How do you craft projects you’ll actually finish?
I’ve spent most of my life undertaking learning projects [1] of various sorts. Some were big, ambitious efforts that spanned a year or more. Many others were short sprints that lasted a month or less.
Getting “good enough” is seriously underrated. We lionize mastery—celebrating those who spend decades honing a hard-won ability. Fair enough. But going from zero to okay in a short period of time can be enormously satisfying, and it can end up having an outsized impact on your life.
My Strategy for Creating Successful, Short Learning Projects
In a recent video essay [2], I outlined the three-step process I use to design these sorts of short projects to quickly get up to speed in a skill or topic.
The basic strategy is:
- Draw a map. Figure out how the skill works, how people learn it, and what resources are available. Essentially, before you start any project, you want to become a mini-expert on what options there are for getting good at it. This knowledge allows you to set clear and realistic goals, pace yourself, and avoid dead ends.
- Choose a path. Decide what you’ll learn first, what you’ll learn later and what aspects of the skill you’ll ignore. Appropriately scoping a project is the difference between feeling satisfied with your progress after a month or two versus feeling completely overwhelmed.
- Craft a plan. The key to good planning is to carefully reflect on how you’ve been able to allocate time and energy in the past. Good plans work within the constraints set by your past behavior, rather than requiring heroic pushes well beyond them.
If you learn to do these three steps well, it’s possible to achieve a lot even in a fairly short period of time.
Three of My Mistakes
While it’s more fun to talk about successes, I’ve made plenty of mistakes:
- In my portrait drawing challenge [3], I assumed getting more practice with feedback was all that was needed. The result was that my progress stalled about halfway through. It turned out that the key to improvement here wasn’t just putting in more effort, but in first finding better methods.
- In my biggest language learning challenge [4], I assumed most languages were about equally difficult. As a result, I severely underprepared for Korean, setting back my progress. (It’s still the weakest of the four I learned on my year-long trip.) Were I to do it again, I would have built a better foundation before traveling, advice my good friend Olle Linge gives [5] for Mandarin learners as well.
- In my quantum mechanics challenge [6], I skipped over a prerequisite class on waves. The result was I spent a lot of time that month relearning half-forgotten calculus and repeating old classes before I could keep up with the homework. The lesson: make sure you’re truly at the starting point before you begin.
I bring these examples up not to be self-critical—I’m happy with how those projects eventually turned out—but because the three-step process I describe above isn’t an approach I’ve picked at random. Each strategy emerged out of my own mistakes.
By creating a map and understanding how the skill works, we can chart an effective course. This map was missing at the start of my portrait drawing challenge, so I had to draw it halfway.
By choosing a path, I would have emphasized more work on basic building blocks of the harder Asian languages before traveling. This would have put me at a much better starting point for the demands trying to communicate while learning a difficult language.
By making a plan, I would have recognized from the beginning that my goal wasn’t only to learn quantum mechanics, but to refresh my faded knowledge of calculus and fill in a missing prerequisite class. Those changes would have shifted my timetable considerably.
While I can’t say every project I’ve undertaken since developing this framework has been perfectly smooth, I feel like my process has gotten more refined over the years as I’ve made and fixed mistakes.
What Would You Learn, if You Had 30 Days to Learn It?
I’m curious, what you would tackle if you could spend the next thirty days devoting yourself to it? Even if you can’t study full-time, what might you be able to do if you set aside a little time each day to work on a skill or topic you care about?
Write a comment below and let me know!