Learn in Public

Last updated Nov 29, 2024

The fastest way to learn

A term I first heard from Swyx on Learn In Public (might be originally from Tiago Forte) and captivated well by what I was doing with my blog over many years. All in the way of The more you share the more you get.

Also, Nicole van der Hoeven picked up on a similar term, but she even moved to Doing in Public with her book Welcome to Doing It in Public.

From RW Learn in Public:

If there’s a golden rule, it’s this one, so I put it first. All the other rules are more or less elaborations of this rule  #1.

You already know that you will never be done learning. But most people “learn in private”, and lurk. They consume content without creating any themselves. Again, that’s fine, but we’re here to talk about being in the top quintile. What you do here is to have a habit of creating learning exhaust:

• Write blogs and tutorials and cheatsheets.
• Speak at meetups and conferences.
• Ask and answer things on Stackoverflow or Reddit. Avoid the walled gardens like Slack and Discord, they’re not public.
• Make Youtube videos or Twitch streams.
• Start a newsletter.
• Draw cartoons ( people  loooove  cartoons!).

Twitter/X and Bluesky are Learning in Public places for me

Besides my second brain and blog and book here, I use Bluesky for my public learning. To see if an idea sticks. Sharing my journey; like Austin Kleon in his book says.

If people like it and I find like-minded people, that’s what I optimize for. “Public” here is key to me. I tried in closed chat rooms, but the effort didn’t justify the time in that setting. Bsky

To me, it’s a never-ending feedback loop. When I’m writing things down, I’m learning for myself. If I share it, I’m getting feedback and learning through the Swarm of Human Intelligence; feeding back to my notes. Later, I might share an updated version ♻️. I also called it continuous notes/learning. Bsky

See Why have your Website and what’s the Future of Blogging.

Origin: RW Learn in Public, Learn In Public - Twitter, Newsletter
References:
Created 2022-08-19