The best way to learn something is by doing it, not by learning about it

When I was 16 years old I discovered a new operating system called Linux. It seemed both interesting and fun to use, and while I wanted to install it on my computer and see what it was about, I was afraid of doing that, so I spent around two weeks learning how the terminal works and how I can setup an Ubuntu operating system.

Then my computer broke. To be more specific, my Windows stopped working, and because I had no backup, I lost a lot of files. I tried installing a new Windows several times and it didn't work (no idea why), so I gave up and I just installed Ubuntu, using another computer I had in the house to put it on an USB Drive.

I started by having no idea how to create the partitions and what SWAP space meant. I searched for a few tutorials online and little by little I installed Ubuntu on my computer. All I had to do from there was to use all the knowledge I acquired in the past to install all the things I needed. Then I realized that I had no idea what I was doing.

So I just started doing things the way I usually do - I went on Google, I started searching for a few tutorials, asked a few people how to use the Terminal and how to install packages, and in just a few weeks I felt comfortable using Ubuntu. Not only that but at the time I stopped using Windows at all. I liked Linux that much.

The way I managed to learn how to use that operating system was by installing it on my computer and just use it. No matter how many tutorials and videos I watched before, nothing helped as much as having Ubuntu installed and using it all the time.

Same thing happened with HTML and CSS. I spent months writing down on a notebook all kind of tags and styles that I was supposed to use to build a real website. I felt smart and I felt like I knew a lot of things, at least until I got a text editor and started writing code. Then I realized that 90% of my knowledge was useless because I couldn't actually code.

I started again from 0 and learned everything by doing. I started writing each tag and learning what it did, learned how to work with divs and how to add all kind of styles using CSS. That helped a lot more than all the writing I did before, thinking I'm learning.

And I believe this is what you should do most of the time whenever you want to learn something new. You may be able to read a lot of books or even watch a few tutorials on YouTube, but you will never learn as much as you can learn by doing.

No matter what it is, allow yourself to fail many times and just do something. Make sure you take your time, make sure you have a browser ready to search for solutions to your problems and make sure you don't actually break anything that you will need later.

With all that in mind, start doing what you want to do, and learn. No matter what you are interested in, doing will always help you understand things better. You can be a programmer or mathematician, it won't matter how many things you read about those two subjects, you will never be as good as a person who actually codes or does math.

So, next time you're interested in learning something new, no matter what it is, learn by doing if possible. Get the software you need, the operating system, the books or notebooks you need, everything that you can use to do the thing you want to learn and just do it. Once you start using this method to learn new things you will realize you can't go back to just reading about something, because you'll notice how inefficient that is.