This is a card in Dave's Virtual Box of Cards.

Solve Problems! (That actually exist)

Page created: 2023-04-28

This Substack post Don’t build to-do apps (substack.com) by Ilango Rajagopal has at least three major ideas in it. The third is:

"When learning something new, after you get the fundamentals down, there is a brief period where you have to bite the bullet and start a project. If we don’t do that, we risk forgetting the things we learned, or even worse, we get stuck in a learning loop called tutorial hell."

"…build something you would use…This is an actual problem for me. So I’m solving it using Rust…"

If you’re solving a real problem, especially one you encounter frequenly, you’re going to be way more motivated to stick with it, even when the going gets tough. This is especially true if you need to learn something new in order to accomplish the task.

The benefits here are potentially many-fold:

You’ve solved a problem. That feels good.
Every time you use your solution, it’ll feel good again.
You’ve probably learned something new.
What you learned will probably stick because it was in the service of solving a problem.
You’ve fueled a habit of solving problems and of seeing problems as something can be solved.

It’s a virtuous cycle!

By the way, the other two cards directly inspired by Rajagopal’s Substack post are:

total-immersion (see also: learning)
creative-habit (see also: idea-generation and creativity in general)