I was recently talking to a friend who is attempting to learn R programming.
I asked him why does he need it.
He said, “I feel it would be good to know some programming.”
I immediately thought of the quote below, from the book Advice to a young scientist, by the wonderful Peter Medawar, which I think my friend could apply to speeding up his journey of learning this new skill.
I thought I’d also share it with you given my friend found it useful.
Medawar mentions certain tendencies young scientists might be drawn into, and offers advice rooted in decades of practicing science.
Though it’s an old book, I believe many things from it are even more relevant today than 50 years ago.
The quote
“The number and complexity of the techniques and supporting disciplines used in research are so large that a novice may easily be frightened into postponing research in order to carry on with the process of "equipping himself”.
As there is no knowing in advance where a research enterprise may lead and what kinds of skills it will require as it unfolds, this process of "equipping oneself" has no predeterminable limits and is bad psychological policy, anyway; we always need to know and understand a great deal more than we do already and to master many more skills than we now possess.
The great incentive to learning a new skill or supporting discipline is an urgent need to use it.
For this reason, very many scientists (I certainly among them) do not learn new skills or master new disciplines until the pressure is upon them to do so; thereupon they can be mastered pretty quickly.
It is the lack of this pressure on those who are forever "equipping themselves" and who show an ominous tendency to become "night-class habitues" that sometimes makes them tired and despondent in spite of all their diplomas and certificates of proficiency.”
I’ve done this too. Endless courses I think it would be helpful to finish.
Making a list of programming languages that would be nice to know.
Most often, these are skills that take a big time investment.
Whatever takes time, will take a proper motivation.
And without the real need to master a skill, the motivation will inevitably fade away after some time.
So one way I think my friend could create a proper motivation for this skill in order to actually be motivated to learn it, is to find things R programming can do, AND that he will actually need in his thesis, and try to do the things in R.
Things like bar charts, dot plots, hypothesis testing basic stats and so on.
These are still basics, but very relevant basics, and directly applied to something he needs.
Then he has:
a deadline (his thesis),
a need (save some money in order to avoid forever paying for visualisation softwares), and more importantly I think -
a real-life roadmap for learning.
Instead of learning by everything from the very beginning, he’s jumping already into a small project.
We can all definitely apply this, if not by directly in learning something, then at least in avoiding to delude ourselves that we will learn some hard skill, by recognizing we don’t have a real need to do it, and avoid speding some time in the clouds dreaming how it would be “nice to know this”.