Don't listen to the loud people
If you want to learn and improve, it's not the loud people you should listen to
In a recent conversation with someone they were asking me how to measure their learning and improvement. My answer: Don’t listen to loud people.
It was an instinctual answer, not a prepared line I had thought about before, but I’ve been thinking about it since then and I wanted to expand on it in this short piece.
Loud people are not a guide
I’ve always been sceptical of the influencer “grindset” posting on LinkedIn or other social media, and that gets to the heart of my point. I’ve spent time in my life trying to keep up with posting content, whether that be youtube videos, podcasts or even writing this blog. The important lesson that I have learned is that consistent output isn’t a measure of quality or progress, it’s a algorithmic trap from these platforms to keep creators engaged and consumers active.
The people who you should be measuring your progress and learnings against (and with) are not on LinkedIn, Youtube or Substack, they are on your team.
No matter the size of the company you are at, there is someone you can learn something from, and someone you can share your learnings with. This is how you grow, and build positive relationships with those you work with.
This does not have to be someone more senior than you, or even someone in your same field/department. I have learnt a lot from people of all walks of life and level of experience that I have worked with. Just because I’ve been a CTO or managed people that does not mean I should be so arrogant as to assume I cannot learn anything from a junior engineer or a first time project manager. All it takes to learn, and measure your learning is the right metacognitive awareness.
Metacognitive awareness refers to the recognition of one’s own cognitive processes. Metacognitive Awareness is often associated with improved learning outcomes and effective problem-solving skills. Metacognitive awareness can affect an individual’s self-concept, decision-making processes and general psychological health.
That is what metacognitive awareness is, according to the US National Library of Medicine. I recently watched this great video from the JetBrains Academy YouTube channel that spoke about metacognitive awareness and the role it plays in learning, especially in a time of coding tools making the “solution” seem less frictionless.
This video resonated with me because my experience has been that it is working through the friction of learning something new that helps to cement that understanding.
As someone who was diagnosed with ADHD as an adult I have had to become a lot more aware about how my brain works, how I learn and how I motivate myself. This intentionality about learning has made learning more effective for me, but not necessarily easier.
I have written about learning whilst using these LLM based tools and will write more in the future, but to get back to the core point of this piece, people moving fast does not indicate they are learning more than you.
That doesn’t mean you can rest on your laurels either. You still need to work on learning and improving your skills, and it is encountering that work and recognising the progress that lets you know it’s working.
The social media trap
We should all know by now that social media is a trap.
Unfortunately it’s a very well built trap. Not just a trap for us as consumers, but also a trap for content creators. Posting takes time, the more a person is posting the less time they are likely taking to learn.
I know that’s slightly ironic coming from someone writing this post, but you see this blog is me processing my thoughts and working through these learnings to reinforce them for myself, and share them with you. If I was trying to keep up with an algorithm that dictated if anyone actually read these posts then that quality and intentionality would suffer in order to satisfy the algorithm.
Social media, including YouTube, can still be a great place to learn though. The key is to look for quality not quantity. It can be quite exhausting to find the quality in these platforms, especially in an era of AI slop, and that’s why it’s important to not just rely on them. If you rely entirely on social media then you will inevitably hear the most from the loudest voices, because that’s what the algorithm rewards.
Speak to people, those you work with, those you can meet up with at events, and even people online. Engage in real conversations and build those relationships and you will get far more out of that than social media.