Don’t Fear the Learning Curve

One scene in a movie that I will always remember is from The Matrix. Neo, finally disconnected from the Matrix, is learning new skills by having them ‘uploaded’ to his brain. The culmination of the scene is when he famously says to Morpheus, “I know Kung-Fu,” and they fight. I think about how great it would be to learn this way; just plug in and have knowledge transferred directly to me. Of-course, we know that’s impossible (at least right now ;-)). We have to learn by reading, watching videos, attending class, and other tradition methods. It’s not always easy and it could be discouraging. That’s why we need to be mindful of the learning curve.

When I first learned Sass, it was a little tough because I was forced to think about CSS differently. I needed to run a complier on it and I had to follow some new conventions. However, I got up and running fairly quickly and now I can’t imagine writing CSS any other way. This was a small learning curve that yielded great results.

Git is another technology that was tough to learn; as a matter of fact, the learning curve for Git is a little steeper than for Sass. But again, I can’t imagine working without git now. I know I’m still learning a bit about it, but it’s such a great tool that once I got over the learning curve, it made me much more productive.

With that in mind, a few weeks ago I was asked to look at a new theme framework that could possibly use to start all new projects. The theme seemed complicated, difficult to use, and made doing things a lot longer. I didn’t want to pass judgement on it just yet, though. I wanted to give it a couple of weeks for me to really learn the framework and see what it had to offer – I didn’t want the learning curve to jade me. In the end, it wasn’t a good tool; the learning curve was too steep for the reward it was offering. When I did decide to give up on it I was able to give real reasons why it wasn’t good and not just, “I don’t like it because it’s hard to use.”

The moral is that most things seem hard to use the first time around, but it’s important to stick with them. Don’t be intimidated by the learning curve. In each case above, I got something out of the process and more often than not, I end up saving time in the long run.