin packing problem , but with time and it’s virtually impossible to have an optimal progression path. What is important is that what you learn you can immediately try out, not only will this ensure the lessons stick, but it will also give a huge motivation boost to keep at it.

To conclude, what I changed was I realised the immense value of the new position I found myself in being able to do much more with a team then I can do on my on, in hindsight, I can’t believe I didn’t see it sooner. Some take a more drastic approach, I know a person who quit a very well paid job to instead spend a year learning ML and AI, simply because he was not feeling motivated to work and he realised he didn’t want his whole life to feel like a chore because of it.

To conclude, if you are not feeling motivated to keep learning about whatever it is you do, you need to change something, either your approach, or what you do.