me_not_brucelee

You can sit there and wait for someone to tell you what to do, or you can start crawling and observe how others walk. You can look outside the window and see all the wrong things in the world, or you can look outside and see all the good things in the world. You can look backwards in your life and see all the stupid things you have done, or you can think about the good things you will be doing tomorrow. You can think about all the things you have no control, or you can think about the things you can leverage. You can think about that 100 people who hates you or you can about that 1 person who loves you. You can think about yourself as a sum of all your mistakes, or you can think about yourself as a sum of all your actions. Take a chill pill, drink some chill beer, relax, its not the end.

What a great book. Thanks for sharing!

Maybe you can get a more fruitful answer, if you layout what kind of problem you want/expect to solve. I can tell you to read more books, solve more problem, but I'm pretty sure you already know that, or can know with some google search.

Personally, I think it depends. Its more pragmatic to think about "when is it the right moment to use this approach", instead of "what is right or wrong". Usually when it is related to some concept I need to understand, I would alternate between 40% reading and 60% doing. If it is related to some theory that requires in depth knowledge to get it right(and hard to understand), I would alternate between 80% reading, 10% doing, 10% reflection. If it is a tiny task, I'll alternative between 5% reading, 95% doing. If copy pasting or it is something I know, 100% doing. If I'm reading something that fundamentally affects how I program or think, I'll alternative between 80% reading, 20% reflection. I use to be a perfectionist(listen more to myself), now I'm more pragmatic(listen more to the world). Ultimately, it comes down to what you are comfortable of not knowing, but still can get shit done and progress.

I would divide my moments into

1. meta learning

2. learning from multi perspectives

3. retention

Meta Learning

Ask yourself, "why are you learning this?", "what pre-knowledge I need to learn this material?", "Is there anyway to learn this faster?", "Why am I getting stuck on this?", "Do i need to update a previous assumption?". Metacognition, or the awareness of own thinking, is a very powerful method to improve thinking skill on any domain.

Learning

Use The Feynman Technique. The idea is any jargon used in particular domain can expressed with more common day to day words. This not the same as using analogy, avoid analogies. In feynman technique you are thinking below the word, using more simpler word to describe things. Once you have understood an idea, then subscribe to the jargon for that idea. Another way is to build a semantic tree of the things you learn, essentially build a huge graph where ideas are connected. Dont make disconnected clusters of ideas.

Retention

You can learn as much as you want but there is no point if you remember nothing. Use a mind map, reorganize according to your work. Just because a book has its own index, doesnt mean you can't reorganize the information according to your thoughts. Bookmark high quality links and resource, ditch meager resouces/links. Write code, practice what you have learned! Teach others! Teaching is the most effective retention method, because it challenges your own understanding.

Edit: Your prove of learning can be shown using everything you use to retain the knowledge.