The Syllabus Kept Getting Longer

My Kindle library is slightly ridiculous. There are books at 3%, 11%, 27%, 54%. Some I remember downloading for a very specific reason. Others... no idea.

The one book I can confidently remember reading from beginning to end recently?

A novel lol.

Most of the unfinished ones weren't random books, though. I had downloaded them because I wanted to learn something properly. And “properly” turned out to be a dangerous word.

Say I wanted to understand product management. Fine. Then I started seeing how much of the work involved understanding users, weighing tradeoffs, making sense of data, and working with engineering and design. Analytics entered the syllabus. SQL kept showing up. Maybe Python too. And somewhere along the way I decided that if I was going to work on software products, I should probably understand how the software was actually built.

You can probably see where this is going.

APIs. Databases. Design patterns. Distributed systems.

Then AI happened.

Cool. New syllabus. 🙃

The annoying part is that every step makes sense while you're taking it. It's not like I woke up one morning and thought, you know what would really help me understand product strategy? consensus algorithms. One thing just exposes another thing you don't know.

From far away, a subject looks reasonably contained. Then you get closer and realise there are layers underneath it. Then layers underneath those layers. You know more than you did before, but somehow feel less prepared because the map just became much bigger.

For a long time my response was pretty simple: if I can see the gap, I should probably fill it. Sometimes that's exactly right.

I've opened a book because I needed one thing, read the relevant chapter, understood whatever was blocking me and left.

Book at 18%.

Done.

And I mean actually done.

If the question that sent me there has been answered, I'm not sure why the remaining 82% should automatically count as unfinished.

The confusing version is when the goal is something like understand software architecture or learn machine learning properly. Where exactly do you stop?

There isn't a chapter called Congratulations, You Now Know Enough. Please Go Do Something Else.

You learn one thing. It exposes three more things that sound useful. All three quietly join the list. And learning feels productive because... it is productive. Duh. 🤷🏻‍♀️ Something clicks. You understand a conversation you couldn't follow last week. You can build something you couldn't build before.

Progress!

Except... toward what?

That's the part I keep coming back to. A rabbit hole can be completely real. The learning can be completely real. I can come out of it genuinely knowing more. And it still might not have been the thing I needed to learn then.

I'm not always sure how to tell the difference while I'm inside one.

Curiosity is definitely part of it. Probably FOMO too. Sometimes I suspect learning is easier than testing whether I can actually do the thing I'm preparing for. I suspect ADHD is somewhere in that mix as well, although I don't want to blame every rabbit hole on it.

And maybe I occasionally just enjoy collecting difficult-looking books and imagining the person I'll become once I've read all of them. Sorry, not sorry. 🤓

Which is why “stop learning and start doing” feels too neat. I've wandered into things that seemed unnecessary and found them useful months later. I've also spent hours understanding things that were fascinating, genuinely educational, and nowhere near as urgent as they felt.

Maybe the useful distinction isn't learning versus doing. Maybe it's whether the learning has anything capable of telling it to stop.

A real problem often does. The bug is fixed. The query answers the question. The missing concept now makes sense. The thing works.

But “be more prepared” doesn't really have an end state. Neither does “understand this properly.”

There's always another layer. Another book. Another concept that suddenly feels irresponsible not to know.

The books I remember aren't necessarily the ones I finished either. They're often the ones that gave me something I needed, or something to wrestle with.

A book finished at 18% may have already done its work. One finished at 100% may not have.

I'm starting to think “ready” works a little like that too. Maybe there isn't a percentage where it turns green.

I haven't solved this, by the way. I still open tabs. I still look up one unfamiliar term and occasionally return three hours later knowing its entire family history.

Sometimes that turns out to be exactly what I needed.

Sometimes...

well.

My Kindle library is still there.