So what if you don’t document every moment of your learning process on a personal blog that you created using blogdown? So what if your notes are scattered in a couple of different notebooks and half-used GitHub repos? Who cares if you even take notes?!Ĭommit to yourself every day and show up and do the work - if a course or book or video isn’t working for you, try something else! This is your journey - you get to decide how you get there.If you’re looking for theory, this probably isn’t the best place to start. It’s so easy to use perfection as procrastination - you don’t have the correct plan for documenting your learning, you don’t have the right color pen, the music is too loud, whatever.

Instead, try getting comfortable with the fact that you’re going to forget a lot of things when you first start out - but the more that you read and re-read and learn and practice and apply what you’ve been learning, the more you’re going to remember. At first blush, you don’t know if you’ll ever need this information again! So why go through an online course or a textbook once, expecting to extract all of the information? When you first encounter something in data science and/or R, it’s 100% OK to forget it 20 minutes later. You can knock down walls and landscape the yard and you don’t have to ask permission to do so, because you own the house. Once you’ve really learned something, you’ve bought the house. You don’t own it, and you can’t really make any changes. The next few times you encounter that same information is like renting a house - you’re committed for a relatively short amount of time, but you’re not necessarily in it for the long haul. You don’t know if you’re going to rent that house, buy that house, let alone if you’re even going to like that house.

The first time you encounter a piece of information is like going to an open house. I had a couple of amazing Chemistry professors in undergrad, and I will never forget how one of them phrased learning:

On learning to learn From open house to home ownership

Free coding khan academy