The Power Of Sponge Learning

The strawberries taste like strawberries. The snozberries taste like snozberries. Snozzberries? What the heck of a snozzberry? We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of the laws.

This is the Music Makers podcast where I read things out loud to you and then offer my unqualified opinions on them. The Power of Sponge Learning by Alex Rosen. I love the Internet and technology in general, but when it comes to the core technical knowledge, I'm definitely a noob. This is in stark contrast to my roommate, who I mostly chose to live with based on his deep knowledge of web development. Just kidding.

Sort of. I didn't study computer science in college or anything formal like that, but I'm doing my best to learn as much about web architecture as I can because, a, it's cool, and, b, I'm never going anywhere in this industry without doing so. Despite not understanding most of it, I take a great amount of pleasure in reading articles about programming topics. Besides being plain interesting, doing so has helped me absorb these topics, if only the surface. And I've slowly begun to assimilate them into my vocabulary and way of thinking.

I've found the most useful place for this knowledge grazing to be Hacker News. Hacker News, for those of you who haven't heard of it, is a community driven link and discussion site run by Y Combinator. People post links or short posts and others comment and vote them up or down, much like Reddit or Digg. The level of discourse is unusually high. There's an active, engaged community, and perhaps most importantly, their interests align quite nicely with mine, the Internet and other technical topics.

On any given day, there will be discussion about JavaScript, startups, Ruby on Rails, job postings, current events, productivity hacks, and much more. Worthwhile posts get voted up quickly, and the comments are always a good place to dive in to gauge reactions. I get a lot of what I call sponge learning out of Hacker News. For example, today I followed an innocent enough posting, a CoffeeScript intervention. I didn't know what I'd find, but now I know CoffeeScript is a syntax that compiles into JavaScript, that it seems to have some following, and that global leakage is quite a problem in JavaScript.

I'm not really gonna do anything with that right now. But next time I start working on a project, I might give it a look. At the very least, I know there's such a thing as another JavaScript syntax that such a thing is possible. There have been examples of this type of learning too numerous to list, things I file away and that come to me at the right moment later. VIM, Django versus Ruby on Rails, types of servers, and what web host to go with.

The list goes on. Even if I don't dive into the vast majority of what I read, it definitely reduces my unknown unknowns. Plus, it's just damn inspiring and has pushed me to learn more. The level of passion and talent on that site is staggering. Being exposed to other people going after their dreams day in and day out, building incredible things, and having an awesome time doing it tends to rub off on you.

My strategy to conquer noobdom doesn't stop with just reading Hacker News, of course. Mostly through being inspired by sites like this and friends, I've started to learn Python the hard way, set up a test app, hacked around with CSS and JavaScript, and set up my own server. I'm a level 0 on this road to code journeyman, but it's certainly been fun. Viewing the world through the eyes of Hacker News has been the most helpful to start to familiarize myself with what's out there. I can't wait to keep going.

Like some of the other articles we've looked at on the show, this one has a bit of a technical leaning. And that's just just because I'm a technical guy, and I really enjoy those, and that's a lot of what I have saved in my Evernote. But this concept isn't a technical concept. It's just that the examples that he used happen to be technical. So let's zoom out a little bit from the technical examples and talk about the overall concept of sponge learning or reducing your unknown unknowns.

Have you ever noticed that when you get a new car, suddenly you see that exact same car on the road all the time, and you're convinced that it never was there before? The same thing happens when you learn a new word. You learn a new complicated word that you're sure has never existed before, and then suddenly the next day somebody says that word. And we think to ourselves, oh, how serendipitous. I just learned that word, and finally somebody's using it.

But, of course, people have been using that word forever. You just didn't have any context or framework. You didn't understand it, and so it didn't it didn't mean anything to you. It didn't matter to you. It just whizzed right past your ears, and you never even heard it.

But now that you know it, you hear it all the time. Now that you're aware that the word exists and you're aware of its meaning, suddenly you're picking it up everywhere. So I think sponge learning is the same way. You learn a little bit about a topic or you become aware of a topic's existence, and now suddenly your brain is primed and ready, and you start picking up little bits about this topic everywhere. You start hearing about it on the radio.

You start hearing about it on the news. You see some more articles about it, and you're picking up on more and more information about it because now there's a slot in your brain for that category, for that topic. Whereas before, you didn't know anything about it. You didn't even know it existed. And so when you heard about it, you had no way to file that in your brain, and so it just whizzed right past you, and you were blissfully unaware.

Now that you have the category or the file in your brain for that particular topic, Now when you hear something in passing, your brain is just gonna slot it in that in that spot, and you're gonna learn more and more about it with relative ease because now your brain is picking up on all these things that you were previously missing out on. And this plays out really, really well if you just want to be a learner. If you just want to be a lifelong learner, one of the things that I recommend is start picking up articles or listening to podcasts or reading books about things that you just don't really know very much about, but you find somewhat interesting. And you're gonna be exposed to all these new concepts and new ideas, and you're probably not gonna pick up on a lot of them, but it will reduce your unknown unknowns and increase your serendipity. Because the next time you hear about that topic, you'll think, I know a little bit about that.

Let me pay attention. So I've said this phrase unknown unknowns a couple times now, And where this originally comes from is a press briefing back in 2002 with Donald Rumsfeld, and I'll just play it for you real fast.

There are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say we know there are some things we do not know, but there are also unknown unknowns. The ones we don't know, we don't know.

Excuse me. So he says that there are things that we know that we know. There are things that we know that we don't know. I know I'm ignorant in a lot of places, and I know that. But the worst kind is the things that I don't know I don't know, and that's by far the biggest category.

Right? The things that I don't even know that I don't know. And so this idea of sponge learning tries to reduce the scope of the things that you don't know you don't know, so that when you come across a problem, your arsenal of tools is bigger, so that you can say, hey. I once heard about or read about this thing. I wonder if this would be appropriate to use here.

Your brain is extremely powerful. So if you just prime the pump a little bit, it's gonna start picking up and absorbing information from all around you. The Music Makers podcast is released twice weekly on Mondays Thursdays at 10 AM CST. Here's a sneak peek of the next episode, but you did not persuade me. If you wanna build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

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