Welcome back, my friend.
In this week’s issue:
What is time compression and how it relates to learning.
Experiment results with a new language.
Something cool I found.
Let’s get into it!
Main quest 🛡
What the hell is time compression?
Now don’t worry. I’m not going to go all physics professor on you and talk about the relation between time/space, wormholes, and such.
Independent to the fact that time doesn’t pass in the same way it did 10 years ago.
This is about you being the main factor for the change in the perception of time.
Still confused?
Let me give you an example.
Back in 2005, the average person would go the normal route of taking an elective course in college or picking a couple books from a library. That person would also be in very niche online forums where others shared their own experiences.
Knowledge only came by being in the trenches doing the thing. If you weren’t physically present or around the places where the innovations started happening, you were out of luck.
5 years later that started changing. YouTube was now popular and webinars were a thing as well. Most people were still going the traditional route but there were a few brave ones that chose to forego the college path for the DIY route.
In 2015, it was very different. MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) had good traction and opened the path for experts to share their knowledge through an online format.
The time it took someone from beginning to completion of a learning goal, whether that was finishing a specialization path, getting a role in a competitive industry, or starting a business, shortened radically.
Fast forward to today. There’s no need for traditional MBA’s. There are thousands of people worldwide starting new businesses. Several running more than one in parallel.
What was unthinkable before is possible now. What used to take years and a group of experts, now takes months (or even weeks) and a couple of people.
Nevermind the fact that you now can get access to the distilled knowledge of the best experts in their field through a book or an online course.
You can get a decade’s worth of experience and insights condensed in a few days.
And most importantly, you can do something like that for the people that’s starting their own journey.
That is what I mean by “time compression”.
You can shorten the time it takes you to accomplish a goal thanks to the work of others. And you can help shorten the timeframe for others behind you through your own work.
It is a greater concept with more implications. But this is a nice, broad overview for you to think about.
Now…
Let’s move forward.
Experiments 🧪
In case you’re not aware, I started a learning experiment this week.
I posted about it in a few groups and wanted to do it in more of them but life happened and I lost my internet connection late Monday afternoon, for the rest of the day.
Unfortunately, several different things converged this week and I had to juggle many projects and tasks all at once.
But I’m here to tell you that I survived the week and wrote a recap of the whole experience for you to read and learn from.
We’re living in crazy times where everything happens and changes so fast. Gotta be nimble and adaptable to come out on top.
Power-ups ✨
This week I found a cool site to search and discover podcasts from all over the world. Think of it like being the “Google” of podcasts.
You can create playlists of favorite podcasts (or favorite episodes) and share them with others or just keep them for yourself.
The feature that I thought to be the coolest is that you can get the RSS feed of any podcast. So you can listen to them from pretty much anywhere, not only a specific app or platform.
I found it very cool and useful. Especially for a person like me that doesn’t have any apps to listen to podcasts or even the time to go through several of them.
But now I can pick and choose which ones I like and even download episodes for offline listening (or even to feed them to an AI and get the highlights).
From the vault 🏛️
This week, there’s no resource coming.
But don’t worry, it’ll come back the next time.
That’s all for this crazy and busy week.
Hope you enjoyed it and it was useful.
I leave you in peace and wish you a great start of the week.
Cheers,
Juan.