Learning

Introduction

When you started doing this stuff, whether "this stuff" is writing iPhone apps, UNIX minicomputer software, or whatever future programming you meals-in-pill-form types get up to, you didn't know how to do it; you had to learn. Maybe you took a training course, or a computer science degree. Perhaps you read a book or two. However you did it, you started with no information and ended with… some.

It doesn't stop there. As Lewis Carroll said:

It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.

He was talking about the Red Queen's race, but I'm talking about learning and personal development. If you stopped when you had read that first book, you might have been OK as beginner programmers go, but if the woman next to you in the library read another book, then she would have been a step ahead.

We live in what is often called a knowledge economy. Francis Bacon said, "knowledge is power." If you&apos...