Never Stopped Learning
One evening, I had a call with an old friend, he once told me I should spend around 1.5 hours every day improving myself, learning new tech/stack/framework, otherwise I was wasting my potential.
On the surface, it sounds like reasonable advice. I can even imagine myself agreeing with it at a different point in my life. It just, I don’t think it really fits where I am in life right now.
I have been learning continuously for more than two decades. What changed is not my willingness to learn. I have simply become more selective about what I want to spend my time learning.
I started learning software development when I was still a teenager, long before I knew that it could become a well-paying career. There was no five-year plan behind it. I just thought programming was fun. Being able to type something into a computer and make it do what I wanted was enough to keep me interested.
A lot of things I learned later followed the same pattern.
Back in college, I spent more time understanding matrices because I was interested in image manipulation. Mathematics became interesting because I could suddenly see what it was useful for. I was not studying matrices because somebody told me that knowing linear algebra would make me a better engineer someday. I simply wanted to understand how to manipulate an image.
I learned Windows Phone development for an equally simple reason: I loved Windows Phone. Its interface felt slick and refreshing compared with the Android phones I had been using at the time. Naturally, I wanted to build something for it (see this post).
Years later, I spent weekends learning React Native because it made mobile development fun again. I remember being fascinated that I could change some code and almost immediately see the result on the device. No long rebuild cycle, just change something and there it was. That feedback loop was enough to keep me exploring.
More recently, I found myself spending a lot of time on agentic coding. Again, nobody told me to do it. There was no manager asking me to learn it and no personal development plan requiring it. I simply found it interesting and wanted to understand how far these tools could change the way I build software.
Learning in AI era
I am also genuinely grateful to be curious in the AI era.
Years ago, satisfying curiosity took much more effort. No joke. If I wanted to understand something, I might need to visit a bookstore and hope there was a book or magazine that covered it. I might spend hours digging through random forum threads, reading scattered blog posts, or opening an open-source project and tracing through the code myself just to figure out how something worked.
Sometimes that struggle was useful. It forced me to dig deeper. But it was also slow, and many small questions simply were not worth the effort required to answer them.
Now I can follow a question almost immediately. I can ask one thing, discover something unexpected, ask another question, challenge the answer, look at an example, and keep going until I understand enough to move on.
That suits the way I tend to learn.
Even learning how to drive follows the same pattern, although it has nothing to do with software.
For a long time, I had very little interest in driving. I could live without it. But my wife was getting tired of going everywhere on a motorcycle: breathing pollution, getting caught in the rain, arriving wet, or dealing with the heat under the sun.
At that point, driving stopped being some arbitrary life skill that people told me a man should have. It became a solution to a real problem that mattered to me.
So I learned. A lot of learning does not necessarily look like learning from the outside.
Learning Doesn’t Always Look Like Learning
I have spent years learning about investing, economics, markets, and how money works because I wanted to make better decisions with my hard-earned money (see this post). Running taught me about my body, recovery, consistency, and how differently the body responds depending on what I do. I read about health, experiment with habits, occasionally read self-improvement books, build side projects, and spend a fair amount of time discussing philosophy with AI.
All of those things count as learning.
Perhaps the problem is that we have a very narrow picture of what learning is supposed to look like. We imagine courses, certifications, tutorials, books, new programming languages, or a fixed number of hours every day deliberately allocated to “self improvement.”
There is nothing inherently wrong with any of that. Some people genuinely enjoy learning that way, and at certain stages of life it can be extremely useful.
I just don’t think learning needs to become another productivity metric.
At this point in my life, I don’t want to chase every shiny new framework or learn something just because it is the latest thing (psst. there will always be another one 😉), because it might look good for my career, or because somebody else thinks I should.
I tend to learn best when something makes me curious, when there is a problem I actually care about, or when something looks fun enough that I want to spend my weekend figuring it out.
When the interest is genuine, I usually do not need much external motivation to keep going.
I never stopped learning.
I just became more careful about choosing what is worth learning.