Playing Around Does NOT Speed Up the Learning Process

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Yes, you can learn some surface-level stuff about a subject by playing around. No, it’s not nearly as efficient as committing to serious, guided, deliberate practice. No, the play did not speed up your learning process.

Say a subject takes 100h to learn. Say you play around for 100h beforehand, watching videos and tinkering. And then you commit to serious study and it takes you 75h instead of 100h. You perceive that you learned the subject faster but really you spent 175h instead of 100h.

Maybe you’re okay with that, maybe the play was necessary to get you to commit to serious practice. You can have good reasons for engaging in play before committing, I’m not arguing against that.

But you can’t just ignore the opportunity cost and claim that the play sped up your learning process.

If you spent all those 175h on serious practice then you would have gone 1.75x as far. What you really did was trade a large amount of play for a small amount of practice, and then leave the play time out of your learning efficiency calculation.

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