Learning comes from curiosity, and from proper exploration of rabbit holes

The most effective learning comes from following your curiosity. Not from following somebody else's map.

The step by step path that's laid out before you? That's just a starting point. To help you get started. To show you one possible way to get to one possible destination. The interesting part of the journey happens when you step off of the safe path. I wonder what's over here? Let me just peek a little further around this corner, to get a better view.

Learning - and adventure - begins the moment you start chasing your curiosity. It doesn't matter exactly how the journey starts. You don't know where the journey might lead. What matters is that you notice the fork in the role. The rabbit hole. The side quest. Then you start to wonder. So you look more closely. Before you even remember how or why you got there, you're well into the journey, looking around the next bend. Into the rabbit hole.

Proper rabbit hole pursuing is not just passive or consumptive. Watching videos and tutorials is not proper rabbit-holing. It can be part of the experience, but it is not the whole journey. Chatting with AI can also be helpful, but it is also not proper rabbit hole pursuing.

Reading a good book is an order of magnitude better for deeply following your curiosity than watching videos and chatting with AI. But it's still just following somebody else's journey.

Proper rabbit-holing involves getting your hands dirty. Getting your mind and body fully engaged. Crawling through the dirt and the weeds. Bruising and scraping your knees and elbows. Getting dirt and grease up under your finger nails and all over your face.

Curiosity demands asking hard questions. Scribbling lots of notes. Asking 'what if', and 'why not'. Scribbling more notes. Drawing boxes and arrows. Making lists. Sweating. Making a mess. Making weird noises. Diving deeper, and exploring farther.

Because you're not OK - and should not be OK - with not knowing. Not understanding. Not experiencing the thing for yourself. You're not the kind of person who walks away from a good question before you find a satisfying answer.

True and proper learning (for a software engineer), comes when - while wrestling with a new idea - you break out the tools of your trade. Programming languages, libraries. IDEs and text editors. Pen and paper. It comes when you start moving bits of code around, or drawing boxes and arrows. What if I did it this way? What about this? Why can't it work this way? Wait, why can't we simplify this even further? What's the difference between 'this way' and 'that way'?

Follow the rabbit holes. Build the things. Throw away your safe road maps. Step off the paid path. Make a mess of things.

That's how you become a software engineer.