In a previous post I turned what was supposed to be a routine post into what I would call a psychotic ranting babble in which I had to vent how stressed out and overwhelmed I became from all this new and interesting information I felt bombarded with. I just wanted to share some links to cool things I had come across and thought was worth sharing because it was cool or just useful for people that do web design or development.

Well, that was not quite how it all went down, at least in my world. It isn’t something that can put into words, you just have to experience it first hand. I know I’m not the only one who has felt the need to disconnect from the internet, so this fact alone makes me feel a little less crazy, but not much lol.

Getting to the point

So anyways the other day on Forrst I posted the question: “Do you ever get overwhelmed by the endless amount of information?” and, if you don’t know what Forrst is it’s an invite only site for designers and developers to share/post only things of interest to people like us. So, it is the perfect site to post this question, since others there would understand and comment on.

I was really very impressed and surprised with what some responded with. There were those that agreed straight up, mentioning things like how bookmarking has not only become useless but also a distraction when they try to sort through them and in-turn wind up adding more to them and failing the original plan. Others explain ways they’ve found to help them deal with the overload, that thing which can eventually drive oneself off a virtual cyber cliff during a mental meltdown caused by something made up of a bunch of 1′s and 0′s.

Then there was what I deemed to be the “best comment ever” in the discussion, posted by Ken Erickson. I think it was one of those “just what I needed to hear” types of things that make you feel much better after, and even change your entire perspective at the same time.

A Comment Can Be Worth A Million Words

The biggest education fallacy of modern times is that more knowledge is better. We’ve all been trained to value information absorption over mastery.

As life long competitor in mental sports (chess, poker and draughts. And yes, several variants of draughts are played competitively ) my major leap in playing strength came when I begin to realize that the fundamentals are what really matters.

Mastery does not come through accumulation of a huge library of knowledge, but through an increased grasping of the fundamentals. The great chess grandmaster Emanuel Laskeronce reflected on his rise to world champion and said his increase in strength came from forgetting more than half of what he had learned.

The knowledge you pack on doesn’t help increase your skill it just serves to convolute and confuse the mind, making mastery harder. Eastern philosophers might call this muddying the waters of flow.

There can be the urge to absorb every new design article that pops up in hopes of learning more. But I can tell you now that there are no subjects that require you to master more knowledge than can fit in a pocket sized book. If you feel your skills are lacking its probably not due to a lack of knowledge but rather a lack of mastery over the knowledge that you do have.

It may seem like masters of a subject have a much greater library of knowledge than you do but I can assure you they don’t.

Increasing mastery of the fundamentals is the only way to get better at anything. It may seem that those tip articles are improving your skills by some magical increase of knowledge; but really what is happening is that these articles are catalysts that help you master fundamentals. However, they are the worst catalyst possible.

Learning to master things varies from person to person, from learning style to learning style, but the basic tenant “know thyself” applies universally to all.

Learn how you learn and the roads to mastery of anything will become clear to you. Once you understand you, teaching yourself will become much clearer and easier.

In every subject there is a ton of fluff that results because of differing learning styles; learn by example books, workbooks, screencasts, audio books, conferences, blogs, documentation and on and on. They are all methods of trying to make the fundamentals “click” and finally become clear. Everyone is trying to sell their own way of learning, the key to learning well is discovering what cocktail of learning methods work for you.

So all I can say is stop trying to absorb everything “new” that popups and focus on the little things. Just stop following and subscribing to everything, its not helping in fact its probably hurting you. If your a designer then study typography and design fundamentals again and again and again. If your a developer pick a programming pearls book and go over the design patterns again and again and again.

You may be saying to yourself “well turning off is fine for learning, but what about new technology? I don’t want to miss new tech coming out”, all I can say is that if a new tech really matters then you’ll hear about it eventually. Most technology builds hype and then disappears, very few new bits of technology ever become relevant. Think about all the time you’ve wasted following and reading about new tech, take Google wave for instance.

Follow the big guys relevant in your subjects and let the others be, if something new matters eventually the bigger guys will cover it.

It’s Not Exclusive To One Specific Topic Or Person

This perspective doesn’t apply to just the one topic of discussion I started. It can be adopted in other areas of your life as well, any equivalent thing which causes the same feeling of overwhelming stress. Everyone, no matter what they do, has one thing that can cause such a thing, it just may not be as common or extreme depending.

Basically, this is sort of like a life lesson that you may eventually learn, or unconsciously have an awareness of on some level. I am glad I posted that question on Forrst. All of the responses were just what I needed to hear, because I know I am not alone, some ways I can deal with or prevent needing to deal with this in the future, and also now have a whole new outlook on the point at hand.

The wicked web of the world, is not so wicked, it’s just wicked overwhelming with a wealth of information. It is this free and publicly accessible information, however, that helped me become the designer and programmer that I am today. So I can’t complain much about it.
Can you?
Post a comment below with your thoughts.